Willy "Cookie" Sutton

"Me not take cookies, me eat the cookies." -- Cookie Monster

Quite a few years ago my family was looking to move, so every Sunday after church we would hit as many open houses as we could. I was just a wee sprog then, with the attention span of an autistic goldfish, so I was often subject to about an hour and a half of unadulterated boredom on these excursions. After all, how many times can a kid carve her name into the master bedroom's north wall before she gets fidgety? It seems that at every house we went to there was a plate of free chocolate chip cookies -- this, of course, was the homemade bribe used to get people to make a down payment on a $750,000 home. My dad took to allowing me and my brother a cookie at every house we visited to keep us pacified while he and my mom looked around.

A few months passed and we bought a home, but the now-ritualistic open house-visiting hadn't faded. At this point, it was no longer about the homes, but the cookies that were inevitably there. My parents would give them to me as a treat for behaving in the service that morning. A little piece of me withered and died every time we waltzed through a doorway, nodded to the realtor, and stole four cookies before quickly making our exit.

"Go on, take one," my mom would say as Mr. Homeseller looked on with a confused smile and my ten-year-old self alternated between the beet red of embarrassment and the pallor of imminent death.

I have a feeling this is the sort of thing I'll be bringing up in therapy forty years down the road -- "You have no idea what it was like. My family was like the Willy Sutton of real estate cookies: hitting up houses with a smile, in 'n out in forty-five seconds."