Tales from the Donut shop

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I don’t know about you, but I am having a hard time trying to keep my spirits up in the wake of all the bad news we are enduring, so this morning I took a trip to my filing cabinet, and I dug around in there until I found something to read that I knew would cheer me up. I’m going to share this piece with you in the hope that it will also lift your spirits, and that it will remind you of the great worth and variety of human personality, and the pleasure of donuts, too. To say nothing of coffee. I wrote this piece a long time ago when I was married to a man whom I still call a friend. It was also a time when my adult daughters were young girls. What a pleasure to see the three of them on the page. Anyway, here goes:

These things keep happening, so the stories keep being told, and there is something about them. I mean that they make me feel good. They are like lifting up a branch and finding a surprise flower beneath it. “Well, for heaven sake,” you say. “I didn’t know YOU were here!” You don’t pick those flowers, usually. You keep the knowledge that they’re there to balance some harder aspect of life. That’s what these stories are like.

My husband tells most of the stories, because he’s the one who goes to the donut shop every night. It began when he was on a diet. He felt crummy not getting dessert, so he started going out for coffee each night, pretending IT was dessert. It was only coffee, but it was made fancy by the fact that he had to go and get it. The young woman who worked evenings, Terry, got to know his order, and so when he came in, she would say, “Large coffee with milk, no sugar? “My husband would nod yes, every night. He has a story about just that: one night he walked in and was waiting in a long line and when it was his turn, Terry said, “Large coffee with milk, no sugar?” and these two handsome men behind my husband started getting all excited. “Oh! “ one of them said. “She tells you what you WANT! What do I want?” Terry didn’t think it was funny but my husband did and the two guys thought it was hysterical.