When I worked on designing submarines, I came up with the idea of making a cookie submarine.

I baked a sheet of cookie dough (1/2 c sugar, 1/2 c butter, 1-1/4 c flour, molassas, vanilla, salt, baking powder).

When the dough was nicely browned, I formed a cylinder by wrapping the cookie around a rolling pin, pushed cookie wedges into the bottom of sherbet dishes, and cut miniature sail and dive planes.

Several ounces of melted white and bittersweet chocolate later, I had a tiny submarine.

Fast forward seven years, and I’ve now made so many cookie submarines that I’ve lost track. I’ve made one in Japan from ingredients whose labels I could not read. I assembled one on a British frigate to celebrate a successful sonar test.

And when each of my colleagues retire, I make them a cookie submarine, stuffed with peanut M&Ms.

When I am old and aging, no one will want to hear me talk about my career. And I won’t want to talk about the really good stuff anyway. Most of it is so context-specific that it wouldn’t survive translation. Nor will they want to hear about the enduring truths, like how propeller side forces are caused by the counter-rotating force vectors produced by the Fourier harmonics adjacent to integer multiples of the number of propeller blades.

See. Told you no one wants to hear about that stuff.

But my children and their children and their children after them will know Mom made submarines. Because they saw me pulling them out of the oven and got to eat the scraps (the crunchy, gently-browned, wickedly delicious scraps).