Revised this for my writing portfolio tonight and wanted to share this special story. I hope this piece makes you proud, Jan. Every holiday season I smile with a sad heart knowing you are no longer with us. I am so sorry for not being a better friend. I miss you dearly.
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Whoever thought of a funeral for a
friend in a kitchen? I’m not doing anything silly like wearing all black
or baking in silence. I do nothing
special, really, except bake.
In my dated kitchen apartment, I
lovingly gather each of the ingredients in the same order Jan listed them in
her recipe, the one she typed up for my mom on a pale pink 3x5 card fifteen
years ago:
1 CUP BUTTER FLAVOR CRISCO
1 ¾ CUPS SUGAR, DIVIDES
2 EGGS
1 TEASPOON VANILLA
1 TEASPOON NUTMEG
2 ¼ CUPS FLOUR
2 TEASPONS CREAM OF TARTER
1 TEASPOON BAKING SODA
¾ TEASPOON SALT
1 TEASPOON CINNAMON
I could correct the typos, but I don’t. The haphazard type
job embodies Jan, kind of like the time she cut herself one Thanksgiving
morning. Jan, the big sister I never had but always wanted, walked into
my mom and dad’s house that afternoon with so much gauze wrapped around her
hand it rivaled a baseball glove. “Eh,
it’s nothing,” she said.
The many ingredients for Jan’s
Snickerdoodles clutter my small kitchen counter as I read and re-read Jan’s
recipe card.
Rather than washing the dirty
scissors, I decide to open the pack of Crisco sticks with a steak knife. Come to think of it, maybe that’s how the
gauze baseball glove came to be, or maybe not. It happened too long ago
to remember, which is precisely why I hold on so desperately to something as
silly as typos in an ingredient list. Mementos, like the souvenir t-shirt
from Maui, the “Lil Sis” charm Jan gave me, and this recipe, will far outlast
my already fading memory. After all, I can’t even remember the
sound of Jan’s voice anymore.
I preheat the oven to 400 F, and combine the first batch of ingredients—Crisco,
1 ½ cups sugar, two eggs, vanilla, and all of the nutmeg. I set the mixer to medium speed just as Jan
said, but, out of habit, switch to high soon after the sets of elegant swirls
appear in my butter concoction. Upon realizing my mistake, a tinge of
guilt stabs my stomach. I quickly turn the
mixer speed back to medium before dumping in the rest of the dry
ingredients—flour, cream of “tarter,” baking soda, and salt. Someone once said, “The greatest gift you can
give another is the purity of your attention,” and I can’t even do that. I
have already failed Jan twice today, once by accidentally setting the mixer
speed to high and then by answering a text message.
As I clumsily trip over the
mangled rubber bone at my feet, I look up at the ceiling and smile. She
forgives me. Jan didn’t have a dog, but I bet money she tripped over one
of her cats in her kitchen a time or two or twelve.
Tripping, falling, crashing. You name it, Jan did it. One weekend my pseudo big sister went out
into the forests of western Pennsylvania for yet another adventure with her
mountain bike club. The usual crew
consisted of Jan, my dad, and their friends Craig, Joe, and Lance. Their
destination that day: Brockway.
Mountain laurel framed the debris-laden trail when Jan looked to clear a two-log
jump. Her front wheel, however, dropped into the gap between the logs,
and she flew over her handlebars, hitting her head.
Dropping his bike in the middle of the trail, my dad ran over to help. “Jan, Jan, are you okay?” he asked.
“What am I doing in the woods,” she replied.
“Wait, why am I in the woods?”
“You hit
your head,” Dad said. “We’re mountain
biking, remember?”
A couple of minutes later, Jan, who
most likely had a concussion, gathered her muddy bike and her senses and rode
on. No matter what, she always rode
on.
Jan’s mountain bike club dubbed her “Shark Bite” because whenever she crashed,
the teeth on her front sprocket would gash the meat of her leg.
After a long ride, the club would
often ride their bicycles off of the pier into a local lake, and then they
would proceed to dive six to eight feet to retrieve said bikes.
And this same club also let me join
the fun on their tamer days. Needing a
nickname like the rest of the crew, Jan called me “Little Shark Bite.” I
always thought it was because I shared her aversion for gracefulness. I
never knew the sprocket story until just recently. I never knew that the Snickerdoodles my
family enjoyed every Christmas were Jan’s recipe until just recently
either.
I grab a spoon from the drawer and
take a bite of the sweet-smelling dough, wondering if Jan, too, thought that
Snickerdoodles are the only cookie ever made that tastes better when
cooked. Maybe some more cinnamon sugar will help.
I debate whether or not to grease the
pan as Jan suggested in her recipe. I
trust her. It’s just that I’m afraid the cookies will stick. So I spray
some oil on my barely-used baking sheet but soon decide to wipe it off with a
paper towel.
After rolling the first dough-ball in cinnamon-sugar, I try the dough again,
but it still doesn’t taste as good as a Snickerdoodle fresh from the oven—a
sugar cookie with punch, a treat both spicy and sweet that when cooked just right
melts in your mouth.
I’m supposed to shape the dough into one inch balls before rolling them in
cinnamon-sugar, but I don’t know how big one inch is. I just eyeball it
and get thirty-one cookies, forty-one short of the seventy-two the recipe
should yield.
Oven-mitts on, I place the cookie
sheet in the oven to bake. I then set the timer on my microwave for
exactly seven minutes and decide whether golden brown or not, the cookies are
coming out. I’m surprised. Seven minutes go by relatively quickly.
