DFY and the cookies

Please enjoy this picture of my dog, offering to assist me with some of the tiny cookies I made, and burned. He likes to help.

I planned on making a boatload of cut out sugar cookies last December, the way I do every year. 

I enjoy the entire process: the dough making; the chilling; the coloring; the rolling, the cutting; the decorating.... Every year when the kids were little we did it, and now that they are grown I do it to entertain myself. 

To be honest, without the kids, this is a zen moment for yours truly to sit at a table with royal icing, sprinkles, and all kinds of shit, and I love it. 

One of the things I fail at is the follow through, if I say I'll send someone cookies. I usually don't. I'm the queen of procrastination, and cookies are best served to a recipient within a week.

Right around this time last year, with the pandemic and all the shit that the world was in, I decided I was just gonna do it. I would make AND ship cookies. Spurred on by my friend Morgan posting that she wanted someone to deliver her cookies. 

Our mutual friend Dave Yonkman replied that he too wanted some "damn cookies" delivered to him. I got their addresses, and said it's on. Let's do this cookie thing.  

Dave Yonkman, or DFY as many called him (the F meaning exactly what you think it does) was known for being a fantastic visual artist and videographer, collaborating with Guster and a lot of other bands. That's how we met. Lots of Guster fans were Dave fans, and Dave became friends with the fans, because Dave was a fan. 

The fact that Dave knew who I was, and wanted some damn cookies baked by me delivered to his face, well hell.  It made me feel magical and special and a geek. 

Dave and I had years of conversations and discussions, but strangely we never met in person. We were never at a show at the same time, but we were typical online friends. We'd see things and think of each other. We'd share memes and images. We'd check in.  

He asked me for an in for a job at a program NPR produced, asking for who to talk. I gave him names, I reached out to my own teammates who also worked on that program to give him a recommendation. He didn't get the job, and he would have been fucking amazing at it, and it disappointed me that it didn't work out.

Back to the cookies. 

I got kind of a later start than I'd intended, and thought meh - no one cares if they get them AT Christmas, right? It's about the damn cookies getting into your face. I'm mostly just doing this to send to Jess, and Morgan, and yeah, now Dave. 

People just want some damn cookies. In their face.

Then I got Covid. It knocked me on my ass (you can go back to December 2020 and January 2021 here in the blog and read all about the fun that was had). 

I ended up in the hospital and everything, and Dave messaged me to check up on me, and I apologized that the cookies were not happening any time soon.

"JFC, Christine," he wrote back, "I don't care about the fucking cookies. I am worried about you." 

Dave checked in with me daily during my 5 day hospital stay, and then when I got home. He sent me teaser videos of something he was working on (I know I'm not the only one he shared them with, but I like to think he did it to make me feel better). He wanted to know what he could do to help. He sent me jokes and more memes. He was there the whole time.

Dave passed away in January.  Right around the time when I was starting to feel a little better. Right around the time I was strong enough to at least supervise Geoff in baking the cookies. We could do a small batch, decorate them, and ship some off to Jess, and then to Morgan, and... to Dave.

When I heard the news, this wonderful and fun person, this dear friend, was gone, I was just absolutely destroyed. He was in the midst of making a documentary of Guster's Drive-In theater show in NH late in 2020 (which I didn't go to, because I followed the rules about states and quarantines, and now I regret being a rule obeyer). I thought of his son, his family, all the Gusters, all the friends, and I couldn't believe we didn't have a Dave anymore. 

This wasn't happening, this couldn't happen. But. It happened. 

I had Ziploc bags set up, his with DFY in red sharpie, waiting to be filled with cookies to be sent to him. 

I still can't believe he is gone. I can't believe I still have this ziploc bag with his name on it. 

So this year. This damn year.

This year I made up for last year and all the years past. I made about 200 cookies. Mostly cut out christmas cookies and toll house, and some "christmas crack" but it didn't come out as good as it usually does because I didn't have enough brown sugar, and it shows.

The cookies have been ready, bagged, waiting. Boxes picked out for them to get put into. I was really making amazing progress in actually getting this all done, and then last week I just fell off the get the cookies out the door wagon. I'm not at all sure why this happens to me. Everything is good to go. Ready to go. Boxed up! AWESOME! 

I could ask Geoff to do it, right? He does so much. But I remember the time I gave him a letter to mail, and he drove around with it for weeks in the car, because he didn't know you could put the letter in the blue boxes found all around town. He thought the post office had to be open in order to send a letter. Boy doesn't exactly know how the post office works, I guess. So. I didn't quite trust him to go.  

Today. I did it. I just did it. I just got back from the post office. I shipped boxes to Jess, Morgan, Amy, Molly, and my sister. I have cookies to hand deliver to our former neighbors up the street. I am going to drive cookies over to Sara & Sean and the boys. Then there is Janeen. 

Technically, after Sara & Sean I'm out of cookies but I'll make more for Janeen and her boys. 

And we'll need some here for our Christmas. So I will make a couple dozen more cookies.

As I sat in my zen, dipping trees and stars and hearts in royal icing, writing in design with gel decoration frosting, adding red M&Ms to reindeer noses, I thought of Dave. I thought how much he would love sticking these cookies in his face. I bet he'd share them with his son. Of course, he would. 

I miss you, Dave Fucking Yonkman. 

