The sweet cookie monster and a sour thought

The cookie monster has hit our house—not so much the one that devours cookies, but the one that bakes them. For three weeks now, I have been consumed each weekend with making cookies, primarily for Jacob’s benefit. He gets them in his school lunch every day, but I also admit that I have them after my lunch and dinner. I remind myself of my late mother-in-law, who used to say, “Judy, dear, just a little sweet with my coffee.” I don’t have the coffee, but I sure like topping  meal off with something sweet. I’ve noticed that I almost never hit my chocolate stash if I have cookies on hand.

I started, of course, with chocolate chip cookies—to me, that’s the quintessential cookie. But when those disappeared, I made oatmeal raisin, because Jacob admitted to a real liking of them. Those are almost gone now, so today I made the dough for molasses cookies. That led to an interesting exchange. Me: “Do you like molasses cookies?” Jacob: “What’s in them?” Me: “Molasses.” Jacob: “What’s molasses?” How do you explain molasses to a thirteen-year-old? I’m sure if I let him sniff it, he’d say, “No, thanks. I’m not eating that.” But the cookie batter smells and tastes so good. Yes, I confess I licked the beaters and the spatula.

So now I have to bake them, which is tricky in a toaster oven. It heats too hot and fast, and I have to adjust. Made stuffed eggplant this weekend, and the top got all crusty and dry—too hot too fast.

While it’s fun to bake cookies for a teen, I think often these days that raising a teenager—or loving grandchildren—is fraught with perils that I never thought of when my kids were teens. I know I’m inclined to be a worrier, but danger seems to lurk everywhere. It’s not unheard of for Jacob’s school to be on lockdown, and while I’m glad authorities are so cautious, I can’t help but be alarmed each time. Surely a shooting won’t happen here—but that’s what the people of Santa Clarita thought.

On Facebook I see too many notices pleading for help finding missing teens. I know a lot are runaways, and I ache for the unhappiness that must cause them to make such a dangerous decision. But we also hear too much these days about sex trafficking, and I wonder how many of those kids have been outright kidnapped and sold. A horrifying thought. If Jacob is a bit late or plays basketball on the schoolyard at dusk, I can conjure up horrible thoughts. My other grandchildren are in a way fortunate that I don’t live close enough to worry about their every move.

But as I admitted, I am a worrier. I worry a lot about my dog Sophie and almost never let her out in the yard unless I’m at my desk where I can watch her. My fear? That dogfight people will come snatch her. When I see notices on the Neighborhood News or some such of dogs needing a new home, I almost always write and recommend that people register the dog with a recognized rescue service which vets prospective owners carefully. I’ve heard that dogfight guys will send their cute girlfriend to ooh and aah over what a good pet a dog will make, only to flip it as a bait dog. (As I write this, Sophie is sitting on the deck, across the yard, watching me.)

Probably I am a person with exaggerated fears. Sometimes I blame it on my childhood on the South Side of Chicago, where I was raised to be cautious—well, yes, scared. Other times I attribute my fears to the over-active imagination of a writer. Now if I could only translate those fears into best-selling mysteries!

On the other hand, there’s that old bromide: better safe than sorry. Be cautious folks—there’s a world of meanness out there. Having said that, I have to admit I cling to my belief that there is so much more good in the world than evil, and in people. It’s just those aberrations we have to watch out for.

A sad night

During the day I squirreled away a couple oh-so-clever items to blog about tonight, like my miniscule crop of tiny, tiny tomatoes from my unruly plants on my desktop green house. Or I could tell you about the birthday dinner I had tonight, with three friends—lots of laughter and a bit of commiserating about the difficulties of aging. But my heart is too heavy tonight for trivia, and aging seems a blessing denied to many.

A Paschal high school student died at noon today because he was racing his car against a friend, lost control, and hit a tree. On a street that I travel often, the route I took to work for years. Somehow, we don’t expect these things to happen close to home. I do not know the boy’s identity, but the horror increased when I heard that tomorrow is his sixteenth birthday, and the car in which he died--a Mustang—was his birthday present. I cannot stop thinking about that family whose child is not coming home tonight. Jacob will go to Paschal in another year, which also brings it closer to home. How do we build a protective bubble around our children?

I grieve too for Bothran Jean, who left us some time ago, and for his family and for Amy Guyger who shot him and who today was convicted of murder. I watched TV for a while just after the verdict was announced, and it was wrenching. What she, a police officer, did was so wrong that there is no comprehending. Jean was in his apartment, eating ice cream—the only thing he did wrong was to leave his door ajar. She entered, thinking she was in her own apartment a floor below, and shot him, out of fear for her life, she says. I presume, as a police officer coming off duty and still in her gear, she had other ways to subdue a threat, but she shot to kill.

As the prosecutor said today, there’s a strong lesson there for police officers, a lesson about deadly force that should be a cautionary tale for so many police officers across the country. I was sad that supporters of Bothran Jean’s family made it into a racial issue, though the tones of racism were always there—she is white, he was black. But it seems to me this is more a police training and brutality issue than a racial one, though perhaps in our society today the two are so intertwined as to be inseparable. But like the teenage driver, Bothran Jean will not be coming home to his family—ever.

The judge allowed the castle theory defense for Ms. Guyger which seemed really out of whack to me. She wasn’t defending her “castle,” which was one story below. She was invading his castle. Still I thought she might be convicted of manslaughter. When the murder conviction came back, I felt a wave of sympathy for her, awful as what she did was. I could imagine, seeing the shock on her face, that she was desperately wishing that this was a bad dream from which she would wake up. But it wasn’t. She will pay a stiff price—from five to 99 years—for the grief that she had brought to two families and to a community and a city.

As a good friend of mine says, there’s a world of hurt out there. Be gentle with one another, my friends. None of us can see around the next corner in our lives.