Tip of the hat to the Girl Scouts gathered outside stores with boxes of their annual cookies. This blog is not written for them.
Peanut butter cookies float my boat. For those with peanut sensitives, please substitute your favorite cookie variety. At the local Piggly Wiggly the store-baked cookies are delightful and at their peak for at least five or six days. Soft and buttery, one cookie has to be enough for anyone over the age of daily recess playtime.
I carried the last four cookies home near the end of their prime to surprise my husband. Unfortunately, they rested under bananas in the carrying tote. That’s the way the cookies crumbled. Four round sweets became pieces of many sizes in a sealed bag. The 1950s phrase, jokingly exchanged with my husband, stuck in my mind.
On Reality Wednesday, the day after Super Tuesday, I responded “this is the way the cookie crumbles” to a friend’s deep unhappiness about voters’ behavior. He asked if I had learned that phrase from my grandmother then suggested I use the appropriate contemporary phrase: shit happens. Which describes what many people hope to avoid during the 2024 election cycle.
Our discussion made me wonder about how U.S. English slang language transitioned from cookies crumbling to shit happens when describing something bad has happened and a person must accept the way things are. The 1950s were considered a happy time in the U.S. with the boys (and girls) returning home from war, building houses, starting families and enjoying the life that World War II sought to protect. Cookie references seem to reflect that seventy years ago kind of contented outlook.
And today’s phrase also seems to reflect the current emotion of our nation. Fearful, divided, violent, embracing the crudeness of life, watching events too large to be absorbed that must be accepted because people did die or had their lives negatively impacted. We’re not looking forward to a golden era, just trying to adjust to what now exists, and hoping for at least a plateau in our world’s disruption. For some the best times are past. For others the best times were never experienced.
These are broad painted observations. Media no longer allows people to remain ignorant of what is broken or underdeveloped in our country or how the physical environment of our world demands attention.
I ate some of the cookie pieces and one of the offending bananas. Mustn’t waste. Time to return to the heavy lifting of doing something to keep more shit from happening.
