“Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower.”

William Wordsworth

Sometimes we come face to face with our mortality. That all things will end. That the page must be turned. That the chapter ends. And that the sports trophies must go. Children who’ve long relinquished a claim to the bedrooms of their youth have made a life for themselves, and, at a minimum have created new bedrooms in their adult image. No more tiki hut and artist’s studio and posters for The Matrix and Lord of the Rings.

What remains behind are the plaques, the ribbons … the trophies. The trophies, dusty, tarnished, proclaiming mostly insignificant events, not even victories in most cases, but merely the fact of showing up for practice and contests – in the spring from March – June, but also in the fall season, August – November. Of course, when I think about it, summer swim team runs from May – July. I suppose, parents with children in ice hockey and basketball have to deal with a November – March season. And it’s my impression that soccer is ALL year long.

Trophies displayed on the shelf have too much of a physical presence, requiring a footprint that I’m now unwilling to grant.  And yet they remain as an affirmation of a parental commitment to get a child to practice and to the game on time. What I call that portion of child-rearing, the child-relocation business.

Trophies call up memories of the tight turnaround met between the end of the school day and the practice time on the other side of the county. What mother hasn’t pushed the edge of the speeding envelope so that her child wouldn’t have to run laps as punishment for a late arrival.  (A Novel Idea:  Why punish the kid?  Make the Moms/Dads do the laps.)

Trophies represent memories in some cases of games won and lost, but more than not, the moments that one’s child overcame deficits of height or speed, or fell short in skill and power. My breath gets short, my heart flutters, when I suddenly call up a moment of disaster and disappointment that my child felt and endured. A terrible moment of pain that I felt equally, a moment that I had no power to contain, fix, ameliorate, deny, or, just plain, make vanish.

Everyone who even contemplates parenting a child should get some kind of training in learning to deal with failure.  Why didn’t we learn that lesson when we were young? It’s easy to say, ah me, I wasn’t an athlete so how would I get this lesson.

Winning is so easy – we smile, we laugh, we cheer, we rejoice, we get ice cream, we get pizza, we go to Disney World.  But what to do when we fall short.  How do we help our child when they fall short? How do we deal with the anger, the tears, the sullen silence, the staring out the car window? Our hearts are breaking and the soft cocoon we’ve tried to form around our nascent butterfly has been breached.

What we do, unfortunately, is we try to make winning less important. We try to make the fact that you showed up with perfect attendance be the standard. And we give everyone a trophy. And aside from the fact that these items collect dust, is this such a good idea?

Let’s face it – the trophies are for parents. For that perfect photo op. For the moment when your child is a winner.  Once children figure out that everyone is getting a trophy and that this is the norm and not the exception, the trophy becomes devalued in their eyes. For this to be a coveted treasure it must be a unique, special, and discrete representation of the moment. Which it is not.

And now, years later, the evidence that Mom and Dad did their utmost to give their child a well-rounded experiential youth must be dealt with because these dust-gatherers are living rent free in spaces that would be better used to display the Central American pottery collection.

So, sadly I pulled them off the shelves and examined each of them and remembered afternoons when the sun was falling at just that level on the horizon to trigger a migraine as I was driving toward the west to get someone to softball practice. Recalled the discovery of a fortuitous shortcut that shaved minutes off the trip to gymnastics. Smiled with pride thinking of the reception of brownies baked to feed the swimmers in the car after practice.  And, in a self-congratulatory, valedictory farewell thought of all the hours spent watching, cheering, and managing the t-ball and softball teams.

These are my trophies too.

To actually decommission these objects, I carefully pried the nameplates off with a steak knife, only once stabbing my hand in the process. The nameplates now nestle in the photo album next to that year’s team sports photo.  Two trophies were special enough that I determined a way to downsize them by removing the ostentatious center support and reattaching the figure at the top to the marble base, but those were unique and special, as they should be.

