The perfect cookie would bake itself

The message arrived silently and went unnoticed for more than an hour as I set about my usual morning routine blissfully unaware. 

In one fell swoop, my husband wordlessly sent a family challenge in the form of a forwarded recipe from the New York Times: "A Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie."

The picture alone set off a flurry of replies.

The boy weighed in first, taking himself out of the running: "chocolate chip cookies are gross, wake me when you bake brownies."

The girl wasn't impressed by the picture-perfect confection proffered by her pop.

"I prefer the Toll House," she typed back, referencing Nestle's premixed batter packaged in a yellow casing and found in the dairy case next to the pre-shredded cheeses. "Perhaps we can do taste test bake-off."

"If you bake them, I will eat them," came my husband's self-sacrificing reply.

"Oh sure," I type, "That sounds fair."

"I'll just cream two kinds of sugars with softened butter, add the egg (which I have weighed to make sure it is truly "Large" and not "Extra Large") and the dry ingredients (which I've sifted twice and blended in small increments until it has entirely incorporated).

"And you'll slice a loaf of chilled cookie dough, baking a tray of disks for exactly 8 minutes. And I will have to go to the store and procure all the ingredients, including yours. I predict you will even have the temerity to steal space in the oven I have preheated."

She scoffs an interruption as I open my mouth in protest. "You won't need the oven any time soon. Your recipe requires the dough sit and chill for 12 hours before baking. You are essentially making "breakfast" cookies.

I hate to admit that she's right. How can they call these perfect? Easy would be ideal but settle for foolproof. Heck, I'd even say perfect would mean finding superfine sugar without having to visit four stores. 

(I didn't find any, in case you were wondering … already we were starting with an imperfection).

As she lounged on the couch, hanging upside down on the cushions and flicking through movie options on Netflix, my arm already felt fatigued from the manual folding part of the recipe. And, with each further sprinkling of flour, my inward panic grows over whether this is the dash that will break the dough into crumbled bits.

I wondered if I'd made a mistake to eyeball the salt?

Who am I kidding?

If I were a character in an 80s movie, I'd have tipped an ash from a cigarette into the batter along with the unmeasured cascade of chocolate chunks and given it all one last half-hearted stir.

Now that instant gratification had been erased from the recipe, I had lost an equally weighted portion of enthusiasm.

I might not even sequester the mixture in the fridge for the duration. Two hours should suffice in our newly fritzing fridge.

When it's almost time (fifteen minutes is the new forty-eight hours), I pop the tray into the oven and watch the batter balls deflate into an almost perfect circle. It's center slightly domed, and its edge lightly browned.

The hunks of chocolate melting into a more artful mosaic as if hand pieced.

They slid off the cookie sheet and onto a cooling rack with ease. 

They were the most beautiful looking cookies I'd ever made.

How did this happen?

The girl's cookies, just as perfect in shape and symmetry, had been done ages ago and were already arranged on a plate when the man who started the grudge match followed his nose to the kitchen.

He didn't notice that vanilla was left out of the recipe by design. Or that the sugars had been substituted by necessity. 

He pretended he couldn't tell the difference by looking at them. ...

But when he said the "perfect cookie" had too much salt, he was just rubbing it in.

No Justice

 This week Amy Coney Barrett almost silently walked us through the complicated and tedious work of her jurisprudence as she seeks a position on the highest court of the land. While she explained how she applies a history scholar's forensic understanding of the Constitution to justify the alignment of contemporary laws, not only with the framers' intentions in mind but also the understanding of the 18th-century populace; I had an epiphany:

Originalism is racist hogwash.

A close read of words to divine 18th-century reasoning for the defense or discrediting of any particular law seems just about as helpful to modern life and communication as speaking in tongues.

Nothing more.

Ultra-educated people examining words from the public record with such surgical precision, and yet not seeming to notice the absence of opinions from those who were disfranchised from the start of this century's long experiment: The native people who were here first. People who had been enslaved and later called 3/5ths human. Women. 

History, as we have been told so often, is written by the winners. 

But who wins? What do they get?

Let's face facts: a conservative majority court is a win for some American enterprise and a loss for a more perfect union.

When they succeed in gutting protections for the vulnerable and take away a woman's right to body autonomy, when they let the polluters dump more waste into our skies and our rivers, and when they install one corrupt leader after another, what will be left of democracy?

And if anything solidified my new understanding, it was the exchange of "sarcasm" between Lindsey Graham and Barrett when he asked if she had any knowledge of any desire to go back to the "good old days of segregation."

Barrett, who is raising two Black children, said "no," with neither hesitation nor derision at such an ugly glibness.

There will always be winners and losers. 

Barrett, the law professor, explained how discrimination, as a concept, is a necessary endeavor of law.

She wants us to take for granted that she is unbiased despite all her writing and advocacy to the contrary. She wants us to be reassured that she always takes the loser's thoughts into account as she renders her decision, just like she would anyone of her children when she's taken away their heart's desire for the greater good.

It's a shame that a woman's right to choose her path in her own life is one of the shiny objects Barrett desires to snatch away in her goal of parenting of a nation.

Not that she sees it that way.

I'd like to think Amy Barrett and the people who believe in her brand of conservative domination will not prevail. I'd like to think that a body that believes itself to be just will understand that the right to self-determination for all people is no less worthy of defending and upholding without discrimination.

