NOW PLAYING: Pobbies

18 June, 1999
My Pa makes the best chocolate-chip cookies in the world.

He's had a lot of practice at it, tweaking his recipe over the course of many years (with the enthusiastic assistance of a legion of "testers") until it has been perfected.

I'm not sure where the initial recipe for his cookies came from -- for all I know, it started on the back of the bag of "Tollhouse" chocolate chips, or it may have been the one that Mom used when she was the one baking the cookies -- I dunno, but I DO know that the cookies are damned good, whatever their origin!

I can't even remember the first time that my Dad made a batch of "his" cookies -- most likely I was still a young pup growing up in the wilds of northern Minnesota at the time, and didn't care where the cookies came from or who made them, as long as they were available.

And they were available to us, under the roof of the house that he built (and I mean HE built it -- not "hired a contractor to build it"), on the wonderful lot that he bought in the Minnesota woods on the shore of one of the state's 10,000 lakes that he took us fishing and hunting and boating and swimming in. He plowed the 1/4 mile driveway after the snow fell (even when it was -40° F) so we had access to it. He cut and hauled and split wood (8 cords each year -- enough to get through the long MN winters) for the furnace and fireplaces so we could be snug and warm inside it on (very) cold winter nights. He put up with (almost) all our crap, too -- and if we didn't like it, he said we could leave.

Which I almost took him up on when I was about six years old. I don't have more than a fleeting memory of the whole episode, but I was evidently unhappy with the way things were being run around the Charlson household, and said that I was outta there. I went upstairs and packed a few clothes in my suitcase (along with what I'm sure were my most priceless possessions, though I'll be damned if I can remember now what those might have been). Dad offered to drive me to the end of the road where I could begin my journey, and I accepted.

When he stopped the car, I of course decided that things were probably not quite so bad as all that and wanted to stay at home. Pa graciously took me back into the family that I wanted to run off from a short time before. He has since admitted that he didn't know what he would have done if I'd actually gotten out of the car and started walking.

Luckily, neither of us ever had to find out. Thanks a million, Pa. Happy Father's Day.

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