Colton Harris-Moore and Grandma Jean

I never thought there would be a connection between the 19-year-old "Barefoot Bandit," above, and my Eastern European grandmother who died a few years ago at 100, pictured below with some of her great grandchildren.  But if Colton hadn't been captured in the Bahamas yesterday after two years on the run, right now you'd be reading about my grandmother's famous sugar cookies.

It all started when I discovered a scrap of paper with a list of ingredients in the back of a kitchen drawer.  I realized that they were for my grandmother's sugar cookies, cookies distinguished from all others by their unusual shapes -- diamonds, clubs, hearts and spades.  I wanted to make them, but didn't have the signature cookie cutters.

Enter eBay.  I immediately found a set of c. 1950s cookie cutters (how lucky is that?).  I bid and won handily for, as you might imagine, there wasn't a lot of competition for these.

I had them sent to DH's office in Manhattan because Brooklyn isn't exactly a place where the mailman can leave a package at the front door, if you know what I mean.

But last week, when the cutters arrived, DH -- a journalist who has been working on the Colton story for months -- was suddenly called to the Bahamas, where Colton had been spotted.  I waited patiently for his return.  But just hours after DH's plane landed in New York Saturday night, Colton was captured. So this morning, instead of going to his office to retrieve the cookie cutters, DH is on a plane headed once again for the Bahamas.

The lesson?  In the future, all packages will be sent to my office on the Lower East Side, because working for a social service agency, I'm pretty confident that I won't be taking any last-minute work jaunts to the Bahamas.