But I cannot pretend under our current and unprecedented circumstances with open corruption, ineptitude, and malevolence in this administration, that this president's pick for a lifetime appointment to the bench will redeem an embattled court or preserve our sullied democracy.

Just the opposite.

Unloading

 Loading. … Loading. … Loading ….

Dashes circle around the computer screen as if any second now something is about to take place. That second lasts for one minute and then another. I'm beginning to wonder if progress will find me. 

Nothing yet and the meeting time is nearing. "No one has responded to your request to join the call."

Unlike a real-life room in a mostly abandoned middle school at 5:30 in the evening, I can't just sit here quietly and wait. 

Except that I most certainly can. Just sit here. Making the shapes of the alphabet with each ankle, scrolling through the news on my cell phone.

I have no place else to be.

I don't even have to worry about the dog knocking over something loud but, by the sound that carries up through the floorboards, unbreakable as she takes off after the cat.

Their primordial battle lines drawn between their respective dinner bowls.

Someone on the creation end of this middle school open house has to let me inside this virtual room in the ether eventually. 

"Eventually" being only a moment in terms of going out of ones way. It just seems excessive now that I don't have anywhere to be. 

There isn't enough time to shower or change. I would fix a drink and wait here in the dark of room - the only place I can go where the sound of down-time won't be an intrusion.

Luckily the lighting here is lackluster.

No one will see that I haven't combed my hair, or done my makeup, or changed into something presentable.

Frankly, I'm not sure how this will work. The instructions would be simple if I were looking for an available chair in the gymnasium. How do I follow a schedule in virtual school? 

Follow the link to the chat rooms? 

Of course, I haven't made the bed. Or cleared the nightstand of its buildup of debris. The cat will undoubtedly drink from my glass, half-filled with two-day-old water.

Who will notice if I just turn off the camera? They already have everyone on mute.

I am barely present anyway. We have all lowered our expectations no matter how we spin the story.

My kids show up in person two days a week, and then as blips, here and there on a computer screen for the next three days. Sometimes the youngest is done with all assignments before I leave the house in the morning for work.

I try on the most disappointed expression I can muster and resolve to call him up a thousand times that day.

The first call will go something like this:

"Hey."

"Hey."

"What's going on?"

"Nothing much."

*Electronic battle sounds crashing in the background.*

"Are you playing video games?"

"Kinda. I'm also watching 'Hamilton'"

"Are you sure you have all your school work done?"

"I'm sure, I double checked."

"Ok ... well ... Go outside before it's winter again. Maybe mow the lawn?"

"Ok. Sure. When I'm done with this game ... or after Phillip dies, whichever comes first."

The second call will ring three times before he answers:

"Hey ... how's it going? ...."

"Just kidding. I'm not here. I'm mowing the lawn for my mom. Leave a message but I probably won't call you back. I'm going to be busy until next Tuesday in Forever."

A little night music

The curtain lifted. The scent of earth and lavender wafted past me. I hadn't noticed before, but someone had left the window sash up. Now that I was comfortably in bed, the sounds of cars seem amplified as they pass on the road, and their whooshing rides the cross-draft through my bedroom toward the peepers in the backyard.

For a moment, I consider getting up to slide the window to its most silent position, buttoning up the house to keep the evening chill off my neck.

I'm still considering this when the wind howls, rattling the screens in the window tracks and dragging in a fresh scent. It's not unappealing, but it's something I can't quite identify. The breeze also carries to me the laughter of coyotes somewhere in the distance.

I have lost all desire to shutter this symphony.

Tired's warmth creeps under the covers with me, allowing the night sounds a channel into my mind where consciousness can dissolve into watery dreams. This band – Canis Latrans -- plays raucously into the night. I can't tell how many of their voices are singing in harmony, but the song rolls and tumbles with the energy of a litter of youthful Canis Lupus Familiaris.

The dark of my room illuminated all of humankind's progressive imperfections; I imagine a little pack of pups, playing some growing-up games with each other until a warble gives way to a scream. 

This scream startles me out of any desire to sleep. 

At first, I think it is a woman's shriek, and my heart starts to pound, moving up my chest and into my throat. But the utterances have a rhythmic repetition that reassures me they are not human. Most likely, they are the call of the peacocks just over the hill from here.

Up close, peacocks have the guttural sound of a truck horn. They sound alarmed from a distance, almost as if they are repeating the word "help," as it falls on deaf ears.

As I wonder if the coyotes are menacing the magnificent birds, they all fall quiet as if my mere imagination had sent them to their separate corners.

.

In this new silence, the hum of crickets – or katydids, or some other singing member of the family Arthropod that I can not identify by the pitch of its chirp – starts to tune-up.

The insects' tonal regularity – like tinnitus – soothes me as much as the steadiness of a white noise machine comforts my husband. Both drown uncomfortable thoughts quite readily. 

I imagine myself out walking. A crunch of autumn leaves rustling underfoot.

With each step, the chorus of grasshoppers goes silent. They draw their leg bows away from their body cellos and wait for me to pass. This silence created by my appearance in their hall pleases me despite its root in fear and self-preservation. I am human and detached from my long shadow, imagining I have become a virtuosic conductor of nature's music.