a hundred and one cookies
the day before I left for San
Francisco. They were most
ly peanut butter, but I don’t
put in chopped peanuts I
don’t like the crunchy.
There was also this celeb
ratory cake at the labora
tory. That’s where I worked.
Well, if you think about it in
a certain way it is. Upon the
cake’s white icing with sprink
les was iced in red “The Road
Not Taken.” Frost had lived
where I was going until he
was eleven, then came
almost all the way to where
I was eating that celebratory
cake in a metaphorical labor
atory filled with real laboratories
within which the most renowned
chefs had come from all over the
planet to labor. Each chef wore a
long white cotton lab coat and carried
around Bunsen burners filled with
boiling bubbly stuff. Their goal: to
find the tastiest or the healthiest or
the cheapest peanut butter that had
the cheapest peanut butter that had
ever been concocted. The irony of it all
was that it had exceeded expectations,
that some dimwitted flunky’s dumb idea
for a contest was nothing short of a rat
