The Miracle Continues

Max has reached Red Alert and is running in circles scream-barking. I fling doggy treats in his direction hoping he will shut up. My ears bleeding I stagger to the door and see my friendly UPS man has left a box on my porch.

I carry in the box and Max sensing Something of Interest immediately quiets down. He prances ahead of me into the kitchen. This is the doggy equivalent of the person who says, "Oh, can I help you with that?  Here--right this way. Yes, let me help you," and then does nothing to help.

Holy Hot Dogs! An enormous box of COOKIES from Arran-Paterson the Scottish Cookie Company! Max must have known it was treats from his homeland! I scream-bark and run in circles around the kitchen; do a couple donkey kicks off the counter and dig into the box.

This is a dream come true.

Over cake, over ice cream, over pie, over custard, over hill, over dale, I would take a cookie any day.

I find a hand-written note:
Dear Debra, 
Please enjoy!
From all at Patersons

Oh, my God! WHAT shall I get my new Scottish friends for Christmas?

To refresh your memory: this is the company to whom I sent a complaint message. See post "It's All About the Chocolate" dated, November 2nd, 2011

Here is what they sent (All spelling is just like it is on the package and by "biscuits" they mean "cookies."):

Giant Cookies: Custard Cream; Triple Choc; Bourbon Cream; Fruity Oat. Biscuits: Apple and Cinnamon; Milk Chocolate and Orange; Chocolate Chip and Stem Ginger.  Dunking Bars: Fruit Shrewsbury, Double Choc Chip, Oat and Raisin, Choc Chip and Orange, All Butter. Then there are Orang-U-Tangys, Clotted Cream Shortbread Fingers, and Cheese and Mild Chilli Oat Bites.

As noted in my November 2nd post, many of the packages boast, "No pork, alcohol or palm oil." This conjured up an image of a pig slathered with palm oil, sunning on a beach and drinking a Mai-Tai. Well, there's none of that in these products!

I'm sure Kosher Jews appreciate no pork. No alcohol suits many people. No palm oil?

Well, it turns out that by not using palm oil, they are saving the orangutangs. Vast areas of rainforests in South East Asia are being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations and it's threatening their survival.

So I guess the more Orang-U-Tangys I eat, the better for the rainforest! And the orangutangs! Not so much for my thighs.

Wow. I can't get over a big company responding to a consumer--a foreign consumer--this way. A pre-Christmas miracle.

I'll think about sharing .  .  .

It's All About the Chocolate

You know how you have a complaint about something you buy but never really do anything about it? Or maybe you actually write to the company but never get a response, let alone a personal response? (I'm talking to you, Starbucks.)

Well, miracles do occur! There I was last month on a flight from Amsterdam to Seattle after taking an eight hour flight from Entebbe to Amsterdam. So I was a little tired. A little cranky. A little bored. A bit dissatisfied with my KLM meal, particularly the cookie onto which I had pinned all my hopes of gustatory delight and rejuvenation.

While on the plane, I wrote the cookie company a letter. I've always believed that when you complain you need to at least offer some suggestion, some kind of possible solution to the problem. I then emailed the letter when I arrived home.

I woke up this morning to their reply. I love these people.
I especially love Allan Miller their Sales and Marketing Director of Paterson Arran who not only agrees with me but promises to accept my solution and make a change immediately!

See our correspondence below. Enjoy!

Note: You will need to know that on the wrapper it reads, "Contains no palm oil, pork or alcohol."
______________________________________

Dear Paterson-Arran,

Just ate your Bronte doubly choc chip biscuits which you describe as “bursting with choc chips.” Let’s discuss your definition of “bursting.”

Mine: Dolly Parton in a 34B bikini top, Barack Obama on knowing Osama Bin Laden was dead, but having to keep quiet for a while; King Henry VIII (RIP) in thong underwear.

Yours as evidenced by your “doubly choc chip biscuit:” rocks scattered on a concrete driveway; fingernail clippings on the bathroom floor; hair pins on the floor of a car after a heavy make-out session.

In other words I’m afraid you use “bursting” when you really mean “scattered.” After a meal of chicken w/risotto, half cup salad, dinner roll, butter, Jacob’s cracker, cheese, every one of which seemed to live up to it’s hype—meaning none—we have your final biscuit as dessert and it was such a let down.

Perhaps it was the eight hour flight from Entebbe to Amsterdam. Perhaps it is the false hope I carry for abundance on the flight from Amsterdam to Seattle that makes your biscuit such a crushing disappointment to me.

It is crispy. It is crunchy. “Bursting” it is not.

My suggestion: add more chocolate chips! A biscuit such as yours should be nothing but a vehicle for chocolate chips. And I’m sure you can do this without bringing in any palm oil, pork or alcohol.

If this suggestion is not agreeable to you, perhaps you would consider a name change that is a bit more straight forward and to the point: Super Crunchy Crispy Chocolately Biscuit! Just the facts, ma’am.
Thank you for your time and attention.

Best regards,

Debra Jarvis
KLM/Delta flight #233
___________________________

Dear Debra,
You are right. Thank you so much for taking the time to write so thoughtfully and wittily. If it wasn't for the fact that I'm so sorry our biscuits disappointed you so, reading your email would have been more of a joy.
After a little reflection I see your point exactly and we'll address this immediately. For this particular product line I can't heap more choc chips in I'm afraid, but the text on the pack will change as you suggest - maybe not in time for your next flight on Delta #233 but it will change.
We do offer a wide range of other products and, by way of thank you, I'd be happy to send you some if you wish - just let me have a postal address. Maybe you could let me know if I've got some other stuff wrong!
Thanks once more.
Kind Regards,
Allan.
Allan Miller
Sales and Marketing Director
________________________________
So who knows what will really happen? For now I take joy in the personal response. Hope you experienced some vicarious joy too.

