cookies

The problem and the beauty with New York is that it is always whatever day you will make it and never the today that exists in the newspapers.

Point in fact. About two weeks ago when it was still a summer night in the hot and sticky apple, two friends and I were walking down the street in Hells Kitchen eating chocolate chip cookies. The cookies had been purchased earlier at from the Big Booty Bakery in Chelsea and had been saved as special post-dinner treats. B had insisted that I make the trip downtown for the very purpose of experiencing these truly remarkable cookies, and being a bit of a sugar addict, I could not refuse.

Biting into their soft and buttery edges, I was sold – these were the best cookies I’d had in a long time. Maybe even better than the cookies from the Overland Café in LA. But what is more amazing than the deliciousness of the cookies themselves is the reaction they garnered from passers-by. A man with buzzed gray hair in his late 40’s walking out of a bodega nearly jumped in front of us demanding to know where we got these cookies. They were huge, their chocolate chunks still glistening. His 15 year old daughter would kill for one of these cookies. She was obsessed. But explaining that the cookies were not to be had within walking distance, the man promptly changed the subject and started telling us Bush jokes that supposedly his daughter had told him. However, as it became more and more apparent that the existence of said-daughter was highly unlikely given the content of the jokes, B cracked a few dead baby jokes and we moved on.

How bizarre to be stopped on the street because of a cookie, we remarked! Only in New York, we said.

But then, not even two blocks later, still nibbling at cookies that might as well be called “as big as your head,” we were stopped by two young African American women pushing strollers asking where we got those cookies! Explaining yet again that the cookies were from the Big Booty Bakery in Chelsea (we felt like sales people) the girls contemplated whether they might make the trek. We talked about the relative merits of the cookie compared to the distance, and one of the girls joked that if she knew me better, she’d ask for a bite. And since I figured we now knew each other as well as anybody, I broke her off a piece and we went along on our merry ways.

I went home smiling. Feeling like this city was my city and that we were one big happy family. Because in New York we live for these cookies. These walks. These experiences.

Meanwhile, out in the real world Sarah Palin was getting away with murder in the media and the stock market was teetering on the brink of a precipice that everyone blithely denied. Real people in real places lost their jobs. And I was happy about a cookie. Feeling that the cookie was all the world really needed. Oddly reassured and discomfited that sometimes the cookie is all that really matters.