What Was in That Batter?

I sat with anticipation in the West Ocean City Breakfast Club, waiting for Sam, my waiter, to make his entrance with a plate of fluffy, steaming goodness topped off by the rich, brown sugary liquid designed to lift me out of my late summer funk.

Every year on the Saturday before Labor Day I had made it my tradition to end my vacation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with a trip to the area’s best morning eatery and treat myself to a heaping platter of Delmarva pancakes.

This time, though, my annual journey would lift me into a world I could never have anticipated in the decade I had ended each of my seasons in the sun with my final meal before plunging back into my university professorship.

Suddenly, with my first bite of the delicious goodness to which I had become so accustomed, I found myself lifted out of the tiny cafe and transported not only across hundreds of miles of space but also back in time to my parents’ middle class home in Elizabeth, New Jersey in the 1960s.

“Crash” came the sound of all the plates on the breakfast table tumbling to the floor followed by a bloodcurdling scream.

The scream probably came more from shock than fear from my cousin, Carey Stupolski, a guest in the home of my parents, Stan and Martine Fizurski.

Carey had joined us at a number of meals in the last three weeks because she and her family had fled their apartment in the lower class projects in our city after witnessing a few potentially dangerous confrontations between her parents.

“The craziest thing,” Carey exclaimed in a voice bordering on hysteria, “I sat eating a plate of Uncle Stan’s delicious pancakes and reached for a glass of orange juice. All of a sudden I found myself tossed off my chair into mid-air with most of the dishes and other breakfast-ware falling on top of me, in a perfect line, as I landed on the floor.”

Luckily, Carey escaped with nothing more than a scare and a bruised ego and the serving plates and glassware from the Fizurski home escaped with few breakages.

For Carey, however, the breakfast incident continued a series of incidents stretching over a traumatic number of months that had brought sadness and concern, both for her welfare and that of her mother Marcia and sister Penelope.

Their father, Jason Stupolski, had gone from a decent, hardworking father and husband to a destructive alcoholic with dangerous schizophrenic tendencies.

One of the most serious of those incidents, probably stemming from a combination of her father’s personality disorders, and his love of the bottle, happened the previous Thursday. While walking to school with her cousins, Carey narrowly escaped injury when her father attempted to abduct her and nearly ran her over with the junkyard reject car that provided his current mode of transportation.

Jason also narrowly missed the traffic officer on duty, which yielded him a very stern 10-minute lecture and a warning, “Good for you I am in a good mood,” the policeman said, “otherwise I would, at the very least, issue you a summons and possibly land your ass in jail. Drive carefully from here on out and don’t you dare endanger anyone else’s life or you’ll be wearing a striped suit for a long time.”

Not that he hadn’t come close. Two weeks ago, Marcia had thrown Jason out of their home after another one of their raucous and boisterous fights.

The following week, after Marcia had notified him of their impending divorce, he had broken into the apartment and attempted to physically assault his wife.

Luckily my dad, visiting with our family at the time, had forcibly escorted Jason from the premises.

Back to the fateful morning of the falling plates:

Turns out the bizarre incident had very little to do with Jason or the domestic storm clouding the Stupolski household.

“Guess the dishes just slipped off the table,” my father said as he helped Carey up from the floor.

As he replayed the recent past though, he realized the breakfast incident also had capped off another series of strange happenings in his own home and that of his sister-in-law and brother-in law.

“Come to think of it, this is just one in a series of strange things that have happened here in the last month. A few weeks ago, as my wife began preparing a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving, the oven door on our stove popped open for no apparent reason. He laughed. We thought something caused the turkey to come back to life and seek revenge for becoming our main course.

“Then, Last Friday, our television screen turned purple before the TV stopped working, but it suddenly came back to normal within a few minutes.”

Just as the family started to recover from the latest shock the kitchen door flew open and in walked a very large man—about eight feet tall—with strange-looking skin that had almost a bluish tint,

The creature said. “I am from the planet Turkon. We have had your earth under observation for about six of your earth months. Our scientists believe Turkon received an unusual blast of energy from your sun because an explosion from a meteorite pushed our planet closer to the sun. Our planet’s experts predict that this will cause Turkon to overheat and explode, killing all Turkonian inhabitants . We intend to take over your earth and make it our new homebase to replace our planet before it burns out of existence and takes all of us with it. Rather than engaging in warfare with your civilization we saw as the much easier option scaring your people into deserting earth and leaving It to us.”

The Turkonian added that his people had observed the domestic dispute in the Stupolski household and saw it as another way to move their plans along and help them to obtain their objectives without going to war with earth’s massive defensive forces.

Just as suddenly as he had appeared the Turkonian vanished into thin air.

Immediately after the Turkonian disappeared another stranger knocked on the kitchen door.

“I am Col. Sandford Jones of Homeland Security. We saw the meteorite explosion and have monitored the Turkonians as they watched the earth. We listened in on their meetings and waited for the radicals on Turkon to make their move. We then captured some members of the Turkonian faction bent on taking over earth. Fortunately, while observing their planet we discovered a more moderate and reasonable faction. We will work with them to save their planet without having them take over ours.”

Earth, therefore, survived the threat, and so did the Stipolski and Fizurski families. Soon after the incident the family court finalized Marcia’s divorce and the family counseling service had Jason committed to a mental health facility.

Marcia trained in bookkeeping and got a great job with a local accounting firm. She and her two daughters moved to a new home in a better section of town.

Jason heard from a few of his buddies about the strange incidents at his former in-laws’ house and tried to connect them to his own behavior. His new caretakers attributed his rantings to his mental illness. Jason died three years later in New Jersey’s Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital.

Within an instant, I saw a big cloud of smoke and found myself transported back to my table at the West Ocean City Breakfast Club.