RAISINS

I cannot remember what the Fortune Cookie journal prompt was on Saturday, but it had something to do with baking. It led me to write a story of Chris and I in my own bakeshop that specialized in cookies. The story began with Chris asking me what’s the worst thing you can put in a cookie and my response was immediate and swift. Raisins. This prompted Chris to start throwing out ideas for terrible cookies. With each idea, I argued that his ideas could actually work. Brussel sprouts could be caramelized with honey or shaved and treated like a carrot for carrot cake style cookie. Sauerkraut could be the ‘salt’ in sea salt caramel style cookie. Black licorice could be mixed with orange. I kept a notebook of cookie ideas and I paused our discussion to write down of these ideas. We laughed at his failed attempt to convince me that there was something worse than raisins.

Later in the day while running errands, I overheard a young dad trying to wrangle his toddler. “No son, you can’t have that tractor. We need to go find the raisins.” It took all of my restraint to not scoop the little one up and ask him if he was safe and do I need to call child protective services. Clearly he was being tortured…with raisins. Then I wondered if I’d written a short story to conjure raisins because they just kept showing up in random ways, sneaking into my day like my bad memories. The bad memories are those moments of regret that I keep buried in the back. Occasionally that box falls over and spills out, revealing moments when I was unkind and intolerant of Dad or that early time in my life when I was angry about J’s existence. Every fight and argument with Chris (the handful of them) gets rehashed and played over. And don’t think for a minute that this box is only for the dead. Nope pretty much every negative interaction comes up and gets picked apart. How could have I handled that better? I should have said this instead of that. I should have bought those groceries for that woman. I could’ve should’ve.

No matter how many times I try to pick them out like I do with raisins in a cookie, the bad memories never go away. They are also a bit of a surprise because they show up at random times usually when I’m feeling good, safe and secure. That’s my brain yelling out a warrior cry of ‘SABOTAGE!’. I am hard wired for self-sabotage. I will always be picking the raisins out of cookies and granola bars because that one time in high school, I said something mean about another girl in an attempt to fit in with another group of girls and I will need to revisit those actions every five or ten years. There are for sure to be raisins in that slice of carrot cake because of that one time I yelled at Chris for buying a metal desk. [To be fair, I was 100% right about that, but I didn’t need to yell at him. He knew he was wrong.] These bad memories pop up so that I can rehash them over and over again in an attempt to make them good memories or just not so bad ones. But they’re too much like raisins and I hate raisins.

I truly hate raisins.

It’s funny to me that I could take Brussel sprouts and sauerkraut and make them into a fancy cookie, but raisins are still the worst thing you could to do to a cookie. If I have the imagination to dream up a black licorice and orange cookie, than surely I have the imagination to make something good with raisins. I can take the worst thing you could put into a cookie and at the very least, make it interesting. What if you took raisins and apricots and blended them into a paste. Then you used that paste as filling in a vanilla oatmeal sandwich cookie?

That might not be so bad.