Créme de la Kreme

Among the hundreds (thousands?) of commercial catchphrases that have taken up residence on the Madison Avenue inside my head is Dunkin’ Donuts’ “Time to make the doughnuts.”  Even all these years after that ad last aired on television, I can vividly recall the weariness with which the stalwart Dunkin’ employee delivered the line as he rose from his warm bed during the wee hours of the morning to make us the freshest, tastiest doughnuts that money could buy.  But surely he must have known – or should have – that his hard work was in vain.

In the world of doughnuts, as in all things in life, there is a hierarchy.  And at the top of the proverbial heap is the Original Glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut.  Hot.  If you have ever had one, you know exactly what I mean.  If you have not, curse the gods for your misfortune.

To me, Krispy Kreme is far more than a favorite treat, it has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.  Both Krispy Kreme and I were born and bred in North Carolina.  I am from a small town near the South Carolina border; and the Krispy Kreme headquarters is in Winston-Salem.  I ate my first Krispy Kreme on my great-grandfather’s knee; he always kept a box of them in his freezer for me and my siblings.

My childhood crush on Krispy Kreme had blossomed into a full-blown love affair by the mid-1990s, when I was finishing my doctoral dissertation.  At that time I was a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History at UNC-Chapel Hill and living on a diet that consisted mostly of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and orange seltzer water. My tiny apartment was across the street from a shopping center with a grocery store that received Kreme Kreme deIiveries every morning at 6:00 AM.  And, yes, during the struggle with my final dissertation chapter, I did occasionally fantasize about leaving academe and buying my own Krispy Kreme franchise. 

Krispy Kreme followed me into my UNC classroom, where its glazed perfection proved to be a powerful antidote to the formidable antipathy of undergraduates forced by the cruelty of the General Education Curriculum to endure the U.S. History survey.  For special occasions – project presentations and final exams – I drove seventy miles round-trip to the Krispy Kreme store in Raleigh and purchased several dozen fresh, hot doughnuts for my students.  I cannot say that Krispy Kreme made the presentations better or the exam scores higher, but perhaps its fluffy goodness improved my review on Rate My Professors.

 I left Chapel Hill for a teaching position in New Orleans; and it was there I learned that even Krispy Kreme was not invulnerable.  Much to my delight and surprise, a Krispy Kreme store opened in the heart of the French Quarter – a bold move in a city that was home to the world-famous Café du Monde.  Ultimately, the glazed interloper could not usurp the hallowed beignet in the hearts of the people; but before the store faded away like the last note of a jazz funeral, I managed to buy a set of red and green Krispy Kreme Mardi Gras beads, which featured a miniature glowing Krispy Kreme Hot Doughnuts sign.  I still have these beads.  The sign stopped blinking years ago; but the thought of getting rid of them is as foreign to me as pączki.

Krispy Kreme came to my rescue in the Spring of 2013, the year my mother died.  By this time I was living in Baltimore; and my mother was still in North Carolina.  A lifelong smoker, my mother was now suffering from cancer; and the disease had progressed to the point that the only thing that the doctors could do was administer medication for pain.  When I got the call that the end was near, I jumped in my car for the long drive to the hospice center in Lumberton, North Carolina, the town where I was born – and where my mother was going to die.  As I drove my emotions careened from grief to anger to regret.  I was not ready for my mother to go, and certainly not like this.  Though I was determined to stop only for gas, I spotted the familiar “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign from the highway and pulled over for a cup of coffee and a couple of hot doughnuts.  The coffee was, as it always is, terrible.  (Think about it.  No one – NO ONE – ever waxes rhapsodic about Krispy Kreme coffee.)  But the doughnuts reminded me of happier days with my mother, when my only concern was whether I could convince her that a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts were a balanced meal.  Thus fortified by sugar and memory, I was able to continue my journey home, so that I could be there when my mother ended hers.

You are probably expecting me to argue for some profound connection between the circular nature of life and that of the Krispy Kreme doughnut.  Tempting, but no.  Indeed, I am much more prone to identify with the hole than anything else.  That said, Krispy Kreme does remind me that sometimes the world can be warm and sweet.  All we have to do is look for the flashing neon sign and pull over.

