April 14, 1927 - August 2, 2013

I keep telling myself it's wrong to think of a cookie at a time like this. It was, in fact, the most expensive cookie I've ever encountered. The cost of a loaf of bread. The only reason I went through with the purchase, aside from the shame of sending it back to the shelf, was that originally I thought the total made it seven dollars. In fact, it was only about four, which seemed relatively reasonable. Full of oats and interspersed with chocolate chunks, with melted toffee on top and coming out of its sides, it weighed maybe half a pound. I finished it and wondered if there would come a day when I would have another. This was yesterday morning. This afternoon I returned for a second.

The night I came back to Santa Cruz after seeing my dad for the last time the evening before, I stood motionless in the cookie aisle at Shopper's Corner, weighing the possibility of buying an entire package of semi-gourmet cookies just to have one. These were the cookies I used to buy singly on Pacific Avenue, the same cookies whose warehouse marked the destination of my first driving experience after my surgery. Irene G and I went to the fabled warehouse, where the cookies were sold on the honor system for half the cost of in a store. I was so amazed by the sight of them that I forgot I couldn't smell them, though later I realized that my skin tingled with the sensation of sugar coming from the ovens and the warehouse. The night before I stood in Shopper's Corner, after I said goodbye to my dad and after I picked up my niece Katie across town and took her home, my brother offered me a plate of the dinner he'd just made. I had a piece of chicken, but refused the squash in spite of my nieces' urgings to eat my vegetables. "I'll surely have some in California," I told them. Then Katie came into the dining room furtively eating M&Ms, dropping a couple into my hand when I looked up at her, thinking maybe that was what I wanted. I followed her back into the kitchen, and she offered me more, then dropped the package into a drawer full of treats. A package of Oreos sat in the middle. "That's what I want," I told her, and took one.

When I was about 8, our babysitter Monica stayed with us while our parents were away for the weekend. My dad came home inexplicably early, just as Monica and I were about to make chocolate chip cookies. She promised to stay to make them with me, even as my dad was grumbling through the kitchen in a light rage. We were all afraid of my father. I can still see Monica standing at the counter, my father to her left, her back shielding us from him, creating a kind of wall for our cookie-making sanctuary. I remember that we were concerned about the possibility that the eggs were hard-boiled, so she was shaking one by her ear to see if she could hear it sloshing about in the shell. The egg broke in her hand instead, covering the side of her face. I remember our quiet mirth, tempered by our fear that my dad would become angry (over the mess? over our fun?). I don't remember what happened next. I see only Monica standing in the kitchen, a broken egg in her hand, laughing silently with my dad's back to her.

Some twenty years later, somewhere in the 1990s I suppose, another lifetime it seemed, I visited my dad at Our House, the AIDS hospice where he volunteered answering the phones. As he gave me a tour, the women who worked there greeted him with friendly kisses and flirty jokes, raving to me about the cookies he often baked for them. Surprised -- a little relieved, a little happy, a little resentful -- I wondered at the man before me. Who had he become?

Granted, I think I already knew my dad had started baking cookies. I think by that time he had been sending me some in boxes that he seemed to have fashioned himself, covering the tops of the cookies with waxed paper. Some involved Krusteaz biscuit mix and apple slices. "Is Dad sending you cookies, too?" I asked my brother Bow. "Yes," he said, somehow understanding the real question. "They're good if you eat them."