The Making Of: A Tradition In Tabby
How answering a call for submissions led me to think about cookies, legacy, and how short human memory really is.
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Reading time: About 5 minutes
My friends, I am so happy to share this cozy winter holiday story with you. 🎄In response to the submission theme of “generations,” I started thinking about things we pass down in our families. My brain stuck on recipes as one of the most common “objects” we share generationally. But this story needed to be a speculative story. How will we pass down information in the future? Old cookbooks and stained recipe cards aren’t entirely things of the past, but so often the things we want to make sure we keep we make digital.
The question then becomes: are digital things any more durable than paper? If we save a document on a hard drive the computer will help us find it again, sure. But what if we loose the hard drive? Or it breaks, or it all gets erased because Windows got screwed up again? What happens when the recipe software we used for a decade becomes incompatible with the new MacOS? Or we change phones and don’t have time to transfer everything over?
This line of thought also made me think about how tenuous my links to my family’s past really are. I knew one great-grandmother growing up, but I never spent a lot of time with her. I don’t know anything about what her life was like, I don’t know any of her stories or wishes or dreams or failures or triumphs. I know a little bit more about my grandparents, but I was so self-centered when I was young, I only really know facts about how they lived before I knew them in their retirement. I know a lot more about my parents’ stories, because I was there to live a bunch of them. The story of my family is pretty opaque beyond my lived experience, which only goes about two generations back. The rest is left to Ancestry.com and a bunch of government and church documents we try to make some meaning out of.
So it’s not just the durability of the format that’s a problem in remembering our past, it’s also how the media is kept. Institutions are great at keeping information safe—that’s why Ancestry.com has access to all those birth and death and marriage records. Human memory is terrible at best. And we are living in an age where individuals are producing huge databases of content about their lives as they live them. How could we hang on to all this information, how could we contextualize it so that it’s useful in any given moment, how could we keep it safe through millennia?
Robots!
At least, that’s what this writer’s brain came up with. The AI that is a robot’s “personality” would have no trouble contextualizing the information for descendants. And information could be stored in the robot’s / android’s body, which could be made incredibly tough to withstand the wear and tear of centuries.
When I thought about what this machine would look like, my brain immediately jumped to “cozy robot cat!” You can make of that what you will. 😊
My initial idea was to have a young girl run away for whatever reason, and for the family’s robot cat to choose to go with her. I worked out some ideas for this story, but it felt wrong. Here’s a bit of my brainstorming train of thought:
Why do we even have a robot cat?? yup, this is the important one.
i would want my robot cat to tell me stories about my great grandmother. or my mother. i would want to know how grandma kept in touch with her friends, if she ever felt ugly, what she ate every day, what made her happy. if she ever had to make choices like mine, and what did she choose? how did she put up with great-grandpa’s snoring? did she follow her dreams?
i am thinking about this robot cat and at the same time I am completely freaking out about getting back in touch with people I love and miss, looking up apps to help me stay connected, trying to figure out how to stay connected not on social media, with reminders and crazy things. they are connected.
my initial thought was to write a cozy story. I think I want to go back to that. maybe making cookies?
I knew I had to make the story a single moment in time. Cookies and a robot cat, generations that reach back and forward in time, and a knowledge that the stories selected for the submission call would be used near the holidays.
When I was a kid, my mom made chocolate chip cookies for Christmas. They were the best chocolate chip cookies you’ve ever had. She’d make batches and batches of them every year—for me to take to Christmas parties, for neighbors who demanded them, for my dad to take to work for his coworkers who also wanted them. We didn’t have a stand mixer so they were very labor-intensive, and I would help her make them. She would get out her 1970s copy of the Betty Crocker Cookbook to check the ingredients—the page became more and more bedraggled each year—and then we would start to bake. Everyone used to ask her for the recipe, and she freely gave it out, but it never came out the same for anyone else. Her best friend came over one year and watched us make a batch to try to figure out the secret of how Mom was making them different from the recipe, but I don’t think she ever did. They were just magically perfect. And I made them enough times with her that I, too, can recreate the cookie magic.
I haven’t made them in years—the key to their chewy perfection was margarine AND vegetable shortening—but the joy of cookies in December is a strong memory for me, so I thought it would make a good base to build robot cats on colony planets in the far future on. I hope you think so too! And I hope you have a fabulous holiday season.
💖
Elnora
Thank you for sharing your process thoughts. It's great that the story has a real family connection and foundation in your life.