Would you like partial nudity with that?

Perhaps I am a prude. Okay, now that you’ve wiped away your tears of laughter, let me assert again that it is true: there are some things that I consider to be acceptable behavior and some things that are not. Today, gentle reader, you are going to get an example of not appropriate behavior (honestly, how interesting would it be if I wrote “All the good little Christian children in the world bowed their heads and prayed to their beloved lord Jesus and he made the rainbows shine just for them.”).
Anyway, my story begins today with an infrequent visit up to my lair by mom and dad. One of my objections to having a “holiday tree” forced mercilessly upon me was that there was no one to see it and therefore why the hell should I bother. So, mom decided it would be a sop to my protestations if she and dad came up to visit me and behold the wonder that is my holiday decoration. Woo.
Of course, one of her other motives was to pop on over to the quilt store that is but a stone’s throw from my abode. That left dad and me to our own devices for a little more than an hour until we were going to skip merrily down for lunch at one of the delightful cafés in my neighborhood. Amazingly enough, dad was not the source of the inappropriate behavior. No: that incident didn’t occur until we reached the café.
Mom was lagging (she had another encounter with the gang of motorcycles that seem to plague her on the roads), so dad and I headed to the café by ourselves. It’s one of my favorites, as their greek omelet is just delish, although it always makes me experience a feta of regret. It was sort of mizzly (you know, a combination of misty and drizzly) outside, so we hustled on in to the café. We ordered for mom, she arrived, we ate, and all was right with the world. Except, except… well, you remember that feta of regret? Yeah, I guess it had sort of decided to “kick it up a notch” above my usual feta foibles. To wit: I was about to release a ham blast of epic magnitude. Also, I strongly suspected that two of my friends (whom I like to call Crap Master Flush and Stooly D) wanted to visit the pool, if you catch my meaning. So I excused myself to visit the facilities.
This was unusual for me, because I don’t like to conduct that sort of business in a public bathroom (not that I like to conduct any other sort of business in there either, you understand. No t-room tricks for me, thank you very much. I do my hoin’ on the corner like everyone else). Besides, when I am visiting the little downtown area, I am really close enough to whisk home, “make a deposit”, and whisk right back, sixpence none the wiser. But doodie called quite urgently in this case, so I made my way inside.
Fortunately, there was no one else in the bathroom. Well, you know: nothing is more embarrassing than giving someone you don’t know a toot serenade. So was able to take care of business in sweet solitude. Then the trouble began. As I was completing the paperwork for my little transaction, the door opened and someone else came in. Now, the etiquette involved in signifying to a mysterious bathroom stranger that someone is already in flagrante depoop-o is simple: you tap a foot, make a little cough, something audible so that whoever has entered the room is aware that your shit is going down. I had hardly had time to contemplate which polite notification I was going to choose when all thought was drowned out by some of the loudest nose-blowing I have heard since, well, since my dad. And it wasn’t just loud: oh no my friend, mere loudness (while certainly of a special quality of its own) isn’t enough to really warrant mention unless you are running thin on conversation. This was also persistent nose-blowing. I found myself having to time the rhythm of the blasts so I could know when to work in my announcement. Of course, this did not prepare me for what awaited me outside the safety of the stall door.
You know how, while you are attracted to the same sex (or the opposite, but that so crazy), you aren’t necessarily attracted to ALL of them? You know how, sometimes you want to see someone naked, but then there are some people who you sort of mentally dress? Yeah. I open the door to the stall, expecting possibly one of the archangels (because of all the trumpeting he had done) but that is not what I see. No, what I see is this piece of old man flap, shirt off, man-titties a-jiggle, vigorously toweling himself off. The back hair was not a big whoop to me (I am a bear, after all), but the pallid grey of his skin was more than a bit disconcerting. It was like seeing withered old Dracula washing up before a big blood feast. I suppose, if I had to come up with a reason (and the nature of the trauma is such that I must) I would say the mizzly weather had gone rainy and that he wished to dry himself as much as possible. Of course, he also had chosen to occupy the sink with his shirt. Why it couldn’t be casually draped over the paper towel rack as his sweater had been is simply beyond me. Perhaps it is a fundamental law of physics, like the explosive reaction between matter and anti-matter: your sweater and your t-shirt shall not touch when they are off of your body and casually arrayed in a public restroom. Perhaps he was just a dick. Either way, his sartorial selfishness left me unable to wash my hands without having an interaction.
I hate having interactions with strangers in public situations. Now, I am not saying I am averse to meeting people. However, I absolutely despise it when people speak to me in a store or in line; anywhere no one knows your name. It’s just a thing I have. That despite is increased a thousand-fold when the interaction takes place in the bathroom. The rule is: don’t speak. Ever. It doesn’t matter if your stall neighbor is puking his guts out, if your urinal buddy is on fire with actual flames licking at his clothing, nothing is sufficient cause to break the single most important rule. You simply don’t speak in a bathroom. Not ever. Now, here I am, in a bathroom with a partially clothed old man and I have to talk to him or he has to talk to me. Walking out without washing my hands is simply not an option.
He looks surprised, not quite like a deer caught in the headlights, but as though I haven’t been tapping and harrumphing, flushing even, while he was occupying the same space. I suppose he could have imagined that I had dropped down from the sky, like the old man that drove around with the homeless guy in his windshield. I have one goal in all of this: make the interaction as limited as possible. I make a simple nod of acknowledgement, and move to the sink to wash my hands. He does nothing beyond what he is doing (i.e. wiping his sagging flesh with paper towels) until I begin to turn the sink on. Then he says “Let me get that” and yanks it away, as though I had intended to douse the material in the sink like it was some kind of Kafka-esque Woolite commercial. I wash my hands, grab a paper towel to dry them with, keep it in my hand to open the door, and drop in the waste container as I walk back out into the café, free at last from the tyranny of a poor mannered man. Although, I can’t help but suppress a small smile back at the table. Crap Master Flush and Stooly D. Heh, I am so clever.

