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Andrea Ihl

Last week, frozen cookie dough saved me from myself.

It all started when the new neighbor across the street backed a U-Haul truck up to his house, walked a ping-pong table down the ramp and left it on his front lawn. He is a college student, and if you live in a college town, you understand that a ping-pong table on a front lawn is not just a ping-pong table. It is a beer pong table.

For those unfamiliar, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2015/05/27/what-i-learned-playing-beer-pong-with-my-son-at-college/" target="_blank">beer pong</a> involves bouncing balls into an opponent’s cup of beer, thereby forcing that person to drink its contents. I wouldn’t know the first thing about it if I hadn’t spent years living on the other side of town, closer to the university, where beer pong tables riddle front yards. At the time, my husband and I shared a property line with a whopping 27 students, the sounds of beer pong extending late into the night and early into the morning, accompanied by thumping bass lines and the occasional fistfight. To call it a drinking game implies a beginning and end. These students embraced beer pong as a lifestyle.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/chocolate-peanut-butter-apology-cookies/" target=_blank>Get the recipe: Chocolate Peanut Butter Apology Cookies</a>

The best we could do was move to a quieter part of town, which we did at great expense. And now, here was this guy, depositing a new beer pong table within full view of my new kitchen window.

I come from a long line of angry folks, and I have always hoped that I’d be the one to change. I <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/29/anger-management-techniques/" target="_blank">go to therapy</a>. I <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/05/11/anger-release-meditation-free-audio/" target="_blank">meditate</a>. I <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/11/23/happiness-depression-journal-garone/" target="_blank">journal</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/05/17/forest-bathing-is-latest-fitness-trend-to-hit-u-s-where-yoga-was-30-years-ago/" target="_blank">forest-bathe</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/realestate/2005/01/15/housecleaning-as-spiritual-exercise/af3220bf-c0b7-4e78-8807-3de99da2f157/" target="_blank">smudge</a>. These have softened the rage I inherited, but it’s still in there, like lava bubbling inside a dormant volcano.

Occasionally, when deep breathing isn’t enough, the lava boils over and I say something I regret. The best way I know to repair the damage is with food. I’ve gifted gallons of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2020/11/07/squash-soup-recipes/" target=_blank>butternut squash soup</a>, homemade baguettes, chewy caramels and jugs of orange juice squeezed from the fruit from our backyard tree. I’ve seen the way that a simple gift, such as a loaf of banana bread or a wedge of brie, can open the door of a heart that’s hurt, even if only a little.

Of course, I’d rather not hurt anyone in the first place. Still, anger remains the most exhilarating and addictive substance I’ve ever known. And when I saw that beer pong table, the memories of drunk, loud and entitled college students tripped a wrath inside me so big, it eclipsed a truth I hold to be self-evident: that all neighbors are created equal — at least in theory.

So I walked right up to the student’s house, past that stupid table, knocked on the door and told him that it had to go. I expected him to cower, apologize and comply. Instead, he returned my rage in kind.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked. “And what gives you the right to make such a ridiculous demand?”

His defiance only infuriated me more. Profanity isn’t my mother tongue, but you wouldn’t know it from the way I yelled. Suffice it to say, I surprised myself.

I felt a tug on my arm: my husband. He’d seen the U-Haul and the table, and had predicted I’d be on the warpath. (No one knows a person’s triggers better than one’s spouse.) As he pulled me away, I snarled at the kid and told him this wasn’t over.

The rest of the day, I seethed, incensed. But the next morning, I awoke with a rage hangover, full of shame. Why didn’t other women get angry like me? Why couldn’t I keep it together? Why couldn’t I choose being happy over being right, or find some useful way to release the aggression, such as butchering whole chickens or churning butter?

I’d asked myself these broad, self-pitying questions all my life, including just weeks before, when I’d offended a friend with an insensitive offhand comment and hurt my teenage son with observations on the sad state of his bedroom, all within the span of six hours. I felt like a tornado that ripped through other people’s lives, an unchecked and unstoppable force of nature. I texted my therapist to ask whether I was a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/narcissists-are-everywhere--but-they-may-not-be-the-people-you-think-they-are/2016/10/07/175d79ee-867d-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html" target=_blank>narcissist</a>. He reminded me that narcissists don’t wonder whether they’re narcissists, and suggested that instead of worrying about my diagnosis, I just apologize to those I’ve hurt.

Peggy Cormary for The Washington Post

So I pulled together a batch of my big <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/chocolate-peanut-butter-apology-cookies/" target=_blank>peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies</a>, baking a half-dozen to beg forgiveness from my friend and son, and putting the remaining half-dozen in the freezer, unbaked.

I hadn’t intended to save the cookie dough balls for future apologies, but damned if it wasn’t handy to have them sitting there, waiting to make things right. That’s the thing about frozen cookie dough balls: They are ready whenever you are. The whole house fills with the heady aroma of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/bake-someone-happy-how-to-use-homemade-cookies-as-a-force-for-good/2016/10/28/af92416a-9bb1-11e6-9980-50913d68eacb_story.html" target=_blank>baking cookies</a>, and all you have to do is preheat the oven and get out a sheet pan.

If that isn’t grace, I don’t know what is.

I put a half-dozen dough balls on a cookie sheet and baked them just until they puffed up and smelled a little caramelized. I put each cookie on a rack and proceeded to wash the hood vents, scrub the backsplash tile grout and perform any other chore I could find before facing the fact that they were, indeed, cool enough to plate and deliver. Then I walked what felt like miles across the street to the kid’s doorstep, right past the beer pong table that started the whole mess.

The student opened the door wearing a white T-shirt and a seashell hemp necklace, his dark hair shiny and wild. I offered the plate with one hand, the other pressed to my chest. I told him that the person he met yesterday — the one with the pointing finger and incendiary vocabulary — wasn’t actually me. At least, it wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I told him how remorseful I was about my behavior.

“Would you please forgive me?” I asked.

He looked down at the plate. For one horrible moment, I pictured him slapping it from underneath, sending cookies across the yard and telling me to suck it. Instead, his face softened. He said the person I met at his door yesterday hadn’t been him, either. He was sorry, too, and could we try this again?

Of course, I said, and passed the plate of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies over, my hands shaking. Then he closed the door and I walked back across the street, feeling like I’d witnessed a miracle.

Jaime Lewis (@jaimeclewis) writes about food and drink and produces the podcast “Consumed” from her hometown of San Luis Obispo, Calif.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/chocolate-peanut-butter-apology-cookies/" target=_blank>Get the recipe: Chocolate Peanut Butter Apology Cookies</a>

Jaime Lewis

These chocolate peanut butter cookies help me ask for forgiveness

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