And, even though I enjoy decorating the cookies all by myself, it is indeed still very nice that Geoff wants to do it with me. As evidenced here. Enjoy all the cookie pictures. 

And happy christmas. If you didn't get cookies, let me know if you want some next year. I'll make the effort. 

Getting Ready to start....

Mid process. This took 2 days.

Drying. I got a black "writing icing" marker, and had some fun with it!

Geoff gets into it, and you can tell which ones are his, which ones are mine.

The reindeer are always a big hit, but a friend of mine said she thought those were boobs instead of eyes, and skinny chicken legs. And now I cannot unsee that.

I like doing the tiny trees. 

Smoking

 I don't smoke. I've never ever smoked. Never once, and I haven't smoked pot either. The concept of breathing in something other than air is completely alien to me. One of my big fears is drowning, and I think smoke inhalation is a step away from that so it is exceptionally unappealing to me. 

My parents smoked my whole life. My dad did quit about 28 years ago on Thanksgiving. We were home with jess, who was a little over 1 year old. There was a blizzard, and he worked for the town. His job was to go out and plow. He missed most of our visit because he was working (I can only imagine the money made for basically 30 straight hours of plowing during a holiday!) and he would come by the house to get fresh coffee. My mom would brew him up some, fill the thermos, and send him on his way. 

He told me in 24 hours he smoked four packs of cigarettes, and his chest hurt. His head hurt. He was in agony. And he looked at my kid, and said that he wouldn't see that baby graduate high school if he kept this up. So he quit cold turkey. And never started back up again. I'm still impressed with that.

My mom has quit a few months at a time over the past 30 or so years. Usually when she is sick. She has COPD so really, why bother quitting now ... right? But she would get pneumonia or bronchitis and end up in the hospital on oxygen, and wouldn't smoke for weeks and weeks, but would go back to it after a while. 

My sister has smoked forever. She said she needs to quit, it's expensive, it's bad for her, but she still smokes. 

Me, it grossed me out growing up. The smell, how it stuck to my clothing, my hair. It was disgusting. On some people, sometimes, the smell of the burned paper and tobacco lingering around them is not vile. But on me, it just hung there like stink on a monkey's butt. 

 I remember going to a youth group meeting in high school and the mom hosting the meeting took my coat and put it on the back porch. I was ashamed and embarrassed by that. She asked me (in the typical evangelical Christian loving mom way) "Christine, are you a smoker?" with this tone of judgement and arrogance. Looking down her nose at me like smoking could be the worst thing ever, and how could I ever come into her home stinking of this reek. 

"No, my parents smoke and my mom dropped me off here, so it, I guess, um.... sticks to me?" I was like 15 or 16. And it was horrible, how I felt. I've never forgotten how humiliated I felt. 

When I go back to visit, my parents have a nice porch that they sit on and my mom smokes out there. She doesn't smoke in the house. The interior of the porch is nicotine stained - the ceiling, the walls, the aluminum siding of the house. Yellow, brownish, and not the bright white it should be. My sister and I tried to clean it when my mom was in the hospital in 2017 after breaking her hip. We scrubbed, the ceiling the wall the floor, the porch furniture. We barely made a dent in it. When I was there last week I was looking at where we worked vs. where we didn't get to. The colors were almost matched up again. 

My parents will pass away. We'll inherit this trailer and this porch. And I'm hiring a professional cleaning crew to oxidize and clean this porch. If my mom passes before my dad, I'm not sure my dad can live by himself (my mom can). So I want him to have a wonderfully cleaned porch. Because he sits out there and watches TV, and all summer it is Red Sox games on his little flat screen, while he lounges in the chaise lawn chair and laughs at the games. 

So having never been a smoker, I've recently been thinking about some of the behaviours and habits surrounding this ... habit. I've been watching people smoke, they go out, they take a break from work, they share cigarettes. The art of handing someone a cigarette and then lighting it for them, with a nice lighter and not some Bic lighter with a football team logo on the side. 

There's a kind of fellowship and kindness to it when I watch that. Words are not spoken. The recipient of the cigarette and the light, they don't usually say thank you until after they pull that first drag. 

And then they have deep, important conversations about things. You can tell by their bodies. And then a joke, and there is laughter.

I think of rituals sometimes, these kinds of social agreements. As a non-smoker, I don't get to participate in these things but they are interesting to watch from a distance. 

Once, while working for a small company, several of my office mates smoked. They'd get up periodically, head outside, and do their thing. As a non-smoker, I felt I deserved a break too. But I wasn't going out there to smoke. Instead, I'd play a game on the computer for a few minutes, and stop when they came back. 

The big boss walked by, saw me, and proceeded to give me shit. I pointed out that four of my coworkers were in the parking lot, having a smoke. Me goofing off for a few minutes until they came back in, in my mind, was equivalent to them going out and talking about the Patriots game while puffing away. 

He didn't see it the same way. 

As a 30 yr old human instead of a 16 year old human like the one that felt berated by the mom at a youth group meeting, I just looked at him and said 'honestly, what's the difference, guy? Go out there and give them shit and tell them to get back to work the same way you told me to. I bet you won't.' 

I won that argument. He never gave me shit again. 

Part of me thinks about this acceptable behaviour, for people to take a break and walk away. Maybe I could have taken a break and gone for a walk around the building but games are fun. I prefer games. 

And after all, we're all just playing games with our lives sometimes, right?