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Two brats and their sweet, long-suffering mother were struggling through the grocery store one day as Brat No. 1 wailed, "Mommy, PLEEEEEEEEEEEEASE buy us some cookies!"
A total stranger noticed, as total strangers often do when sweet mothers' kids are behaving at their worst.
"Aren't they allowed to have cookies?" he asked.
Brat No. 2 yelled, "Not real ones. Just the ones she makes!"
As my mom tells the story, she was the sweet, long-suffering mother who always was baking batches of homemade cookies for her unappreciative brats for boys.
Brat No. 2 was my brother Tim. She mentioned the identity of Brat No. 1 as well, but his name slips my mind at the moment. It's not really important.
The point is, I grew up with a mom who made all manner of meals and desserts from scratch. And because of that, we kids felt like we'd been cheated.
Other kids got to feast on burgers that came from wonderful places known as McDonald's and Red Barn, and got to snack on marvelous cookies known as Oreos and Fig Newtons that came in colorful packages.
We were stuck eating homemade meals. At home. Together. Around a dining room table. No TV or anything. Just us and food Mom baked herself.
When the guy in the grocery store figured out what the real problem was and how the Brats had been so mistreated, he looked at the Brats and said, "I'll trade you places."
When the Brats grew up, they figured out that the total stranger meant it.
It seems like we spend our childhoods begging for takeout, then spend the rest of our lives in search of meals like Mom used to make.
Oh, there were those special times when I found Oreos in my Walt Disney school bus lunch pail. We kids carefully unscrewed the cookie tops and popped them in our mouths. Then we gingerly peeled away the cream centers and stacked the layers on a single cookie bottom. If our moms gave us eight Oreos, we ended up with an Oreo tower eight layers thick. (Nutrition hadn't been invented yet.)
The Nabisco company finally got around to marketing a Double Stuf Oreo in 1975. We mad cookie scientists were building Oreo Monsters a decade earlier in the lunchroom laboratory of Monroe Elementary School.
A couple weeks ago, I freed a snack-pack size of Oreos from the vending machine and built myself an Oreo stacker just like back in grade school. The Oreo-zilla was wonderful. The memory tasted better than the cookie itself.
What I didn't see in the vending machine -- what I never see -- are what we called "hat cookies," two-layer marvels Mom used to bake. Store-bought chocolate chip cookies never taste as good as the ones I was "forced" to eat 40 years ago. And "monster cookies," those glorious concoctions rolling about every sweet and salty goodness found in the kitchen into one cookie… Sigh.
As I perused the grocery store the other day, I was interrupted by two little brats begging their bedraggled mother for a package of colorful cookies "baked by elves."
"All we ever get is the stuff you bake!" they wailed.
"I'll trade you," I said.
— This "Classic Cole" column first appeared in the Tribune Chronicle in March 2011.