...still warm...

She made cookies.

There are times when cookies are necessary.  They are sugary little emotional painkillers, morphine for the soul.

Most people don’t realize it, but many words in the English language derive from ancient onomatopoeia.  There is a reason why “fuzzy” sounds, well, fuzzy, and why pronouncing “stutter” sounds like you have a bit of a speech impediment.  Likewise, there is a reason why “cookie” has that heartbeat BUHdum rhythm to it.  Cookie.  Cookie.  Cookie, cookie, cookie, pulse getting faster as you smell the chocolate… cookiecookiecookiecookie heralds a touch of brown sugar and cinnamon.

Cookies.

I’d had one of those days that seem to come ever more frequently in late October and early November.  Strange how, when I was a student, I never seemed to notice how painful it could be when we didn’t have a mid-October “fall break” to briefly arrest our long, painful tumble toward Christmas.  As a teacher, I feel it keenly.  I begin sleeping through my alarms, shivering through scalding showers, aching deep in the marrow of bones I didn’t know I had.  My favorite students become my worst nightmares.  My worst nightmares go on strike, unable to meet the ever-more-challenging demand to be more terrifying than waking life.

On this particular day, I had slept through not one but two separate alarms, completely zoned out while sitting on the toilet (resulting in ten minutes of pins-and-needles in my upper thighs), broken an ice scraper attempting to clear my windshield, and nearly been struck by a hypercaffeinated teenager with an incomplete understanding of what “four-way stop” really means.

Then I arrived at school, and my day began.

My students didn’t seem even vaguely interested in either Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet or in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version – nearly unheard of, since normally the girls in the class (with occasional assistance from a guy or two… you never know) like to argue about which Romeo is hotter.  Instead, they were more concerned with asking whether I knew that Obama is a Muslim and speculating about what “color” he is.

If you can’t tell, I teach in a rural school.

They didn’t seem particularly interested in the research paper I gave them, either.  No point in letting them get the idea that watching films is all we’ll be doing for the rest of the semester.

Lunch would have been a granola bar.  Lunch would have been, had I remembered to bring one to school with me.

Days like that, I normally leave faint smudges of rubber in the parking lot at 3:30 sharp.  Sometimes 3:30 is so sharp, the minute hand on the clock hasn’t worked up the nerve to swing past the 5.  Unfortunately, the meeting scheduled to run from 3:15 to 3:45 promised to curb my enthusiasm.

“3:45,” you understand, is administrator-speak for “4:35.”

On the way home — finally – I got a text message.  “Y r u l8 nd 2 pk up gro.”  After swerving to avoid a pair of joggers who decided to jaywalk while I was fumbling with my phone, I pulled into the nearest gas station to fuel up and dry-swallow some Excedrin while trying to decipher the text.  SMS abbreviations were one of the original Egyptian plagues.  This is a little-known fact, since the sinking of Atlantis destroyed the last remaining ancient cellular towers, and since King James’s translators thought ”rofl” was Hebrew for “locust.”

Close enough.

Because Excedrin always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, causes me to feel jittery, and doesn’t actually kill the headache for at least a half-hour, by the time I arrived home sans “gro” or whatever I was supposed to “pk up,” I was not in the best of moods.  Specifically, I was all set to rant for at least an hour about the degeneration of the English language, the thickheadedness of at least three assistant principals, the ignorance of my students’ parents, and no I didn’t pick up the gro, next time spell it out, dang it.

Then I walked in the front door, took a deep breath to fuel the coming storm, and…

She had made cookies.

All the world’s a cookie jar, and all the men and women merely crumbs. … I happen to be one of the chocolate chips. — Garfield

Un biscuit ça n’a pas de spirit, c’est juste un biscuit. Mais, avant c’était du lait, des oeufs. Et, dans les oeufs, il y a la vie potentielle. — Jean-Claude Van Damme

(Shreds of Truth disclaimer: She doesn’t really use that many abbreviations… but she does make cookies.)

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