Warning

In one of my favorite scenes from the tremendous movie Fallen, John Goodman's "Jonesy" spends a two o'clock hour explaining across his desk in a deserted police headquarters to Denzel Washington that his wife Delores thinks we're all here to do one thing. They wonder whether, when your time comes to do that one thing, you know. And they wonder whether your whole life is judged on the basis of what you do when confronted with that one thing.

But all of those questions are in the context of Hobbes' (Denzel Washington's) morally and theologically complicated situation. Concerning Delores, from whom the one-thing principle is drawn in the first place, Jonesy simply says, "Her one thing is lasagna."

My Delores is called Bonnie. She works in the office making cruise reservations for the ship where I bartend -- where, recently, I've completed training as a server so the cruise director can be more flexible in her schedule-making. Where, recently, I got thrown off the bar and onto the floor when another server didn't show up and we found a back-up bartender before we found a back-up server. Where, recently, I had to deal with a handicapped lady so mean that she made me cry, and after we docked and I was stripping table cloths, the captain ventured down from the wheelhouse and asked if she was gone.

When I'd finished my side work, I shuffled meekly off the vessel and into the office to see Bonnie, who always, always, has cookies made and living in a tupperware box on her desk. Over the course of my visit, I took two brownies, hugged my Bonnie and reminded her she was "a great, great lady," and decided (here is your warning) that when I am an old woman, I may not wear purple, or a red hat, but I will always be armed wherever I am (doing whatever one-thing I find I am to do) with freshly baked cookies -- for the waiters and bartenders who so uniquely and unluckily find themselves dealing, as not many of the rest of us do, with people.