By Prudence L. Gourguechon on 10/3/2009 9:04 PM
I was driving back from Michigan and my husband says, “I think you should write something psychoanalytic about Hanson’s doughnuts”.
Some of you who have abandoned bad habits and only eat food that is good for you. But those readers who still are capable of grabbing the occasional doughnut, hoping for something, well exquisitely doughtnuty, may be able to share vicariously in this extraordinary story of hope and desire.
I like doughnuts but I’m not nuts about them. I could name a couple of desserty snacks that sing more of a siren’s song to me. But still, you can’t ignore the doughnut. They evoke memories. Neighborhood Halloween celebrations in the community I grew up in. Pulling out of a Dunkin Doughnuts parking lot when I’d heard some especially weird news and getting in a car accident. Michigan apple orchards when I was in med school. Pumpkin farms with small children. A pretty nifty diet I designed once consisting of four munchkins for breakfast (two cinnamon and two powdered sugar).
One of the core and inexplicable aspects of the doughnut experience, I think, is perennial hope and sharp disappointment. (Here as you can see were verging on the psychoanalytic part.) For some reason, the humble doughnut, unlike, say, pie or cake, seems to grab hard on to an internalized ideal. There’s this internal sense of what a doughnut should be like. Just what it should be. And the bite, the taste, the disappointment and acceptance. Not bad, but not great. Like the mother we know we should have had, the partner we can just sense exists beyond the reach of reality. We can taste it, we know it, though strangely we’ve never actually experienced it. Where does this knowledge come from?
Saturday, I picked up a doughnut at the men’s club trailer at the fall festival in our small Michigan village where we retreat some weekends. It was amazing. Plain cake with a little glaze. No hole. It WAS the donut I’d always imagined but never expected. There it was. They said it was from Hansen’s, a grocery store in the next town. It was like waking up one day and finding out that your regular flawed mother had woken up as the perfectly empathic, relaxed, funny and wise mother you could just taste. |