It was another rainy morning, the kind that makes you want to stay indoors and take things slowly. Then Jim made his request: pancakes and bacon again.
“Is it really so much bother to make them?” he asked.
I teasingly replied, “Even if it is a hassle, I’ll make them for you.”
So I made the pancakes and then turned my attention to the bacon. As I watched the strips curl up in the skillet, I found myself staring at them with a familiar curiosity.
Why do they do that?
I’ve watched bacon curl countless times, yet I had never really stopped to ask why. Somehow, I had simply accepted that bacon does what bacon does!
But on this particularly lazy, rainy day, I finally decided it was time to find out.
A quick search on Google gave me the answer. Bacon contains both lean meat and fat, and when exposed to heat, these two parts shrink at different rates. That difference causes the bacon to curl.
There it was—a simple explanation for something I had watched happen for years.
Once again, I was reminded that I don’t know everything—even at 81.
Perhaps that is one of the joys of growing older: realizing that there are still so many things left to discover. Even something as ordinary as a strip of bacon curling in a hot skillet can teach us something new.
So today was no longer just a lazy, rainy day.
It became a learning day—and I loved it.
