Trick and the "Little Treat"
The website Know Your Meme traces the origins of the “little treat” meme to a tweet from March of 2021, a year and a week after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world.1
The “little treat” meme has maintained steady popularity over the last few years, finding a rich presence on Twitter (currently X) and other online platforms, such as news satire website Reductress, which published the article “‘I Deserve a Little Treat,’ Says Woman Who Has Never Denied Herself Anything” in 2022.2
I’m writing this from a room in my childhood home in Southern California. I put my pilgrimage on pause to fly home for a couple of days to celebrate my dad’s 60th birthday with friends and family and to enjoy some of my favorite local haunts. Pun a little intended. This little detour has been a neat practice in perspective in the sense that I can appreciate the shades of green on either side. I was homesick for the sun-drenched, sand-clad landscapes of California’s Inland Empire and for the people who live here, and now I’m finding myself a little roadsick for the abbeys, churches, crummy motels, and delightful uncertainty I’ve—momentarily—left behind me.
In so many ways, coming home is a little treat. From this vantage point, I’ve taken some time to reflect on a few of the little treats from my time at Mepkin and on the road.
One of my staple little treats in recent years is the YouTube video essay. They’ve been around for more than a decade, but in the last four years or so (I wonder why), they have only increased in popularity.3 One of my little treats on the road—and it is increasingly rare, but isn’t that what makes a little treat all the sweeter—is an occasional video essay. As a matter of fact, in honor of my very favorite video essayist, Jenny Nicholson, I’ve formatted this SubStack in an internet-friendly numbered list.
When I was at Mepkin, we only had an hour or so every day during which we weren’t either in prayer, at meals, or at work. As much as I loved the mushroom farm, this isn’t about that. Across the monks’ cemetery from my bedroom, a single-room building sits at the edge of the abbey campus, right up against the slope down to the Cooper River. This is the music building, and once or twice a week, I made sure to make my way there to spend up to an hour at the piano. Sometimes I’d let myself play popular music, like “Shake It Out” by Florence + the Machine or “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan, but more often than not, I found myself playing old set lists I’d saved from the months of organizing Mass music back in Wexford, circa 2020-21. One of my favorite pieces from these is the Dominican Magnificat.
If you should know anything about me, it’s that I love coffee. For all intents and purposes, I am a casual fan, but sort of in the same way everyone was a casual fan of The Hunger Games in 2013 and showed up to the midnight premieres in boots and pins and braids, whether they’d read the books or not. Can I tell you the difference between roasts or beans? Do I have the even the basic combinations of espresso, cream, milk, water, etc. of the various drinks remotely memorized? But does it matter when there’s an iced oat latte in my hand? a little cup of espresso beside my computer while I work in the morning? a hearty cup of black coffee, maybe some cream, in front of me after a late meal? No. Not really. The most constant and beloved little treat of mine on the road between monasteries is that oat latte. Since I discovered the Zen Cafe (Rest In Peace) oat latte in fall 2019, it has been the basis by which I judge a coffee house. So far, the best I’ve had came from Sweet Donkey Coffee, Roanoke, VA; Facility Coffee, Brunswick, GA (which doubles as a shooting range; I’m not kidding); Honeybee Coffee Co., Knoxville, TN; and Elegy Coffee Downtown, Nashville, TN.
When I’m not watching the latest Jenny Nicholson video essay, playing a little piano, or enjoying a local iced oat delicacy, I love to walk. This last summer, I got really into hiking, which in my world is really just fancy walking. My favorite trail is the Ferndell to Mount Hollywood Summit Loop, and I will be taking a turn on it before I leave. When I’m out and about and on the road, walking is a huge treat. Whether I’m listening to music, a podcast, or the world around me, I love walking around new cities, towns, and landscapes. I can’t say I’ve been hiking while I’ve been traveling, in no small part to my concern that I am not really a weathered hiker, and God knows how lost I can and could get, and that’s just not a journey I love for me. I am happier, really, walking around somewhere I can observe people, overhear their colloquialisms, and look for my writing in the quirks and clues of the day around me.
The last on my humble list of little treats is maybe a cheat, as it’s something I’ve already written about, but it’s a very important one to me. Driving from one monastery to the next, from one small town to some other little city, I often treat myself to the longer route. When I drove from D.C. to Roanoke, VA, I added something like three hours to the drive just so I could see some of West Virginia, which I’d never seen before, and which I loved very much. Similarly, I added hours between Savannah and Tampa, Atlanta and Knoxville, Knoxville and Memphis—what a treat a detour is! Never let it be said that I did not take my detours, or my little treats, seriously!
Highlights from the last week:
Surviving a layover at DFW
Seeing my dog Becket
Spending time with all six of my siblings
Celebrating my dad’s birthday with friends and family
Playing on my piano
Video essay recommendations (another numbered list!):
Why Pipe Organs Sound Scary by Sideways
THE Vampire Diaries Video by Jenny Nicholson
The Case for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Lindsay Ellis
There’s something wrong with Hallmark’s youtube channel by Jenny Nicholson
Why the Music in Cats (2019) is Worse than you Thought by Sideways
You Should Watch Buffy Season 6 by Sarah Z
Burn Book: I Fell for Caroline Calloway’s Never-Ending Scam by D’Angelo Wallace
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-little-treat
https://reductress.com/post/i-deserve-a-little-treat-says-woman-who-has-never-denied-herself-anything/
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22967496/youtube-tiktok-creators