Dr. Jedidiah's Diary Episode #86: Ted who should have become a Baker, not a Shooter

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life…. or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

 

Episode #86. Ted who should have become a Baker, not a Shooter

One of the most vivid flashbacks to my childhood has always been coming with the freshly backed peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies in my mind. Whenever my friends came over to my house, my mother baked a bunch of nutty and sweet cookies for me and my buddies. The occasions for our meet-ups at home did not matter for my mom to take out her baking sheets and a huge mixing bowl. While the heavenly and flavorful aroma of cookies was wafting all around mom’s kitchen and filling the entire house, my friends and I were shooting hoops, reading cartoons, watching horror flicks, giggling over the topic of girls – because boys, including myself, were inaptly describing girls as classmates with cooties in those days – and doing homework together. 

Such sweet memories of the “I-would-never-trade for-the world” kind of cookies turned into somewhat tenebrific and bilious one since I lost one of those tight buddies named Ted who’d come to my house. Ted was the one who enjoyed my mom’s cookies the most. Mom liked to see him pacing around in the kitchen and asking “Mrs. J, can I have your cookies now? When are they ready to taste?” Then, mom smiled and said “Just wait another 10 minutes. They’ll all be yours, Ted.”

 

When we turned 17 years old, Ted’s father often took us all to the outdoor shooting range near his castle-like mansion. Some of us found the masculine sports of shooting very attractive and enjoyed the time to the fullest like a gallant soldier. But it was not right up Ted’s or my alley, because we were not belligerent lads at all. Ted would apologize to me for the unwanted pastime at the shooting range by saying “Please, excuse my dad’s incurable Thalassophobia. He gets bored if a week passes by without the gunshot noise around him. Just hate it each time he takes me out to this range, but can’t help it. He never listens to me although he knows that I don’t like to have a gun in my hands.” Ted’s eyes would tell me that he’d love to sit back in the cozy nook of my mom’s kitchen, munching on her one-of-a-kind home-baked cookies. When he said his dream job is to bake all different kinds of cookies and become a well-known patisserie chef one day, Ted’s father was furious. He wanted his son to be a politician who would be powerful enough to challenge gun control laws in major cities throughout the U.S. As the then head of the NRA, Ted’s father was adamant that his son should be the most empowered figure in this society in every way. Seeing Ted wearing a baker’s hat with a kneading roll in his hand instead of a gun was not even a joke to his father. Admitting the difference between his son and himself was a nonstarter.

 

It was a brutally chilly winter night that I heard about Ted’s suicide. At Ted’s funeral, I did not cry. I was full of unutterable emotions. It was not just a feeling of sorrow or despair. My friends and I were speechless when we were told that Ted shot himself with his father’s favorite pocket pistol in the tatterdemalion shooting range where he was so reluctantly joining his father’s shooting spree. I thought over and over again to imagine what came to Ted’s mind on that painfully cold winter night out there in the place that he hated the most. ‘Was he thinking about those silly days when he was savoring my mom’s cookies? Was he visualizing himself in his own bakery, patting a dough and buttering the sheets?’ The cookies that I baked with my mom’s recipe were the only gift for Ted at his funeral. The regular gang of friends who used to come to my house said nothing but kept eating the cookies I brought. The look on their faces and mine at that moment must be like ‘this cookie tastes like dust.’

 

Expressions

    1.  to waft: to pass or cause to pass easily or gently through or as if through the air

    2.   to shoot hoops: to play basketball, especially casually by simply shooting and not engaging in a game

    3.   inaptly: not suited to circumstances: improperly, inappropriately, incongruously

    4.  cooties: a children's term for an imaginary germ or repellent quality transmitted by obnoxious or slovenly people

    5.  tenebrific: dark, gloomy

    6.   bilious: spiteful/ bad-tempered

    7.  gallant: brave/ heroic/ courageous

    8.  right up one’s alley: in one's specialty, to one's taste

    9.  belligerent: hostile or aggressive/ war-like

   10. thalassophobia: fear of bordom

   11. NRA: National Rifle Association

   12.   adamant: refusing to be persuaded or to change one's mind

   13. nonstarter: a person, plan, or idea that has no chance of succeeding or being effective

   14. tatterdemalion: unkempt