Suzy Says

John has added a bunch of links to our links page, so go on over and check ’em out. Guaranteed 100% boredom free!

Finally! Oreos Suzy style! I never did like the traditional ones, especially the mystery white goo (what is that, anyway?). But these are excEt, the lemony tartness cooling the spicy ginger. And they really are spicy. Mmm.

This reminds me of something that happened when I was about 7 years old. At that time, we lived in an old house on 5 acres of land in upstate New York, not far from Cornell, where my father taught. The land was a gift to a Revolutionary War soldier in recognition of his service. Pretty ironic that 200 years later an Englishman was living in his house.

It was summer, and I was sent to bed while it was still kind of light outside. I didn’t feel like sleeping, so I was sitting in my window seat, which looked over the fields to our nearest neighbor’s house, about half a mile away. I noticed a reddish glow in the sky, and I thought it was the carnival for some reason, even though if there were one, it would be in town, several miles in the opposite direction and invisible from our house anyway.

I called out, “There’s a funny light outside!” and my father came up the stairs to tell me to go to bed in person, one notch up from yelling up the stairs at us to go to bed. He took one look out the window and said, “Oh my God” and went running out of the house. From my window seat, I could see him running as fast as he could across the fields, and making the discovery that there was a creek between our place and our neighbor’s. Those pants were never the same after that.

I went and got my brother Jonathan, who was four years old. He brought a blanket from his bed and got the cookie jar from the kitchen. We sat together on the flagstone front steps, watching as our neighbor’s barn burned. Jonathan peacefully ate Oreos with mint filling and said, from time to time, “I’m scared”, very calmly. I have never seen mint filled Oreos again, and they don’t appear on the Nabisco website, but according to this story, I’m not making them up.

Eventually, Dad came home, smoky, muddy and sweaty. He and the neighbor had saved all the cows and horses, and the house hadn’t been touched. We didn’t get in trouble for being up, or for eating all those cookies.