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A friend sent me an email a few days ago, asking if I was okay because my recent columns had a “dark tinge” and he wondered what was up.
It is true that I have been irate and have been complaining mainly about poor service, callous politicians and the gloomy state of the world. I’d decided to switch off those subjects for a bit, and then I came across this piece I had written, but don’t think was ever published.
I’d like to share it. So here goes.
Somewhere in the middle of the Christmas season when your kitchen carries more than its usual burden of delicacies that are not delicate to the system at all; somewhere on the periphery of that hotbed of reckless indulgence, I lay reading one night.
Contentedly, I might offer. Sated, I might add; though that turned out to be a weakly defended position.
At 10.30 there was a stirring. A distraction. Perhaps I could just have a nibble of a cookie; one with pecans and chocolate. Just one.
I wrestled the idea to its knees. I’d been very good at avoiding seasonal indulgences. One step into the kitchen, and all would be lost.
When it comes to late-night snacking, there is no middle ground. We know too well it is all or nothing.
I went back to my new book, but soon the stirrings became rumblings.
Before I knew it, I was standing in front of the refrigerator, with no other resolve but to be sneakily quiet. The door to my daughter’s room was directly opposite and although I could tell her lights were turned off, one never knew with teenagers.
I picked up the package and got it open fairly quietly, but the plastic tray wedged snugly inside needed to be pulled out, and it made the loudest crackle you could imagine.
I held my breath and yanked; out fell two cookies on the countertop. Oh well, I was just going to have to eat one more than I had planned.
So what if I had sworn I’d only have one? Fate had intervened. The real sin, I reasoned, was eating them in bed.
Maybe half an hour passed in a sort of contented high. The sugar rush had lifted me but now the senses were dulling down. The beguiling voice came again. Maybe one more. Just one.
You already had two, how much more can one hurt? It’s Christmas, for goodness sake!
This time I walked briskly and purposefully, imagining myself about to start laps around the Aranjuez Savannah. Clearly, one had to have a return strategy.
The cookie wouldn’t come out of the package without a fight. I had to put some real effort into it, which meant quite a bit of crackling packaging sounds before it was finally in my mouth. Before I could bite properly, a voice came, loud and admonishing out of the silence. One word. My name.
You know how parents have a way of abbreviating the names they themselves gave you after searching for all kinds of meaningful and mellifluous words? They go through all that trouble and then they become the ones who never address you by it, unless you’re in trouble.
Well, that was how my name rang out. The uncut version, the one I got as an innocent newborn. I froze; cookie still clamped between lips and teeth, hoping the silence would either absolve or dissolve me.
“I can hear you out there, you know. I heard you the first time, and I heard you making all that noise the second time. What are you eating at this hour?”
I fled to my room.
If she had addressed me as mum, I might have stayed and offered some lame story, but the sound of my name in such an eerie rendition of my mother’s version startled me as if my hand had been caught in a cookie jar.
(Courtesy Healthy Living, Healthy Lifting)
I thought I had learned a useful lesson for the future. Rather than suffering guilt from being caught breaking my own rules of engagement, I adopted a new system.
I bought a cookie jar, one with a nice quiet simple screw-on lid, and I stocked it and stashed it in the dresser drawer in my bedroom, right next to the gym shorts.
Looking back at what I had written maybe 15 years ago, it struck me that although I now live alone (and unsupervised) and I no longer have to be stealthy, nightfall still draws out the impulse to peck.
It made me acknowledge that no matter how disciplined I try to be when it comes to pecking at night, as long as the snacks are in the house, they will issue their Siren calls and I will respond. That’s why I deliberately keep a snack-free environment.
On rare occasions I will indulge, but generally, I don’t buy those dangerous packages.
In fact, that was the beginning of a different culture for me. I began making my own snacks; things I could create to suit my tastes but without the added sugars and other messy stuff.
It’s easy for me. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, except maybe for chocolate. I prefer savoury delicacies, and I love to experiment with our local fare to concoct them.
I know exactly what I am consuming; sometimes I just don’t know when to stop.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
