The cost of baking hubris

I’ve been using my long-dead grandmother’s cookie sheets to do all my cookie-sheet-required baking for probably as long as she used them. They’re scarred and scratched and burn-stained with more than a generation of home-baked-with-love-just-like-in-the-Norman-Rockwell-paintings goodness. But they’re also gross-looking and this-can’t-be-hygienically sticky in a few places.

So in a gross floutation of my dear grandmother’s home-baked-with-love-just-like-in-the-Norman-Rockwell-paintings memory, I went out and bought some brand-new, high-tech, non-stick, nothing-like-you’d-ever-see-in-a-Norman-Rockwell-painting-which-makes-me-a-wasteful-and-ungrateful-capitalist-commie cookie sheets to replace hers, which I planed on unceremoniously leaving in our building’s Dumpster, thereby completing the break-Grandma’s-heart cycle that I started in grade school when I told her I didn’t want to take piano lessons anymore.

But one look at this side-by-side juxtaposition of old vs. new should tell you that I’m making the right decision, especially because the new cookie sheets match the toaster so well:

A second look at this side-by-side juxtaposition, though, should also tell you that the new cookie sheets—which I’ve already taken out of their packaging and washed and thereby rendered them unreturnable—are significantly wider than Grandma’s cookie sheets. Which also makes them taller when they’re stored on their side in our little baking-utensil cupboard. Which is not called a “little baking-utensil cupboard” for nothing. Because the new cookie sheets don’t fit. Which I don’t have to tell you is the cosmic equivalent of my sweet grandmother spitefully cursing my wasteful, family-tradition-disrespecting, memory-spitting-on, why-do-you-hate-Norman-Rockwell-so-much hubris from the grave.

And all I can say is this: Grandma, I love you and I still miss you. And it’s too bad you’re never going to taste how awesome your Christmas cookies turn out on my fabulous new baking sheets. Which I’ll probably have to store under the bed or in the furnace room or in the trunk of my car.