Time Travel

Guy came home with cookies he baked in kindergarten.  He offered me the heart shaped cookie with the chocolate chips on top.  I have tasted kindergarten cookies before, after all, Guy is my forth child, plus I don’t exactly dislike cookies.  Understandably, my enthusiasm was as high as my expectation was, namely none.  However, when your kid offers you a cookie, you take the cookie, put it in your mouth, chew, swallow, and praise.  I picked it up and prepared my speech.  “Guy”, I thought I would say, “this is a great cookie, well done! thanks for sharing it with me”.  However, the scenario came out a little different.

I put the cookie in my mouth, and my surrounding environment changed at once.  I was six years old, sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen, waiting anxiously for the new batch of cookies to come out of the oven.  I was able to smell the fresh cookies, I was able to see her wrinkled face, her house robe, her kind smile, and her green kitchen cabinets.  Instead of praising Guy’s cookie, I found myself telling him that I wished Grandma Deborah had known him.  I told him that she would have loved him as soon as she saw him.  I told him that Grandma Deborah loved all her grandchildren, but that she loved me most.

When someone talks to me about time travel, and I must admit that it didn’t happen is quite sometime, I always imagined a machine with knobs and meters, with some smoke coming out from underneath, and some future technology.  I didn’t imagine cookies.