The Elegance of Cream Soda & a Pink Cookie

In the darkest moments in life, I hope we’re able to find moments of satisfaction and yes, even possibly joy. I found that a pink cookie and a can of red cream soda could make a few moments better even when I was recovering from a major brain injury as a child, in a wheelchair, without even being able to express in words why those moments were so important to me. I hope we all have our pink cookies to lighten the load of hard times.

It’s amazing how simple life becomes when we’re in the hospital as kids. I have some personal experience with that. When I say simple, I definitely don’t mean easy. In some ways hospital stays for kids are harder than they are on adults because adults at least have a fairly good understanding of what will and is happening to them. Kids often don’t have that luxury. So they might be extreme pain, discomfort, and fear and have no idea why.

No, what I mean by saying simple is that life gets narrowed down to just a few basics: receiving meals, therapy, maybe a visit and sleep. I had my longest stretch of inpatient care when I was nine years old. I was on a neuropediatric therapy unit in a children’s hospital close enough that family visited me almost daily, but far enough away that it took serious sacrifices. I’m so grateful for the support my siblings and parents gave me over those three months in the hospital.

But having such a simple daily routine meant that certain things help perhaps more urgency to me than any time after leaving the hospital. Receiving a custom-made t-shirt made for me by a favorite nurse. Getting a basketball from my neurosurgeon for Christmas. Having visits or sleep over parties with siblings.

And so it was with a routine that became almost a sacred ritual that my Dad and I developed over the months. For the first month and a half or so of my time in the hospital, I was relearning how to walk, so I relied on a wheelchair most of the time. My Dad would take me cruising around the hospital, and the experience was so much a part of my experience there, that even now, 30 years later, I can still remember the color of the wallpaper, and the way the evening sunlight slanted through the coated windows of the walkway between the children’s hospital and the adult hospital that was connected by a bridge about a football field in length.

My Dad would push me down the long corridor, beating my hand against the arm rest because I was also relearning how to talk. But my Dad seemed to understand perfectly that I wanted to go as fast as I could and feel the air rushing past me even if it’s climate controlled filtered hospital air rather than mountain gusts.

We’d then retract our path back to the children’s side where two vending machines stood. We would get a Fanta Red Cream soda and a Granny B’s Pink Cookie which always seemed too big and too delectable to believe I could eat it for only 50 cents. We’d then park by the window and enjoy the sugar buzz for a while while the sunlight faded.

I realize there are many ways of looking at this experience. Many who read to this point might think that this is a sad story about a boy with nothing but a cookie and a can of soda to look forward to. But, looking back, the interesting thing is that I didn’t feel picked on at all in those moments. I simply remember the sweetness of that cookie and the cool bite of that soda as being a very good thing.

It’s easy to overlay significant experiences with general emotional labels. But what I’ve come to realize is that even in those desperate times when I felt perhaps more frustration and fear than any other time in my memory, there were also times of genuine goodness—where I connected with remarkable friends and family and where simple pleasures like a cookie and a soda could make a moment vividly enjoyable in my memory. So much so that even though I haven’t actually drunk a Fanta soda or eaten a Granny B cookie in decades, when I see them in vending machines, a smile creeps across my face.

In the darkest moments in life, I hope we’re able to find moments of satisfaction and yes, even possibly joy. I found that a pink cookie and a can of red cream soda could make a few moments better even when I was recovering from a major brain injury, in a wheelchair, without even being able to express in words why those moments were so important to me. I hope we all have our pink cookies to lighten the load of hard times.