Competition

On Monday mornings a truck from the Kroger Company delivers several trays of day-old specialty breads, rolls, English muffins and a large box of donuts and pastries to this place where I live.  The driver puts all this on the big table in the library and leaves.  And the fighting spirits from eleven floors of humanity gouge their way to their fair share.  There is one woman from the seventh floor who looks like a butchy prison guard and wears her muscular fatness behind a wide black leather belt.  We call her The Prison Guard.  And there is a guy who is the head of the Lakewoods Senior Citizens Club who is bipolar and doesn’t like to take his medicine on donut days.. 

There are several other fighting spirits and they all go for the donut box at once without a word, elbowing each other in the ribs and the nose and left breasts.  If you look at the remains of the donut box after they’re gone you see fragments of icing and broken corners of Long Johns and you know that forty people at once have been digging for their favorite sweeties.  One morning at 7 a.m. when I was going out, I met a grossly obese woman from Texas sagging over the sides of her electric go cart and asked her if she were waiting that early for the donut delivery.  “Yes,” she said, “I sure as hell don’t want any of those other bitches getting my donuts.”

Fortunately my sole interest is specialty breads which are ignored and mostly untouched and  I get a couple loaves of multi-grain Home and Hearth, or a couple dainty batards full of sunflower seeds each week and I haven’t bought any bread since I’ve been here.  I was remarking to a friend that many older people have refined their tolerance of others to a great degree as they’ve aged.  I don’t think any of them are at the big table in the Library on Monday mornings. Two friends and I are attending with cameras next week.  Ta!