For those unfamiliar, beer pong involves bouncing balls into an opponent’s beer cup, forcing that person to drink its contents. I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t spent years living on the other side of town, closer to the university, where beer pong tables crowd the front yards. At the time, my husband and I shared a property line with 27 students, the sounds of beer pong continuing late into the night and early into the morning, accompanied by thumping bass lines and occasional fights. Calling it a drinking game implies a beginning and an end. These students have adopted beer pong as a way of life.
Get the recipe: Chocolate Peanut Butter Apology Cookies
The best we could do was move to a quieter part of town, which we did at great expense. And now here’s this guy, dropping off a brand new beer pong table in full view of my new kitchen window.
I come from a long line of angry people and I always hoped that I would be the one to change. I’m going to therapy. I meditate. I journal, bathe in the forest, and smudge. These have softened the rage I inherited, but it is still there, like lava boiling inside a dormant volcano.
Sometimes when a deep breath isn’t enough, the lava overflows and I say something I regret. The best way I know to repair the damage is to eat. I offered gallons of butternut squash soup, homemade baguettes, chewy caramels, and jugs of orange juice squeezed from the fruit of our garden tree. I’ve seen how a simple gift like a loaf of banana bread or a piece of brie can open the door to a hurting heart, even if it’s just a little.
Of course, I’d rather not hurt anyone in the first place. Yet anger remains the most exhilarating and addictive substance I have ever known. And when I saw that beer pong table, the memories of drunk, loud, entitled students triggered anger so great in me that it overshadowed a truth I took to be obvious: that all the neighbors are created equal – at least in theory. .
So I walked over to the student’s house, walked past this stupid table, knocked on the door and told him it had to go. I expected him to cower, apologize and comply. Instead, he reciprocated my rage.
“Who the hell are you?” He asked. “And what gives you the right to make such a ridiculous request?”
His contempt only infuriated me more. Profanity isn’t my first language, but you wouldn’t know it from the way I screamed. Needless to say, I surprised myself.
I felt a pull on my arm: my husband. He had seen the U-Haul and the table, and predicted I would be on the warpath. (No one knows a person’s triggers better than their spouse.) As he walked away from me, I scolded the child and told him it wasn’t over.
The rest of the day, I was boiling and furious. But the next morning, I woke up with a raging hangover, full of shame. Why didn’t other women get angry like me? Why couldn’t I hold on? Why couldn’t I choose to be happy over being right, or find a useful way to release my aggression, like butchering whole chickens or churning butter?
Why couldn’t I just live and let live?
I had asked myself these big questions of self-pity my entire life, including a few weeks before, when I offended a friend with an offhand, insensitive comment and hurt my teenage son with observations about the sad state from his room, all inside. the space of six hours. I felt like a tornado devastating the lives of others, an uncontrolled and unstoppable force of nature. I texted my therapist to ask if I was a narcissist. He reminded me that narcissists don’t question whether they’re narcissistic and suggested that instead of worrying about my diagnosis, I simply apologize to those I’ve hurt.
So I put together a batch of my large peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies, baking half a dozen to apologize to my friend and my son, and putting the remaining half dozen in the freezer, unbaked .
I hadn’t intended to save the cookie dough balls for future excuses, but damn if it wasn’t convenient to have them sitting there, waiting for things to settle. That’s the thing about frozen cookie dough balls: They’re ready when you are. The whole house fills with the intoxicating aroma of baking cookies, and all you have to do is preheat the oven and get out a baking sheet.
If that’s not grace, I don’t know what is.
I put half a dozen balls of dough on a cookie sheet and baked them until they puffed up and smelled a little caramelized. I put each cookie on a rack and began washing the hood vents, scrubbing the grout from the backsplash tiles, and doing any other task I could find before realizing that they were actually cold enough to be served and delivered. Then I walked miles across the street to the kid’s doorstep, right in front of the beer pong table that started the whole mess.
The student opened the door wearing a white T-shirt and a shell hemp necklace, his black hair shiny and wild. I presented the plate with one hand, the other pressed to my chest. I told him that the person he met yesterday – the one with the pointing finger and the incendiary vocabulary – wasn’t really me. Either way, it wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I told him how remorseful I was about my behavior.
“Could you please forgive me?” I asked.
He looked down at the plate. For one horrible moment, I imagined him slapping him from below, sending cookies across the yard and telling me to suck it. Instead, his face softened. He said the person I met at his door yesterday wasn’t him either. He was sorry too, and could we try again?
Sure, I said, handing him the plate of chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies, my hands trembling. Then he closed the door and I crossed the street, feeling like I had witnessed a miracle.
Jaime Lewis (@jaimeclewis) writes about food and drink and produces the podcast “Consumed” from her hometown of San Luis Obispo, California.
Get the recipe: Chocolate Peanut Butter Apology Cookies