Published in: on 03/07/2020 at 06:55  Leave a Comment  
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Bully Pulpit

Bulls 1, Runners 0.

This week a young man who went to the Pamplona Festival in Spain to run with the bulls rode into the Hereafter on the horns of a bull.  He is probably having drinks and cigars with Papa Hemingway even as I write.  Lucky bastard.

In the aftermath of this man’s death, many people have commented on the “safety” of the festival and whether the event is an example of animal cruelty.  I am, frankly, amazed by this discussion.  First of all, OF COURSE running with the bulls is unsafe — probably one of the most dangerous things that someone can willingly do!  Remember Hemingway and his masterpiece The Sun Also Rises?  People (and by “people” I mean men, though I imagine that there must be some women among the runners) participate in this activity to recapture what it is like to be alive.  Nothing focuses one’s attention on living in the moment like the prospect of an immediate and horrible death, especially in the form of an angry, snarling, and deceptively fast bull.

The considerable threat of death aside, the Pamplona Festival is, in many ways, a relic of a faded and heroic past in which life was more volatile and, perhaps, more precious.  We now live in a world where risk has been reduced to something on the financial pages of the New York Times.  Lawyers must remind us that the cup of coffee we get at Starbucks is — gasp! — hot.  Toys come wrapped in so many warnings that we are afraid to let our children play with them.  Soon cancer warnings will be printed on the side of cigarettes themselves.  And do not get me started on food.  The pounding heart of our civilization has become but a murmur.

So let us take a moment to consider the second claim of the aforementioned ridiculous discussion: that the Pamplona Festival is cruel to the bulls.  Even I would be hard-pressed to deny that it is.  But at least the bulls are doing what they were meant to do.

Are we?

Published in: on 11/07/2009 at 04:09  Comments (1)  
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Michael Has Left The Building

Like much of the rest of the world — or at least that segment of it that cares about such things — I was shocked by the unexpected death of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, last week.  News of the passing of Farrah Fawcett saddened me as well.  (The Pinup of My Generation had the misfortune of crossing the River Styx on the same day as MJ, and thus received diminished press coverage.)  Her death was actually more disheartening to me — perhaps because she had lost her struggle against cancer.  And though it may be harsh to say it, one expects — at some deep, dark, unspeakable level — that cancer is going to win most of those heroic battles.

MJ’s final departure from the stage was stunning because he, unlike Farrah Fawcett, was a part of my life almost from the moment I became aware of popular culture.  My cool cousins who lived in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D. C. had Jackson 5 albums on 8-track cassette.  (I listened to the songs so much that even today, I remember when the cassette player would “click” as it switched tracks during the music.)  I watched the Jackson 5 cartoon on TV and saw “The Wiz” in the movie theater.  And years later, as a student at a residential high school for North Carolina’s freaks and geeks, I sat spellbound in a crowded and hushed room as MJ’s “Billie Jean” premiered on MTV, then a fledgling upstart cable channel that previously had only played music videos by White artists.  From that point onward, my life could be divided into two epochs: BMJ (Before Michael Jackson) and AMJ (After Michael Jackson).  Okay, perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration; but his music was the soundtrack of my adolescence.

The King of Pop’s personal eccentricities and later scandals, when I cared to take note of them, were in turns amusing and deeply troubling.  But the thing that really grafted MJ to my cultural DNA was his brief marriage to Lisa Marie Presley.  Elvis is the real musical love of my life; and though I participated in the joking about MJ’s relationship with Lisa Marie, I was secretly jealous of him for having wooed and won the daughter of the King.

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that I had foolishly believed, like most people in my generation, that MJ would always be with us .  We would grow old together and someday — many decades from now — die together.  None of us expected MJ to check out early.

Our 24-hour news and entertainment cycle is, at least for the moment, obsessed with measuring MJ’s impact on music, culture, and society.  That is well and proper as he was a figure of global stature, whether or not we wanted that to be the case.

But there is a small part of me that hopes against hope that the King of Pop is not really dead.  Maybe he just got tired of it all and decided finally to accept Elvis’ offer to join him at his villa in Argentina.  Rumor has it that Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina had a good time there.

Published in: on 30/06/2009 at 14:20  Comments (1)  
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