The Big Bowl

In this one, you're about seven, sitting on the kitchen table with your legs wrapped around Mom's big stainless steel mixing bowl. It must have been after Dad bought the deli, because that's when we first started making field trips to restaurant supply stores and Mom got some industrial sized kitchen equipment. It must be summer time, because you're wearing that striped sleeveless shirt and shorts, and white sandals on your little feet. You have summer hair, too, white-blonde and whispy, pulled into pigtails.

We can't see inside the bowl, which you're stirring with a long wooden spoon. We can guess, though. That bowl is for Brother Joachim's cookies. Mom got the recipe when she went to that retreat house in Danville for the weekend. Good thing she had the big bowl, because the recipe makes 10 dozen cookies. I love those cookies. They were big, back in the day when big cookies weren't the norm. They're flat and crisp and not overly sweet, oatmeal and raisin and walnuts. I made a copy of Mom's handwritten recipe recently, and she's scribbled on the top, "John says 'Good with beer.'"

I can see Dad at that same kitchen table, eating his lunch. Must be a Saturday, because he wasn't home for lunch during the week, and on Sundays, we just had a big breakfast and then dinner. He'd put his sandwich on a plate with some chips, and pour his beer into a cold mug from the freezer, and he'd prop up his book against the covered butter dish, so that the reading angle was just right. It was usually a spy novel -- Robert Ludlum or John Le Carre, or something lighter like one of the Travis McGee books. Although he read a lot of how-to books, also, but not "Idiot" books -- real how-to books about bakery science, or harpsichord building, or the construction of fiberglass kayaks. David looks at me funny when I bring my book to the lunch table. It just seems like the right way to eat in the middle of the day.

Mom wouldn't bake the cookies all at once. She'd mix up the dough, then form it into a half dozen long logs that she'd wrap in freezer paper. She'd pile them up in the upright freezer in the garage, and pull one out and slice it thickly and bake the cookies when the time was right. Like, after school on a rainy day, when we'd come home wet from riding our bikes. After we'd toweled off and changed our clothes, she'd spread a blanket on the carpet in front of the fireplace, and we'd have an indoor picnic of warm cookies and hot chocolate. Remember?