Find a way.
—Diana Nyad

Champion.

I briefly interrupt evening reading time to announce I’m zooming to Albertson’s for eggs for tomorrow’s scrambled egg jamboree and ask my spouse if he needs anything from the store. In the Daffy Duck brogue he utilizes when reading Quackenstein to our giggling Kindergartner, he informs me (with spittle): New client, butterscotch cookies, you bake, meant to ask, QUACK————–

r u effing kddng me, I text from the minivan because I’m not the mommy who shrieks WTH during evening reading time in her little boy’s lovely yellow and red and blue room with all the precious art he’s created taped to the walls and the train stencil I crafted above the closet and on top of the bookshelf there’s the North American box turtle in her aquarium and a family Labrador 1/2 on/1/2 off the twin bed—sensitive types all—especially the turtle—and so no: I won’t protest until pertinent parties are fast asleep, when not even explosions from the just released Star Trek Into Darkness movie will wake them. At which point I will let loose with a stern if not slightly hysterical: Pigeon crap, Spockman! Cookies? Really?

Er—or something like that.

I spend years in the Albertson’s baking aisle–enough time to grow a woman’s moustache. My Albertson’s is close by and I’m very familiar with it. When I burn my mini-muffins into stuck black crystals, where do I stomp for a new tin? That is correct. So my mind has trouble accepting that there are zero boxes of prepared butterscotch cookie mix in the baking aisle. Surely I’ve seen butterscotch mixes before? WTH, Betty Crocker! I run like Zachary Quinto in Star Trek Into Darkness (hands pumping next to the body) to the refrigerated section. If Pillsbury or its copycats sell prepared butterscotch cookie dough, Albertson’s has vetoed them. I Quinto-run to the day-old section piled on that baker’s rack by the restrooms I will never utilize. Nothing. Am I really going to have to make a trek to Ralphs? Back at the baking aisle, I snatch up a bag of butterscotch chips and squint at the recipe for butterscotch cookies on the bag. The word oatmeal swirls into focus. I have that at home! And, I realize, de-hyperventilating, everything else needed to make cookies from scratch. Plus, a bottle of chardonnay has materialized in my shopping basket.

Per Diana Nyad’s advice: I have found a way.