My family lived on a military base when my father was stationed at Little Rock Air Force Base. My best friend, Bill, who lived across the street had two younger twin brothers and a stay at home mom.
This was back in the 70s when kids could play around the entire neighborhood without parental supervision. Mom often joked that if anyone had actually kidnapped me, they’d bring me back.
Occasionally, Bill and I ended up at his house. Inevitably his mom would offer me a cookie. As a little kid, I was addicted to sugar, which may have contributed to my over-the-top energy, but I still managed to be so skinny that Mom bought me size slim clothes and hemmed them because they were too big. So, any offer of sugar was readily accepted—even when I should have known better. Not that I would have understood the dangers of consuming too much sugar at such a tender age, but that this scene had repeated itself too many times with the same level of disappointment when I received a Nilla Wafer.
In my mind, then as now, Nilla Wafers aren’t cookies. They are the crust to a banana pudding. Perhaps a cheesecake crust when you forgot to buy graham crackers and didn’t want to return to the store. Had I been a snarkier child, I would have asked, “Where’s the rest of the dessert?” Yet even my sugar-addicted mind knew that wasn’t polite and may have earned me yet another Mom-administered whupping. So, I accepted the Nilla Wafer politely even though it wasn’t a real cookie like an Oreo or chocolate chip. Even those healthy cookies, peanut butter and oatmeal, would have been better than those banana-pudding-crust cookies.
So, what triggered this little trip down memory lane? I’d read an unbelievable passage in a fiction about a grown woman eating half a box of cookies, which turned out to be Nilla Wafers. As if!
I had to put the book down and start typing this rant out on my phone as I waited to get a mani pedi. Some things just can’t wait until I get home to my laptop. Plus, one of the best things about being a writer is that any moving experience becomes fodder.