Girl Scout Cookie Season
True story: My mom signed me up for Girl Scouts because they had a sliding scale payment in our area and she thought it would build character or something. I was excited because well, cookies. I knew those cookies. Melting Thin mints, buttery tagalongs, and the samaos, oh god, the samoas.
After my first meeting, the troupe leader, a woman my mom loved to describe as ” turbo smile” , sat my mom down for a one on one and asked that I not be brought back to the scouts. Why? Well, I was not down with the praying. I had gotten to the meeting, ready to whoop ass, eat cookies, and climb mountains or whatever girl scouts did, only to find that they sat in a circle and prayed and talked about Jesus.
Apparently the discussion left a foul taste in my mouth and I brought up something about god being boring and he has enough people talking about him, so can we go outside or something? I actually don’t do religious stuff (yes, i said, at six, I dont do religious stuff)
Turbo smile explained this all very causally, with a slight whiff of better than thou as those with money in the south seemed to do, but my mom couldnt help but laugh. “okay, whatever, can we just have a box of cookies and not come back?” my mom chuckled under her breath. Turbo smile said she wasnt authorized to give cookies to anyone who had such a disdain for the lord.
I’m not sure what happened next, some sort of altercation, but all I know for a fact is that my mom grabbed the last of our Piggy Wiggly stamps (for those who do not know, Piggly Wiggly is the quintessential southern grocery store and the stamps were kinda like food stamps, but only good for piggly wiggly) and allowed me to get some cookies on our last sacred stamps. I munched down whatever sugar concoction in the front seat of my mom’s beat up ford car, as she looked straight ahead, grumbling about suburban bitch moms who didn’t have to work and lived off their cheating husbands expenses. I think it tasted less sweet than usual, less like a reward and more of a reminder that Yes! We are just like everyone else! I can get you cookies too!
I cant imagine what it would be like in her shoes now, a twenty something woman living off little means with a kid who cant even survive one girl scout meeting. Maybe she was trying to outrun the fucked up childhood she had and was attempting to give me a normal one. But in the end, she didnt really give a damn and she knew people like turbo smile and the girl scout gang were all toxic anyway, blinded by their own mounting privileges, feeling it better to make judgements based on some sort of pseudo-christian moral. Just be a good person my mom would say over and over. Just be nice. Just be kind. Don’t try and justify it any other way, just be nice because you are supposed to dammit.
I think those cookies remind her of how much simple pleasures were often out of her grasp, how hard she tried to make a “normal” something or other for her kids. It’s like they permanently taste of turbo smile and the vile that was thrown my moms way for years, whether because she was “trash” or “wild” or “poor”.
I don’t know what it all meant, but I do know that even though I barely remember the incident, I know it by heart only because my mom brings it almost every time she has a glass of wine, laughing that she ever cared so much about folks like turbo smile. But those cookies are sure good, she will say, even though I know that they would never taste good to her, even though years after, she would always buy a box when the season came. Part of me thinks she did it just because we liked them, but another part of me suspects that she bought them as a way to let us have access to something she knew we could never really belong to. Maybe its over dramatic, I mean really, they are just girl scout cookies, but all I know is that every time we were presented with a new pack, she would kindly remind us, be nice. be nice to everyone.
