Pour Some Sugar on Me

Tasting nostalgia (and crying about it).

Hey, it’s me, Sarah. And this is Note to Self, a newsletter where I unpack whatever’s been in my notes app, tweet drafts, or group chat lately.

On Wednesday, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I slept poorly and then, accidentally, on the shoulder I injured last week. This led me to cancel my workout class. That led me into a small spiral about the circular domino effect of every adult choice I make: trying and failing, failing and trying, ad infinitum. And then the pigeons that perch on my windowsill were cooing incessantly in that disgusting way that they do, and I couldn’t find the tennis ball I usually chuck at my window for this very reason (which would have hurt my shoulder anyway, but still). Before I could make peace with any of this, the Slack notifications began. The day was doomed on arrival, is what I’m saying. 

Then I remembered that I live close to Fan Fan Doughnuts. If I must submit to the tedium of adulthood, then I may also collect its rewards and concessions. One of them is sugar. So I stomped out of my pigeon den in search of a mood-altering pastry. 

Fan Fan Doughnuts occupies a rare space, offering both eye-roll-and-yet-delicious artisanal options, like a toasted coconut cream doughnut with torched meringue, alongside simple classics like a glazed twist. I picked a modest yeast doughnut with shiny chocolate fudge frosting. It was North of four dollars which is a lot for a doughnut but a steal for salvation. My prerogative in this life is stealing bites of salvation, for the record.

The thing about this doughnut that I need you to understand is that it’s perfect. The chocolate fudge is thick and sticky and it has to be forcibly removed from your fingers. The yeast donut is chewy and sumptuous. I ate the whole thing while I was on FaceTime with Kelley, my work partner and one of my best friends. I pretended to be thinking about work, but I was thinking about the doughnut. 

the doughnut

My first thought was: “It’s a tasteful elevation of the grocery store bakery case,” but on second thought, that’s not exactly it. The Fan Fan yeast doughnut with chocolate fudge frosting does not taste remotely like a grocery store bakery case doughnut. It tastes the way you remember them tasting in your childhood. This is a crucial distinction. 

Do you remember how good those doughnuts tasted? They were seventy-nine cents. You’d pick them up with that wispy blue sheet of plastic and put them in those opaque bags, the ones with a subtle texture. And when you pulled the doughnut out of the bag, the texture of the bag would tug some of the frosting gently off the top. And if you were like me, you would eventually turn the bag inside out and lick the left behind frosting off the plastic.  

Growing up, a chocolate doughnut was my favorite treat. On special occasions, we’d wake up in the morning to doughnuts and orange juice in the kitchen. We’d get them on road trips, or on our way to the mountain, or sometimes for no discernible reason at all. They were something magical that could arrive without warning and alter the trajectory of my four-foot-tall life. 

That’s the gift and curse of childhood: you control nothing. When good things happen, it is by the grace of a benevolent higher power. And when bad things happen, well, there’s not much you can do about it because you’re just a kid. It’s infuriating and yet freeing. You learn to enjoy the doughnuts, Froot Loops, Oreos, or whatever it was for you, with a rapturous appetite. Who knows when the gods will favor us again?

Those doughnuts, the bakery case ones from Safeway or Albertson’s or Ralph’s, they don’t taste the way you might remember them. I can tell you this because every time I go back to my hometown, I have one. It’s a bit I have with my mom: I go with her to the grocery store and when we arrive I tell her I’m going to the restroom but I return with a doughnut in my mouth. She always asks me if I’ve already paid for it. Of course I have, that’s how I know they’re no longer seventy-nine cents. What they are, I’m sad to report, is dry, cloying, and tasteless. They leave a grease cap on the roof of your mouth. Sometimes they’re completely hollow. Biteless. 

Nothing tastes quite the way you remember it as a kid. Haven’t we all tried a Cosmic Brownie, or a Grandma’s Cookie as an adult? They’re still sweet alright, but there’s a flatness to the experience. You swallow thickly and wonder what happened. Could it be they’ve changed the recipe? Switched chocolate providers? Perhaps some evil candy magnate has lobbied the government to let him call his brown corn syrup “chocolate” even though it contains less than 4% chocolate. Or maybe the treats of our childhood always tasted this way, they just didn’t feel this way. Maybe we’re chasing pre-packaged nostalgia, looking for a taste of something that only exists in our memories. 

The Fan Fan chocolate doughnut tastes like a memory, which is to say: transcendent. It is a microdose of deliverance from a higher power; a brief interlude to the chaotic score of the world.

“I’m so sad it’s gone,” I announced to Kelley, immediately after I finished it. I swiped my fingers inside the compostable box to retrieve the last of the frosting. “It tastes the way you remember it, not the way it really was, you know?” There were tears spilling down my cheeks and she laughed.

The gift and curse of adulthood is that you’re responsible for everything, even things you can’t control. I’m sitting alone on a rug in my one-bedroom apartment with an empty doughnut box beside me. I lead a privileged life by every metric but sometimes a lonely one. Sometimes, the unshared weight of responsibility for my life and my role in the world is crushing. It amazes me that our bodies require so much care. That our minds, or at least mine, can be so fickle and cumbersome — to say nothing of the heart. And then there’s everything else: recycling, as a chore and moral imperative. 3,376 unread emails. All the bad news. So much responsibility, so few instances of uncomplicated, rapturous pleasure handed down from a benevolent higher power. 

It turns out that finding moments of rapture is also your responsibility now. And that’s fine. Sometimes it’s easy and everywhere. When it evades me, I just remember that I live close to Fan Fan Doughnuts. 

I hope you have a pastry or some other transcendent joy today. 

xx, 

Sarah