It was autumn during my freshman year of college. My two favorite friends and I landed jobs at a local Farmer’s Market where they sold pumpkins, cider, donuts and caramel apples. The market also dished up seasonal family memories for no extra charge. The most popular crowd-pleasers of this quaint little shop were the warm cinnamon & sugared pumpkin donuts on Saturday morning. Weekend after weekend, all morning long for the entire season, folks would wait in line for the hot and fresh donuts to be bagged up by the dozen. If the crowd realized that the “hot and fresh” part basically meant “fresh out of the boiling oil drum”, they must’ve looked beyond it.
My friend and I were working donut duty one particular Saturday. Our job that day was to plop some dough into the vat of boiling grease, coax the cooked donut on to the conveyor belt, then roll that hot little nugget of love in a delicious mixture of cinnamon and sugar. The donut preparation area was set up as an attraction where the drooling crowd could observe and wait. Anxiously, the swarm would watch and yearn for the donuts like a bunch of kids choosing a puppy at a pet shop. I had grown complacent about the donut hype.
My friend and I were situated on either side of the donut machine, facing towards each other and gossiping about college life. Completely ignoring the gathering crowd, we would take turns grabbing the donuts to roll in the sugar. Suddenly, I heard a lady from the crowd yell, “I am so appalled!” I looked up to see her pointing my way and I thought, “Wow, whoever she’s pointing at is in BIG trouble!” I glanced behind me but there was no one there. She was pointing at ME. The woman said (in a voice that was too loud in my opinion) “that girl has been licking her fingers between every donut she touches!”
My mind rewound and she was right! Moments ago, I had been on autopilot completely unaware of my actions: grabbing a donut, rolling it in the sugar, gossiping to my friend, “and so I says to him ‘oh, no you didn’t’ and can you believe what he said back to me…”, licked the cinnamon and sugar off my fingers, grabbed another donut off the conveyor belt and repeat. I would have denied it, but I had cinnamon and sugar all over my mouth and the breath of a candy whore. I was sent to the back of the kitchen to think about what I’d done and needless to say, that was my last day at the ole farmers market.
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