What Can Words Do?

Changing lives one moment at a time

Hello, Time Stoppers!

What has changed inside of you this week?

I see stories in
abstract blobs of purple paint
smeared on the canvas

Am I a Baker Now?

I am not a foodie, I’m a fatty. For the past eleven years, I’ve been the one that makes most of the meals in our family. I haven’t approached this task with any great enthusiasm—nor with any particular dread. I’m a practical cook. We all need to eat, and I would rather my family did not eat junk food for meals. I learned all the basic cooking skills as a kid while taking care of my three younger siblings, and as a young adult who was too broke to eat out much.

Time is always short because I’m a work-from-home father. Our crock pot, my crock pot, is my secret weapon. With a few minutes of morning prep, that evening we can have anything from ribs to stew to spaghetti casserole. My wife collects cookbooks, I don’t use them. I mostly go with what I know, supplemented with quick web searches.

My mom was a baker. She was the cookie queen. Her Betty Crocker Cookie Book was like a sorcerer’s spell book. With it, Sandy could bake anything from whatever we had in the house.

When I was 17, I baked batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies for my friends that we then hand-delivered to young women we might have had crushes on.

But I stopped baking for pleasure a long time ago. I don’t have time.

At least that’s what I told myself. I’m a lot of things. I’m a decent dad and husband. I’m a poet, writer, and illustrator. I am not a cook or a baker.

Or maybe I am.

Amie McGraham

has an excellent newsletter called

the micro mashup.

She does interviews and shares creative non-fiction essays that are all 100 words or less. I'm in love with her prose. When she started a second newsletter,

Cook & Tell

, it was a no-brainer to sign-up, even though I knew I would never make any of the recipes.

I just wanted to read more of her work.

But Amie’s words slowly changed me. Cook & Tell is both a wonderful curation of her mother’s recipes from her snail mail newsletter and a memoir of a daughter who misses her mom.

Amie’s most recent issue was called Let’s Pretend. It’s poignant, and it pushed a button inside of my soul. I knew I had to make those cookies, they were quite similar to some cookies my mom used to make.

I was going to bake with my two older daughters, a little kitchen bonding time. But events conspired against that. K drove Becky down to the hospital because Becky’s dad had a stroke yesterday. E spent the afternoon watching her younger cousins so their dad, Becky’s brother, could also be at the hospital.

That left me to make the Peanut Butter Grahms by myself.

They turned out incredible. With a single bite, I was transported back to the cramped kitchen in our Milpitas, California split-level home. I was back from school and snacking on a batch of Mom’s deluxe peanut butter chocolate chip cookies with the little cross-hatch pattern on the top.

After the cookies were done, I folded up the recipe I had printed out and slid it in between a couple of Becky’s cookbooks. I read Amie’s post again while drying my eyes. In the late afternoon and early evening, as everyone return home, each person passed through the kitchen and pulled a cookie or two off the cooling rack. A small, sweet respite from the awful day.

In those moments as I watched Becky and our kids smile as they munched their cookies, I became a baker again. It’s what Mom would’ve done.

Artist Note

Today’s comic is a departure from my usual subject matter. I have a whole series of what I call color haiku, and I wanted to see how this poem would look as an illustration. It’s been a while since I’ve done an abstract comic, and it was fun to mix things up a bit.

I do highly recommend subscribing to both of the newsletters that

Amie McGraham

works so hard on. I can also vouch for the joy that a good cookie can bring to even the toughest day.

Be the poetry you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason