Small Resurrections
Sunday nights after church, Mom steered the car into the parking lot of Park Drive Dairy to treat us to milk and a snack, unaware she was buying us our first lesson in longing. At the opposite end of the building, one lone light glowed in the back room of Swedough’s Donuts, where the baker bent over tomorrow’s sweetness.
Housed in a long white building with a dairy-centered convenience store at one end and Swedough’s at the other, it was a decades-old Galesburg staple. The two businesses were separated by a doorway in the center that the donut shop owners unlocked during their business hours.
On the Park Drive side, refrigerator cases stocked with milk and cottage cheese chilled the bright, fluorescent air. Besides dairy, they sold a Hostess line of everything from Ding Dongs to Snowballs. The phantom of that long brick-shaped box of chocolate-covered donuts came to me the other night. These were the bigger sibling to Donettes, those bite-size buggers wrapped in cellophane. My sister and I loved the big variety, chocolate, not powdered. At home we’d pour a large glass of cold milk, break a donut in half and dunk one end. Pure heaven. If we played our cards right, we’d pace ourselves to leave enough for breakfast the next morning.
These days, if I ate donuts as obnoxiously as I ate them back then, it’d put me into cardiac arrest. The tooth-feel of that chocolate coating breaking between my teeth, chilled by the milk, the heart of the donut drenched from its baptism—that’s what hit me the other night, the whiff of a memory that made my chest ache.
Don’t tell me I can’t go back. Maybe that’s what aging is: savoring small resurrections, brief and private, knowing each one costs you the thing it brings back.