Oddly I now feel the urge for a little nibble . . . on something crunchy . . .

A Christmas Story

I was in the fourth grade when my father got the idea of putting a 12 foot aluminum Christmas tree on top his ham radio tower. My sister Lynie and I were wild with delight. "Yeah, Dad, do it, do it! Please. We'll help. It will be so-o-o neat. " My mother rolled her eyes.

Every day after school we would come home to find my dad working on Project Christmas Tree. My mother called it Project Stupidity. Lynie and I helped by putting the aluminum branches into the silver painted trunk. Spurred on by our enthusiasm for the project, Dad also decided to put a motor on the tree so that it would spin around. Then, in a moment of true genius, he installed two floodlights so that it could be seen at night.

At last the moment came to crank the tree up into the sky. "Wait," Lynie said. My dad and I looked at her expectantly. I was expecting something dopey to come out of her second grade mouth. "Ornaments," she said.

"Ornaments!" I yelled running back to the house. I knew just where my mother put those boxes of new red glass balls.

Nobody spoke as we reverently hung the balls all over the tree. I hung up the last ornament. "It's beautiful," Lynie said in whisper. She was right again. It was prettier, more wonderful, more fantastic than any tree I'd ever seen. It was alive--it shivered as the wind blew through it's aluminum needles. Finally my dad cranked it up, up into the sky.

"We have to get some distance," my dad said. "It's like looking up a flagpole at flag. You can't really see it. Let's go over to the Gemco parking lot after dinner and look at it from there." Gemco was about half a mile away as the crow flies.

I could hardly eat dinner I was so excited. My mom didn't want to come to Gemco with us--she was mad that we took her new Christmas ornaments. Lynie and I covered our eyes the way to the parking lot. We didn't want to spoil it. We got out of our Dad's van and there--up in the sky--there was the silver tree. It looked like it was floating. It was magical.

You couldn't really see the Christmas balls, but you could tell it was spinning round and round like the ballerina in my jewelry box. It was so beautiful I started crying, but managed to croak out, "Project Christmas Tree is a success!"

But not for long. Two nights after Christmas, we had a terrible storm. It rained heavily and a gale force wind came up.

The next day, and for several weeks afterward, people, known and unknown, came to our door. Usually they would hold out one of the aluminum branches and ask, "Is this yours?"

My mother would thank them, take the branch, close the door and then mutter "Stupidity!" under her breath. All the branches blew off except for two. All the ornaments were missing except for one. And that one my dad broke when he took down what was left of the tree.

Lynie and I didn't talk about it. That is, until Easter vacation when a strange man rang our doorbell. He said he lived over by Gemco. He carefully reached into the brown paper bag he was holding. "Is this yours?" he asked. He was holding one of the Christmas tree's red glass balls. But now it was actually pink. "I came across this in my garden," he said smiling.

Lynie gasped. "The Christmas ornament that turned into an Easter egg," she said. "It's a miracle." My mother thanked him, took the ornament, shut the door and didn't say a word.

Signs and Miracles

I think sunsets are miracles. And sunrises too. Even when it is cloudy in Seattle, the very fact that it gets lighter tells me the sun is out there somewhere and that seems miraculous to me. This particular pic was taken in Alaska, but sunsets are not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about miracles and signs. Of course it's possible to read something into anything, but other times it is so clear. Here are two examples.

My 23 year old friend Charlie died a couple weeks ago. I had met him fifteen months ago when he came in for treatment of his recurrent Ewing's sarcoma. He had a face like an angel and was one of the sweetest most engaging young men I've ever met. He always asked, "How are you doing?"

He received lots of chemo and finally had a stem cell transplant. He was in a coma in the ICU when his father called me and said, "Deb, Charlie is dying. His heart is giving out. If you want to come say good-bye to him, that's okay. But don't come because of me. I'm fine. All this time it's pretty much been just me and Charlie and it's seems only right that it is just the two of us at the end."

I had already said good-bye and I love you to Charlie and I knew his dad wanted to be alone with him. So I went down to our little creek where there is a water fall. And I stood there with my hands out and prayed for Charlie. I said, "Charlie, I'm sending you the sound of this rippling, rushing water and I hope you can follow that sound and find your way out. Follow this clean, refreshing, renewing water and you will be okay." I stood there praying like that for about fifteen minutes.

I went back into house and the phone rang. It was Charlie's dad. "You're the second person I'm calling," he said. "Charlie died about fifteen minutes ago."

Through my tears I told him about praying for Charlie and he said, "Well, I believe it. He probably heard you."

You could say it was a coincidence, but it was a miracle to me. But there's more.

A couple days later I called to check in and see how Charlie's dad was doing. "I have amazing story to tell you," he said.

He explained how when Charlie got a recurrence fifteen months ago, his dog, a Husky ran away. "We looked all over for that dog," he said. "We drove around and posted signs and checked the animal shelters--no sign of him.

"So my wife and I came home after making all the funeral arrangements for Charlie. And who is sitting at the front gate? His Husky dog! Fifteen months later! And I knew that it was Charlie saying, 'Dad, I'm really okay. Don't worry about me.'" It was the ultimate comfort to him.

I just don't think you can say that was a coincidence. Well, I suppose you could but then I would worry about the kind of person you are.

Me--I live in a state of perpetual wonder.