One thing Mommy can usually cook okay is cookies. They are not special in any way, but they are usually edible. Actually, when Mommy was a little girl, she won a cooking contest for cookies. She made rainbow cookies: The dough was all kinds of colors mixed together. Mommy also made a big chart with the ingredients. On the chart, she made a writing mistake. Instead of baking powder, she wrote baking power. The judges thought that was funny. Mommy won an award for originality in cooking, but she said that she never figured out whether the originality was for the rainbow colors or for the power that she put into her baking ingredients.
Sometimes when the school had a bake sale, Mommy made cookies. People who bought them probably should have tasted them first. Mommy said that it did not matter. She said that people did not necessarily buy the cookies to eat them; they bought them to help the school. So, every time there was a PTA bake sale, Mommy would get busy making cookies, and we would all stay very far away from the kitchen, in case she wanted us to taste them.
Once my Mommy made some cookies the evening before a bake sale for the school band. She wrapped the plate of cookies in saran wrap and put it on the counter.
The next morning my sister, Echo, took the plate to the car and handed it to my Mommy. We lived too far from the high school for Echo to walk to school with all her books and band instruments, but we lived officially too close for her to be bussed. So, Mommy drove her to school every morning. The rest of us got to go along for the ride. That was fun because we drove through our neighborhood and often saw people we knew.
On the cookie day, our neighbors were especially friendly. Every time we stopped at a stop sign or a light, people waved at us. We all waved back and smiled. Even people we did not know waved enthusiastically. We sure lived in a friendly town.
When we got to school, Mommy got out of the car. As she stood up, she saw the roof. On the top of the roof, held in place by the saran wrap, was the plate of cookies. Now we knew why all those people were waving so wildly.
Conclusion: Saran wrap is fantastic stuff!
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This story is excerpted from a collection of vignettes that I helped Doah, my severely mentally challenged youngest son, to write and publish several years ago (copyright 2003). It was my attempt to help him understand literacy and the purpose of writing and reading.
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About Me
- Elizabeth Mahlou
- I am the mother of 4 birth children (plus 3 others who lived with us) and grandmother of 2, all of them exceptional children. Married for 42 years, I grew up in Maine, live in California, and work in many places in education, linguistics, and program management. In my spare time, I rescue and tame feral cats and have the scars to prove it. A long-time ignorantly blissful atheist converted by a theophanic experience to Catholicism, I am now a joyful catechist. Oh, I also authored a dozen books, two under my pen name of Mahlou (Blest Atheist and A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God).
Recommended Reading List
Because I am blog inept, I don't quite know how to get a reading list to stay at the end of the page and not disappear from sight. Therefore, I entered it as my first post. I suppose that is not all that bad because readers started commenting about the books, even suggesting additional readings. So, you can participate with others in my reading list by clicking here.I do post additional books as I read them and find them to be meaningful to me, and therefore, hopefully, meaningful to you. One advantage of all the plane traveling I do is that I acquire reading time that I might not otherwise take.
Dear Beth, since the past week I have been unable to open your main blog Blest Athiest. Its so frustrating. A blog called Blest Home Interios comes up. So i will visit you here till the problem is solved
ReplyDeleteWhat a cute story!
ReplyDeleteHi Amrita, as you can see from my note to readers at the top of this page, I have had a serious problem with Google support of the Blest Atheist site. Rather than work through all the problems -- I don't have time and I don't want to support Google practices -- I have sort of closed Blest Atheist and replaced it with another blog called 100th Lamb. The posts will be similar, and I am moving all of the old BA posts to 100th Lamb. So, the blogsite will seem very familiar to you. You can get to it at www.emahlou.blogspot.com. I explain everything there and, in time, will put the information up at the other sites.
ReplyDeleteKaren, thanks!
I wonder what the consequence for leaving he cookies on the roof were? I once drove all the way to work wih my cup of coffee on my back bumper. The coffee was cold btw when I retrieved it. :) :(
ReplyDeleteI don't know what the consequences might be. Unlike you, I did not seem to have any. Maybe because the cookies were already cold! (That's funny about your coffee - when did you discover it?)
ReplyDelete