Chicken Soup for the Baby's Soul: Tollhouse Cookies.

My brother Jimmy and I have always been close, ever since we were babies. I guess you could say we were close even before that. You see, Jimmy and I are identical twins, and, since Dad worked on the offshore rig and Mom died giving birth to Jimmy and me, we were left alone in our playpen for most of our infancy. Neither of us learned to talk until after kindergarten, if you can believe it! That’s because Jimmy and I had little use for English—we communicated exclusively through telepathy.
Most of our time in the playpen was spent either crying in vain for our missing parents, or trying to get our little fingers into the giant cookie jar on the other side of our one-room shack. There wasn’t anything Jimmy wanted more in the whole wide world than to teethe on one of those stale Tollhouse cookies. Looking back on it, now that I can eat as many Tollhouse cookies as I please, the whole mess seems foolish. But, at the time, that jar presented the Swanson twins with a dilly of a pickle!
The first step, I figured, was to learn how to walk. After all, we couldn’t get to the other side of our one-room shack by magic (telepathy is one thing; telekinesis is another). “Slow down,” Jimmy thought to me. “We need to learn how to crawl first, Willy!” Jimmy made a good point and we started off practicing our crawl. Even though Jimmy learned how to crawl quickly, I laid silently in the corner for several days before finally figuring out how to pull my wriggling, undernourished, naked body across the dirt floor.
Once we learned to crawl, we couldn’t get enough of it- I guess you could say we were “hooked” on crawling. We would race to see who could crawl faster- Jimmy always won, unless he collapsed from hunger pangs. In said scenario, and, believe me, it wasn’t uncommon, we’d call it a draw. But I was a focused little guy, so I suggested we try our hands at walking. Jimmy was a little reluctant at first, but I reminded him of the cookie jar on the other side of our one-room shack and immediately his big blue eyes lit up.
It was easy for me; I was able to walk with the best of them the first time I tried. But it wasn’t so easy for Jimmy. After falling on his face a few hundred times one day, Jimmy gave up. He just laid down and started crawling frantically around the playpen. I grew dizzy watching him from my perch beside the cookie jar. “This walking stuff is too hard,” he thought to me. “I don’t need to know how to walk. Crawling is good enough for this baby.” I tried to convince him that he might get to the cookie jar on the other side of our one-room shack, but that there would be other cookie jars in other one-room shacks that he would never be able to get to. He refused to listen and became enamored--dare I say obsessed--with crawling.
Those years were hard on our relationship- I would come home from my evening stroll each night to find Jimmy crying in the corner with a distended stomach and a vacant look in his eye. I was often on time for school and excelled academically, while Jimmy would crawl in huffing and puffing well after the pleasant ringing of the recess bell rang. Eventually, Principal Stern eventually asked him to leave school because he was creeping everybody out, while I went on to found and captain my high school’s competitive walking team.
School went by lickety-split and, before I knew it, it was all over. Dad took some time off from the rig and came to my high school graduation. Jimmy came as well, although to get there in time, he had to leave our shack well before I returned from prom the night before. When I got my diploma, Dad was busy photographing another boy he mistook for me, but Jimmy wasn’t. Jimmy knew who Hank was and he knew who I was, and what's more, he knew that we were not the same person. There are a lot of things Dad could probably have learned from Jimmy on that day, if only he knew who he was.
I will remember that moment for the rest of my days. Jimmy crawled up to me, with those big tears welling up in his soft blue eyes, and took my hand. “I’m proud of you, brother,” Jimmy thought to me. “You’re gonna get to go work on the rig, while I’m stuck here in Thomas Ferry, Alaska. You’re going places, Will. Sure, I can crawl better than you. But where did crawling ever get me? No where, that's where. Just think of all the Tollhouse cookies that are just waiting for you in those cookie jars.” A single tear ran down his quivering cheek. I was touched so deeply by what Jimmy thought, that I handed him the cookie jar I always kept in my hip pocket-my lucky cookie jar, the very same cookie jar we had groped for as babes. Jimmy was speechless (as usual). He looked at the jar, hesitated and then he just looked up at me with those shining blue eyes of his and smiled. “I’m not gonna need that on the rig, Jimmy; there are probably lots of cookie jars on the rig," I said. "Go on--you take it.”
Jimmy screwed up his face, like he does when he's thinking to himself. Then he gave the cookie jar back to me. “I don’t deserve that jar, Will,” he thought. “I’m a quitter. But I do have a favor to ask you: I want you to share my story with all babies, lest they ever think of quitting. No one ever got nowhere from quitting.” “I’ll do my best, Jimmy,” I said as I looked off wistfully into the bleak Alaskan distance, opened my lucky cookie jar and ate a delicious Tollhouse cookie. “I’ll do my best.”



from the Yale Record