Baking is hell

“4 by 6, 4 by 6!” chirped my mother. Don’t let the verb fool you; her commands (for that is what they are) are obeyed more hastily than if they came from a grizzled drill sergeant. In this instance, she is redirecting a wayward private who had thought to go with an unapproved cookie dough layout. “We must maximize the number of cookies produced on each sheet! And remember, we want pretty cookies!” Our mission: to bake well over a thousand cookies in just a few short hours. Such is life in the holiday cookie brigade, and I should know. I’ve served more tours of duty in the HCB than any of the other officers.
It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning, it was just my mom and I, baking a few batches of holiday cookies for the three of us (Dad can’t even put the dishes back in the right cabinets, so he was granted an exemption from our baking campaign). We had fun, ate the baked goods (always my favorite part), and had a very relaxing time of it. Then my Auntie Reb moved back to town with her Air Force husband and two young children, and our baking duo became a quintet. We gladly welcomed the additions. It was a little busier, but I had fun entertaining my young cousins with cookie dough shapes and showing them how to eat piping directly out of the tube. It wasn’t until the Crafty Friends got involved that CB-Day turned into the massive effort on multiple fronts that it is today.
The Crafty Friends: an elite force of my mother and my aunt’s friends dedicated to sewing and, one day a year, baking. Unfortunately, the irony of this moniker is lost to any outside of the circle: they were (years of intensive tutoring by my mother have brought them almost up to spec) most decidedly uncrafty friends. In fact, in keeping with the day’s more sensitive times, mother used to refer to them as “craft challenged”, a nomenclature they laughingly accepted since it was so very apt. I still chuckle when I think about Auntie Linda sewing the handles across the bag instead of on the sides and how Auntie Mo added pieces from someone else’s Christmas tree skirt to her own. And none of us, our next-door neighbor included, will ever forget the home invasion.
Considering the participants, this campaign might sound like an exercise in chaos (and it can be, especially when considering the “mimosa factor”). However, the general, I mean mom, has a plan of attack that she sticks to with a ferocity a Jack Russell terrier would be proud of. Each November, we begin by deciding which cookies we will make. This is a more difficult task than it seems, because everyone has their own personal favorite that simply MUST be made. That means we start with about ten different recipes. Then mom and I look at new recipes we would like to add to our repertoire. This puts us at about eighty different recipes. Then take a heavy dose of reality and cut the list of new recruits down to about twelve. Then we look at last year’s recipe list to determine which cookies made the cut and which ones scrubbed out. Eventually, we end up with a list of about twenty-five different kinds of cookies, all of which will be baked in one day.
That is not to say that all of the cookies are “made” on CB-Day. To attempt that would be impossible, so we have instead adopted the tactics of the current administration: pre-emptive strikes. The day before CB-Day, mom (aided by me, her loyal lieutenant) prepares all of the cookie dough that must be refrigerated before it can be dropped. By 11:00 p.m. we are as ready as we can be for the carnage to come.
As a senior officer, I report bright and early the next morning. I start baking the dough from the night before, while she mixes more batches. The rest of the forces drift in eventually, bringing supplies and fresh meat, I mean their children. The veterans are put to work as soon as they arrive; the maggots go through a brief boot camp (there are almost never any freak-outs): “4 by 6 goes on the sheet/Pretty cookies can’t be beat. Sound off.”
The Kitchen-Aid mixer roars like a jet engine as cup after cup of flour and sugar pour into its stainless steel maw. Spoons clash as the cookie droppers dip again and again into the waiting bowls of dough, making sure to bring out only enough dough to form one-inch balls. The light glints off the knives of the choppers, their fingers stained red by the blood of countless cherries. Wave after wave of cookies steam out of the oven, to beach upon the broad plain of the pool table. Combat has been met in earnest as we fight to keep the pace; cookies drop on the sheets, the sheets go in the oven, more cookies drop on more sheets, sheets come out of the oven, cookies come off the sheets. We continue to make advances on the cookie front, until about noon, when we break for lunch. The truce doesn’t last long, however, and we take up our positions again in the seemingly endless cycle of drop/bake/decorate.
And of all of the thousands of cookies littering the dining room like the bodies of the fallen, there is only one kind I must eat, the one that I have been waiting for since this time last year. It is my personal badge of honor, the accolade that keeps me enlisted: cherry cookies. I am not the only one held in their thrall; there is a reason other than sheer stubborn fecundity that we make eight batches of this one recipe. They are a study in the things I love: cookies, cherries, frosting. That’s my holy trinity, my guiding light, the reason I enter the trenches year after year.