Unlike Jan, I don’t have a wire rack,
so I set some aluminum foil out on the counter and let the cookies cool there
instead. In the transfer process, a
cookie breaks. Rather than piece it back together, I peek over my
shoulder and shuffle over to the kitchen sink. With my hand cupped
underneath the cookie, I take my first bite. It tastes like
Christmas.
To an auditorium of excited
children, my elementary school principal read The Polar Express.
After hearing the story, I, too, longed for a bell from Santa’s sleigh just
like the story’s protagonist. Christmas
Eve that same year, friends and family gathered at my parent’s house for their
annual Christmas Eve get-together. Jan was there. As always, she
was the first to arrive and the last to leave.
Late that night, I hung out with Mom
and Jan as they cleaned up red-and-green cocktail napkins, empty glasses, and
leftover appetizers. Christmas Eve was the only night I ever had a
bedtime, and my bedtime arrived much too soon. I wanted Jan to tuck me
in. “Please, Jan, please,” I begged.
“Of course I will,” she replied.
When Dad suggested that he tuck me
in instead, I grudgingly obliged. “Jan
and your mom are busy,” he said.
It was Christmas Eve. And I wasn’t supposed to pout, but Santa
said nothing about stalling. So I quadruple-checked my Christmas list for
any spelling mistakes and rearranged the Snickerdoodles on the plate at least
twice. You see, every year I set out
Snickerdoodles for Santa because my dad once told me they were Santa’s favorite
cookie, and I believed him. It makes sense now.
The Snickerdoodles looked so good on
that plate. I had to have one. “Can I please have a cookie?” I asked
politely.
Mom, Dad, and Jan exchanged
smiles.
“You sure can,” Jan replied.
“Mom, Dad, it’s okay, right?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Mom sighed. “But only one cookie!”
Before Jan sat down at the kitchen
table, she poured me a glass of milk in my favorite Nutcracker cup. I climbed up on her lap, and she wrapped her
arms around me. Taking my first bite, I
admired the cinnamon-sugar glistening atop the golden brown treat before
me. It looked like brown glitter, and if
you tilted your head just right it twinkled like Christmas lights. I carefully took each bite of Snickerdoodle, not
wanting to go to bed. But, eventually, I
finished. Jan kissed the top of my head
as I drank my last sip of milk.
“Thanks,” I whispered in Jan’s ear.
“Now go to bed,” she said.
I gave hugs and turned the corner to
the stairs. With The Night before
Christmas in hand, Dad followed me to my room. Once I finally
settled, he started to read.
Continuing the theme of eat, drink, and be
merry, Mom and Jan downed some box wine as they finished cleaning up the
kitchen. Maybe they ate the rest of Santa’s cookies, too. I don’t
know. I wasn’t there.
They weighed the pros and cons of attending Midnight Mass with a bit of a buzz and
finally decided to head to church. On
the way out, Jan noticed a set of bells hanging from the front door.
“Terri, watch this,” Jan said as she darted outside, bells in hand. In heels and a skirt, Jan pranced through the
waist-deep snow toward my bedroom window.
“Dad! Stop reading,” I exclaimed.
“But I’m not done yet.”
“I don’t care. Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That,” I replied and impatiently
waited for the bells to ring again.
“Don’t you want to hear the rest of
the story?” he asked.
“Not if Santa’s gonna skip our house because I’m not asleep.”
“Okay, okay,” he said as he turned out the light.
I fell asleep within seconds.
That Christmas morning I woke up to a hand-written note from Santa, who that
year was Jan, a pile of Snickerdoodle crumbs on the counter, and a silver bell
from Santa’s sleigh under the tree. It was magical, and it still kind of
is.
It doesn’t surprise me that an
adrenaline junkie like Jan would gravitate to a cookie that explodes in your
mouth. It doesn’t surprise me that she would gravitate to a cookie with
such a silly name either. Snickerdoodle. Snickerdoodle.
Snickerdoodle. The more you say it, the funnier it sounds.
Supposedly, there’s this big long history about the origin of the
Snickerdoodle. Maybe it’s the product of a silly cookie name movement in
New England. Maybe it’s named after the 19th century tall tale hero
Snickerdoodle, or maybe it’s German. Who knows? Whatever the
origins, you really can’t say Snickerdoodle without a smile, and I’m sure Jan
realized that, too. But, then, again, maybe she didn’t.
Jan Louise McCoy was born on
December 29th, 1961, just one day and twenty-seven years before me. She
worked as a pharmaceutical sales rep for some drug company, and in her
thirties, she married an alcoholic whom she eventually divorced. Jan had
brown eyes and light blonde hair, which she often wore in a stubby
ponytail. She died in Arizona on May 27th, 2010, by hanging, and is
survived by her family in Pennsylvania. She never had kids, but she did
have a few cats. And me.
As I put the cooled cookies in a
Tupperware container, I wonder if, like me, Jan didn’t regret a broken cookie
or two. I wonder if she wore flour handprints on her thighs, and if struggled
with egg cracking as I often do.
And I also wonder how she changed
after she was diagnosed with lupus, and if she took her life because she felt
too tired to fight or if she took it because she owed so much money on her
house. I wonder why no one told me this
wasn’t her first suicide attempt and exactly how many times she had
tried. I visited Jan in the hospital once as a kid. They told me it was kidney stones, but now I
wonder. I wonder if Jan knew how much I
idolized her. I wonder if she, too, kept
her half of the sister charm, and I wonder where that charm is now.
Sometimes I wish I had attended
Jan’s viewing. Sometimes I wish there was a grave to visit, but maybe
it’s better this way. To grieve Jan in any traditional way seems wrong.
I shall instead mourn my friend when I scrape my knee while hiking, when I hear
Santa’s sleigh, or when I bake her famous Snickerdoodles.
