Sugar Cookie

I have been searching for the perfect sugar cookie for many years now. I have found recipes and tried them and sampled the baking of many others. I have looked far and wide, seeking out the best bakeries. I have even found and used the best ingredients for my own, like real vanilla. For a while I thought the key was a pinch of nutmeg. It has been a hard and demanding task, but I am not going to give up. I started this because I remember a cookie from when I was growing up. When we were kids, after Dad took us to church, we would stop at the Quaker Dairy a couple blocks away. We would get two bottles of milk, glass bottles—this was from before plastic cartons—of skim milk in a metal wire carrier, so skim that it looked kinda blue and you could almost see through it, and bread they would slice right there in the store. And a sugar cookie. I still remember how they tasted. They were perfect and I have not tasted anything like them until I had Margaret’s cookies.
Last time I was in my home town, I saw a building, the Quaker Bakery. I stopped with great joy and found out that it was the corporate office, not a retail store. Also they make hamburger buns now. I am sure they are good buns. Things are different now. Time moves on. Every now and then I begin to wonder if the cookies were that great or whether my memory of them is better than they actually were. The present can be a disappointment, if we cling too tightly to what the past was like. My disappointment was short-lived. I would not want to return to those days just for a sugar cookie. Things are lost and things are gained. I have things now that I did not even dream of as a kid. The computer that is so important to work was not available then. Now I can even send mail to friends across the country without a postage stamp. Many of us carry phones in our pockets. The modern world has brought many valuable things. Nostalgia for the past can keep us from seeing what we do have.
We are that way in many of our churches. We remember the way things used to be and more than that, we remember the way we used to be back then. Things nowadays might not please us like our memories do. We might face many challenges now. The problem with the past, though, is that it is the past. We can remember it as we want to and that can give us great comfort, but we do not live in the past, we live in the present. The past, our past, will never return. To manage the challenges of the present, we have to live in the present. And we might miss new possibilities by looking only at what was and not thinking of what life could be.