Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Let Us Now Praise Famous Donuts
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
There’s Mount Rushmore, the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty. There’s Randy’s Donuts.
Thirty-two and half feet in diameter, perched atop a nondescript drive-in donut shop, the tawny-colored massive concrete donut towers over Interstate 405. The artery-clogging donut shop landmarks the habitually clogged highway artery to Los Angeles International Airport—a mouthwatering irony.
My closest faculty ally at the high school where I teach is leaving for a year-long sabbatical in Japan. Alice teaches, or taught, mathematics. I teach civics with a bit of economics thrown in. With a hollow feeling deep in my bowels, I’m giving her a ride to the airport.
One of my lesson plans is about the donut-defaming idiom “dollars to doughnuts.” A basic glazed or plain cake donut at Randy’s costs $1.60. As I pass out donut holes to my students, I challenge them to discuss and debate summer jobs that pay $1.00 in cash/hour versus one donut/hour. Wouldn’t payment in donuts represent a lip-smacking sixty percent pay raise? It takes them awhile to figure out that not all dough is portable, practical and fungible.
At school faculty meetings, Alice and I formed a caucus of two. Last school year, we argued for student free speech rights, but against student demands for so-called safe spaces. To the annoyance of our colleagues, we wanted more rambunctious, unfettered, uncensored campus debate. To the annoyance of the students, we opposed cloistered hideaways for ducking campus life in all its difficult diversity.
Alice’s travel skirt is a zigzag pattern of black and white stripes. She looks like an escaped convict. Her hair is close-cropped. No earrings or necklace. “I’m dressing down to avoid standing out on the streets of Tokyo,” she tells me. I nod in agreement but I’m skeptical that a 5’10” Caucasian blond female in zebra stripes will avoid the curious eyes of the Japanese, especially the men.
Impulsively, as if I have the power to delay her flight, at the West Manchester Boulevard exit I take the off ramp to Randy’s. The racks of glazed, sugared, powdered, chocolate, cream-filled, frosted, plain cake, sprinkled, cinnamon, twists, crullers, old-fashioned, buttermilk, fritters, jelly-filled, coconut, red velvet, maple bars and coffee-flavored donuts are organized like World War I doughboys on parade. The colorful donuts glisten like the sticky promise of a scrumptious, lip-pleasing kiss from a Hollywood starlet. As if time were timeless, we savor making our selections.
Donuts are a reminder not to take the sweet things in my life for granted. People, like donuts, are missed most when they’re gone. It’s a vulnerability against which I am defenseless.
When Tokyo-bound United flight 632 lifts off, wheels up, my life will change. I’m happy for Alice and all that, but Japan is an ocean away.
Between donut bites, my recalcitrance—like a stomach full of bile—is acting up. I can’t quite bring myself to accept that she is moving, changing jobs, maybe getting married.
On the drive home, I make another stop at Randy’s Donuts. Same donuts. Not as sweet.
