Cookie Time

by Melanie White

"Give me twenty," my grandfather said.

"Twenty?" I asked, incredulous.

"What are you going to do with that many cookies?" my grandmother wanted to know.

"Eat them, of course."  He said matter-of-factly.

"You can't eat that many cookies," my grandmother argued.

"I'm not going to eat them all at once," he informed her.

"You should send some to the troops," she suggested.

"When I was in Vietnam, nobody sent me any cookies."

"All the more reason for us to do so," she said.

He shrugged.  Figuring that they were done with their debate, I put the form on the kitchen table next to him.

"What's this?" he asked me.

"It's the form for you to fill out," I let him know.

"I don't have my glasses.  You do it for me."

"Okay.  Which kinds of cookies do you want?"

"One of each."

"There aren't twenty kinds of cookies."

"Two of each, then."

"There are only 6 different kinds."

"Okay.  Three of some and four of others."

"Three of which ones and four of which ones?  Do you have some you like better than others?"

"I just like cookies.  You decide.  It's a good math problem for you to figure out."

"Always trying to get her to do math," my grandmother chimed in.

"Math is a life skill everybody needs to have," he informed her.

I sat at their kitchen table and tried to figure out how many of each would ultimately come out to twenty.  It turned out that I needed three packages of four of the cookies and four packages of two of the cookies.  I got him an extra of the Thin Mints and Shortbread ones because I was told that those were our best sellers.

"You need the money now?" he wanted to know as he moved to get his wallet out of his back pocket.

"No, you pay when I deliver the cookies."

 "Okay," he said.

That was the beginning of me leading my troop in cookie sales.  I went on to sell to all my relatives, to my teachers at school, to the parents of all my friends who weren't Girl Scouts, to the people at our church, to lots of people in my neighborhood, to the coworkers of my parents, and to strangers passing by the cookie table I set up outside the grocery store.

It wasn't until later that I realized that my grandparents were on a fixed income, and that this cookie order was a real struggle for them financially.  But it didn't seem like that when I delivered the cookies, and he pulled out a $100 bill to pay me.

I also remember that every time I came over, he would share cookies and milk with me.  We'd talk about multiplication tables, decimals, fractions, word problems, negative numbers, and graphs.  I've never known anybody who liked math so much.  In a way, it was good because it really motivated me to work hard in math, so I wouldn't let him down.

Unfortunately, today he let me down.  He stopped being here, and I am sitting in my grandparents' kitchen missing him so much.

My grandmother comes in and hands me a wrapped package.  "He wanted you to have this."

I know what it is before I unwrap it because of the shape and feel of it.  But I unwrap it anyway, and sure enough, it's a box of Girl Scout cookies.  He's included a note in a shaky hand:

"My favorite little shortbread,

Thanks for the sweetest time of my life. 

Love, Grandpa"

As I crumble, my grandmother's arms enfold me.