The Cookie Lady

In which we learn that often the sweetest things come in the most confusing packages.

Poring over tomes of spy lore in the library as I do from time to time, I came upon an entry entitled "The Cookie Lady". Curious, I read on and discovered what is perhaps the best sentence ever written.

"Initially believed to [be] part of a major espionage ring in Saigon during the Vietnam War, the 'Cookie Lady' turned out to be a cookie lady."

Picture it. Saigon, 1970. A busy street corner. A sharply dressed gentleman approaches a little cart teeming with colorful cookies. He is a naval intelligence officer, ordered to investigate what his superiors fear might be a dangerous enemy agent. There have been reports that a woman who poses as a cookie seller is, in fact, passing stolen U.S. Navy documents to powerful clients. As the officer approaches the cart, the old woman looks up and smiles. They have no common language, so the man simply points to a few cookies and the woman nods. She carefully wraps his cookies and hands them to the man. As the officer looks at the little package in his hands, he realizes his cookies are wrapped in top secret coded naval documents. He looks back at the woman. She smiles widely. 

True story. 

Apparently, a Vietnamese employee working at the U.S. Navy Intelligence Office in what was at the time Saigon decided to earn a few extra dông by selling what he thought was scrap paper to the lady on the corner. Neither he nor the Cookie Lady had any idea what the documents contained. And I don't think she ever knew. The Navy dropped the investigation and years later someone leaked the story and some very important people resumed banging their heads repeatedly on their desks. I think the Cookie Lady would've loved it. 

Bánh Men, traditional Vietnamese cookies

I like to think the intelligence officer walked away shaking his head, the slightest hint of a smile breaking on his face as his popped the sugary treat into his mouth. 

Boy, would I have loved to be a fly on the wall in that debriefing meeting. All the fear, the expectation, the confusion. And then this moment of sweet, strange simplicity in the midst of war. That feeling of utter bewilderment and that slow, breaking laughter, particularly reserved for laughing at yourself. 

In life, the Cookie Lady visits all of us. She drops these confusing, discouraging or just plain embarrassing packages on our doorsteps. They can be things people say to us in passing. They can be mistakes we make that leave us feeling utterly ridiculous. And they can be things that happen in our lives that smack us in the face. Maybe you laughed at someone's name because you thought they were making it up. Maybe one of your students told you you have a lot of arm hair. Or maybe you did something stupid and got yourself hurt. (These all did, in fact, happen to--ahem--a fellow ninja in my secret order that may or may not actually, in fact, have been me).

And the Cookie Lady just cracks up. "HaHA! You weren't expecting that, were you? Just try to figure that one out."

I think in these moments we have one very important thing to learn from that Navy officer: our single greatest gift when times get tough is the ability to laugh at ourselves. The Cookie Lady helps us stay humble and if we wait and look carefully, we can always find something sweet, even in the things that are toughest to swallow. 

We always have a choice. We can rage against the confusion, send our armies out to protect our pride and egos. Or we can laugh at ourselves, unwrap the package and eat the cookie we inevitably find inside.

References:

Polmar, Norman & Thomas Allen

2004 Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage, 2nd ed. Random House Reference.