Confessions Of A Cookie Monster

There were a lot of institutions and rituals in my house when I was growing up. Perhaps none was more abused than "Two Cookies Of The Day." The idea was that the poor, starving boys who lived there would have a chance for a quick snack sometime before their father came home to tide them over until dinner an hour or so later. My brothers and I were rarely content to let the number of cookies stop at just two. We always had good cookies in our train-shaped cookie jar. If it had been just Pecan Sandies that jar would be full today.
But it wasn't. There were Fudge Stripes and Chips Ahoy and America's favorite Oreos. Those were the ones that came from the store. My mother would regularly fill that little locomotive with home-made Toll House cookies. She used to put them inside the jar while they were still warm, causing there to be little smears of semi-sweet chocolate in the inside. How were we supposed to limit ourselves to just two?
The truth is, we rarely did. In the beginning, there was a lot of whining and cajoling and begging Mom for just one more. Or two. How long is it until dinner anyway? And when that approach fell on deaf ears, we turned to more desperate measures. Did we steal cookies? It sounds so unpleasant, and since we were the ones who would eventually be eating the cookies, we weren't so much stealing as borrowing against cookies that we would eventually consume. Not that we treated it that way. Our cookie-pilfering raids took on the air of an episode of "Hogan's Heroes": The distractions, the misdirection, the stealth, the fake moustaches.
I'm a parent now, and I know what we were putting my mother through. I know that, like any good business owner, she resigned herself to a certain amount of loss through theft. She had many more important concerns than remaining on high alert through the evening hours to catch us with our literal hands in the literal cookie jar. She needed a moment or two of her own to unwind and prepare for the next act. Clever children like my son sense this is the time to strike. In those quiet moments just before dusk, as parents begin to reflect on their day, that's the time to work them for that little something extra.
It wasn't just her three sons, either. There was an entire neighborhood that periodically emptied into her kitchen to be fed. She ran the House of Cookies, and I don't think she would have had it any other way. Over the years there was a parade of friends and acquaintances who came through our house and were treated to the same experience. I don't remember a single one of them having their dinner spoiled, but that was always the concern. The only lasting effect of Two Cookies of The Day is my continued need to be surreptitious about opening a cookie jar. I'm forty-six years old, and I pay for the cookies in the jar in my own house. But I don't just pay for them once: I still lift that lid gingerly, just in case Mom is listening.