Searching for the mythic chocolate chip pancake

My momma always said that life was like a ... pancake, because you never know what your gonna get! This could be the tidbit of wisdom my children will someday impart to passing strangers as they contemplate life from a park bench. My wife hasn't always compared life to a breakfast food; as a matter of fact, this realization was only discovered recently during a trip to a local pancake house. Let me explain. This was no ordinary trip to a pancake house; no this had the makings of something special. I had finally decided to take a major step in my life, eating chocolate chip pancakes. It was something that I'd looked forward to with anticipation since I'd moved to California nearly a decade earlier. "There's chocolate chips in them thar pancakes!" That was the cry I had heard from friends as I packed my bags and headed west, but I had simply dismissed it as a rumor. In hindsight I realize I was somewhat deprived as a kid. Some kids had been eating chocolate chip pancakes their entire lives. Oh, I'd heard rumors growing up, but I left them at simply that, rumors. I remember one year in particular; I was a junior in high school. We'd all gathered around the lunchroom table during the first week back from summer vacation. My friends and I were exchanging fables of how wonderful our summers had been. I remember it as if it were yesterday. My school clothes so new I can still feel the stiff tag against the back of my neck. My pencils freshly sharpened my folders clear of writing. His name was Clint Freeman and he liked to tell stories. My guess was that maybe half of his stories were based on fact. With this in mind I listened to a particular tale of his trip to California. He said that he had eaten at a place that had chocolate chip pancakes! He couldn't be serious. There are many combinations that I feel were predestined to come to this earth, Abbott and Costello, Batman and Robin, Tom and Jerry, golf and frustration, a car wash and rain, but pancakes and chocolate chips? This was too much; Clint must be laying it on thick. I always kept the thought of this dynamic duo tucked away in that special place in my brain, the place where only dreams reside. I would bring it out occasionally, sometimes as I drifted off to sleep. Chocolate chip pancakes, no, there couldn't really be such a thing, at least not in this lifetime, perhaps in the world to come. I eventually grew up, got married, and left for California. There are many special days in my life: my college graduation, my wedding day, the completion of my first marathon and the birth of each of my children, add to that the day I saw the commercial for chocolate chip pancakes in a restaurant less than 10 miles from my home. My wife and I immediately made plans to head to my personal Mecca, land of the chocolate chip pancake. I was brimming with excitement, and my wife, well, she was happy, too. Nothing beats a good pancake. Here is where everything began to fall apart. First, my long anticipated chocolate chip pancakes were, well, just OK. There was definitely a bit of a let down. There were only a few chips, and my 18 month-old quickly claimed those. He also made it clear that he would require all of the whip cream on top of the pancake. I decided to give in to my child's demands, something I've learned to get used to, and live vicariously through the pancake enjoyment of my wife."I'm going to be sick," I heard her say. I immediately panicked. I have four kids! When my wife says she sick there's usually a little one that arrives about seven months later. I glanced down at her pancakes and immediately saw the cause of this statement; kid No. 5 was not on the way ... unless it was in the shape of a fly! Thank goodness our visitor was still in one piece, but unfortunately it looked like he had spent some time in this pancake. Thus ended our long awaited pancake experience. Needless to say it will be quite some time before we try this experience again. Sometimes I believe life can be compared to our pancake experience. You get excited about something only to find the fly. Everyone has his or her own fly, and possibly one man's fly is another man's chocolate chip! OK, scratch that, a fly is a fly, let's just leave it at that, without waxing philosophic. Actually I think I can pull a life lesson out of this story after all. We immediately went home and no less than two days later I was dumping an entire bag of chocolate chips into some pancake batter. Now there is no turning back. There, there's the life lesson. Sometimes if you want something bad enough you have to do it yourself, and watch for flies. - Tony Overbay is an 11-year resident of Lincoln who has been composing humorous News Messenger columns for five years. He holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication and when not writing funny lyrics, runs Diskology, a Lincoln-based technology company from home while helping to raise his four children. He can be reached at tony@diskology.com.