My sister and my sister-in-law both make the very best chocolate chip cookies. You can't eat just one. And the disgusting part, they can make the cookies in their sleep or two minutes after company arrives between chip and dip. They are also beautiful enough for a magazine layout but the cookies would never make it to the first shot. Snatched up.
Regular Saturday, kinda. Laundry, laundry, laundry. Button that top button. Fold and stack. Still not finished. One of my running buds, in high school and in college, led The Life. Her mother kept her pantry supplied with Nestle's Semi-Sweet Chocolate. My sister and I had to order them months ahead and then wait for the royal key for dispensary. I would go to my friend's house and her mother would say, "Let's make chocolate chip cookies." Not usually heard in my world.
Making the cookies is a rite of passage. It is that first cooking experience the novice can manage without ripping a wall out. There might be a bit of shell. But three or four girls can whip out some good cookies and feel proud about it.
Beautiful fall day. Slept with the windows open last night. Chilly. Wish we were camping because we haven't camped in twenty-five years. We have all the gear.
I haven't baked in six months, barely cooked. But without thinking about it, I was having my non-Covid day except I wasn't wearing make-up to fold towels. My non-Covid day consist of bathing, dressing nice and wearing make-up. Probably just staying home or going to the Post Office. You can almost pretend you are in September 2019.
I was ready to bake cookies. I had plenty of supplies. We still had a bucket of pecans which were a Christmas gift from our Aunt and Uncle several years ago. Stick them in the freezer. Thank goodness I had just the minute before dust mopped the floor.
And in the freak of nature, those pecans lost their lid and about half of a half empty bucket hung in midair and crashed to the floor. Well, what was I going to do? Pick them up and blow and keep the dog away.
This is how my cookies began. No other mishaps, no shells. Actually, very tasty cookie dough. How do you know if you don't sample?
Then I went to pick my purse up off the table and I saw three masks on the inside. Who would have believed? A Covid Day. How can I be making cookies and listening to Bob Seger and the Hamilton Soundtrack and it feel like a normal day? Like my country is not 'upside down'. That one of the most brilliant women ever in the world was not even given the decency of twenty-four hours as the vulture knocked at the door with a folded shroud over his arm. I had to say it.
That a normal day is not marked by 200,000 deaths from a deadly virus that is not a hoax as perpetuated by no one in charge.
Do I enjoy a cookie? Keep folding sheets? Sit on my pleasant deck while good, Evangelical politicians have no manners, wearing their ballcap in the funeral home.
I don't want it to be us or them. I want we. We are Americans. I have watched the Musical Film Hamilton twenty-three times. I am drawn by the desire to build a free nation, seeing this cast become their characters, carrying me along with them in the struggle and the hope that started with risky pickets. With tremendous loss, but beyond that the tremendous effort to come out from under England's thumb and build what all of those freedom loving men fought and died for.
So I have had a frivolous day unknowingly, until I turned on the news. My day had not been a day of mourning. Mourning Justice Ginsburg, mourning 200,000 fellow citizens who died of Covid-19 or mourning for this country I love so.
I need more Covid Days to keep my mind on the muddle our lives have become. Who would have believed the hard fighting education situation, patriot teachers fighting for their beloved students.
Nurses and Doctors dying because of an oath they took many years ago.
A black man being murdered in broad day light with cameras rolling, by four policeman, three standing by and watching, people on the sidewalk begging for help for George Floyd.
These are not frivolous days.
