Y'know why they’re called “Idiot Cookies”?
Tonight I baked cookies for some friends while listening to new Wilco, Happy as Clam. Well, technically I was not baking, just melting ingredients down since it’s a no-bake recipe. While dropping melted chocolate-peanut-butter-oatmeal goo (See? They’re good.) onto parchment paper, (And not only that, but I should write for a freaking gourmet magazine!) I started thinking about how long I’ve been making these cookies.

I used to make them with a friend in elementary school under her mother’s supervision. I guess it was one of those recipes that’s so easy, it seemed like the perfect “starter” baking recipe for kids. (Is it telling how far my baking skills have progressed that these cookies have become are one of the five or six things in my baking repertoire--one of three things I ever really bake at all, in reality?)

When I was in elementary school, this girl – the one I made these cookies with - was my best friend. It was that elementary-school brand of loyalty.

Her family was very conservative and Christian and took me to Vacation Bible School several summers in a row. We listened to Amy Grant in her bedroom while playing Barbies. I think now about how much my mother must have had to bite her atheistic tongue at all this.
I also think about how in recent years, I’ve pared down my memories of that first best friend by reducing her further and further in storytelling. Reducing it to--Well, to what I’ve just written. She was a right-wing Christian. I am not and never was. We were best friends from ages six to 11. Then she moved to another state. The message being: Phew/Lucky me/I went on to have a normal wearing-safety-pins-as-earrings adolescence and look at me now!

But you know, at the time, we had fun. And you know what? I know we must have gotten together out of some fondness other than our mutual love of playing dolls--which was huge and shameful--She was the type of friend with whom I could indulge in this fascination--the costume changes, the intricate storylines--until long after the age most girls had stopped. We were in Girl Scouts together. I liked Girl Scouts. We had all those sleepovers where we stayed up all night, talking and rotting our teeth on Pringles. We must have had stuff of substance to talk about.

Then she moved away and slowly, we lost touch. And now all she is to me most of the time, is this little vignette I pull out in a Getting-to-Know-You story, which is shameful. Maybe I'm something comparable to her at this point. A two-dimensional character in the mind of someone I’ve started thinking of that way.