The plaques are another matter.  Plaques apparently are the unique, special, and discrete representation of a glorious moment in time which doesn’t occur until high school and beyond. Plaques will be relegated to a box someday, but they may never be relinquished to the ash heap of history. That Sportswoman of the Year plaque? That Louis B. Armstrong Jazz Band Performer of the Year plaque? Those were triumphs of skill, perseverance, practice, and will.

Those achievements are theirs alone.

“We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.”

William Wordsworth

• 

Cookies.

Cookies are one of the economical delights of the culinary world.  For the same amount of effort it takes to create a pie or a cake with frosting, one can produce a great quantity of deliciousness without a huge expenditure of ingredients or time.

Every year during the holiday season the Washington Post, in an effort to break us out of our chocolate chip cookie rut, publishes a variety of cookie recipes, perfect for sharing, and in my case, for producing a variety of holiday dessert placeholders. As in “what’s for dessert?” Answer: “Have a cookie.”

This year I tried three new recipes, two from the Washington Post and one from the New York Times. The NYT cookie was the Bacon Fat Ginger Snap. This was the least favorite cookie produced. The cookies did not spread out on the pan to produce a crisp cookie, but were rather fat and chewy and would have been well received if the taste had been more than just ordinary. Ah me.

The Butter Brickle Cookies were yummy and easy and produced a LOT of cookies. Their appearance was plainly disarming, but when popped in the mouth the impulse to have a second one was overwhelming. Frequently, a third cookie was required just to confirm their true greatness. This is a recipe that will go into the LOT OF COOKIES section of the cookie binder. (Yes, I have a binder of cookie recipes – don’t you? Why not?)

Finally, the most interesting, intriguing cookie was…the Forgotten Chocolate Cookie.  This is a meringue cookie found in Jewish delis and beloved by the author.  The ingredients are very few – egg whites, cocoa powder, flour, vanilla, powdered sugar, walnuts.  Any moderately stocked pantry has most of these ingredients and you can easily run out and get the walnuts.  You can whip this up in minutes and the recipe produces 30 cookies consistently. I know because I made them five times between December 1 and January 15. Here’s why.

The first batch did not turn out exactly right. I used a little too much powdered sugar, but even with that failing it was pretty obvious that a fourth egg white was needed. The cookies were a little too dense but had a good flavor and were somewhat chewy in the center. This was intriguing. Further exploration was needed.

The second batch with the fourth egg white added were absolutely divine. Glossy chocolate cookies, a half inch thick, with a crisp bite and then a chewy center with walnuts. They were like a really elegant brownie.  As foodie daughter described it, the flavor was marvelous but it was more about the mouth feel. No kidding. Biting into one of these was a distinct pleasure.

Of course, I had to try to guild the lily. Could these be made rum-flavored?  Made a third batch with a tablespoon of rum. No, they could not be made rum-flavored and the vanilla flavoring was missed.

Fourth batch. This was the worst batch of cookies ever. In a misbegotten effort to turn these delightful cookies into something like a turtle (you know that chocolate covered caramel pecan delight) I substituted caramel bits instead of walnuts. Well while the caramel did melt, it didn’t melt into a sticky filling. With each successive mastication the cookie formed an ever-sturdier glob in one’s mouth. The glob wasn’t so solid that it couldn’t ultimately be chewed and swallowed, but it did constitute something of a choking hazard. This batch was nothing short of unpleasant. Mouth feel was out the window. Cookies went in the trash. I really can’t stress how awful they were.

To wash the taste of that terrible experiment out of my mouth and mind, I made a fifth batch for a group of friends who came over for lunch. Everyone loved them. Everyone asked for the recipe. Everyone except for the one person who had already saved the Washington Post cookie section.

Click here to get to the Washington Post recipe for the Forgotten Chocolate Cookie, forgotten no more and universally loved. Click here for the Butter Brickle Cookie which is pretty darn delicious.

No link will be provided for the NYT Bacon Fat Ginger Snap cookie. That needs more research and development. But I’m optimistic.

January 2020