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This morning I did a bad thing. I ate a donut.

Many people might not consider my eating a donut to be much of a sin, but if they can get inside my head and understand my complicated relationship with donuts they might then understand. More about that later.

In my neighborhood in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, there are two Dunkin Donuts, a couple of Starbucks, assorted diners, and several fairly authentic Italian Cafes. There is also, sitting among all these head spinning options for the breakfast pastry lover, a little, one of a kind, mom and pop style donut shop called “The Donut Stop”. I have walked by it a hundred times but have never gone inside. What with all the other aforementioned options for coffee and breakfast abounding in the neighborhood, it never seemed necessary.

I have been curious though. One always hears about such little hidden away places in the out of the way neighborhoods of the outer boroughs as being places that are potentially unexpected treasure troves of down home culinary delights. They are also places expected to be frequented by colorful local salt of the earth characters with fascinating stories to tell, and It is assumed that such interesting characters and their stories could never be found or heard in the local Starbucks, as Starbucks has become the de-facto home of lap top and smart phone toting hipsters quietly nursing lattes as they tap away on their computer keyboards or the slide out key boards of their smart phones. So, in the search for interesting local characters, places like The Donut Stop are the last frontier.

Of course, donuts cannot be discussed in any way unless there is further discussion of the Evil Empire of Donuts, Dunkin Donuts, which, as I view it, is an exercise in donut fraud. Fraud, compounded by the TV Queen of the delish dish, Rachel Ray, as it’s spokesperson, thus leading us to believe that Dunkin’s waxy, overly sweet factory made donuts are what SHE eats every morning. Of course, we all suspect she actually has her assistant bring her some fancy artisanal donut from some cutting edge Manhattan bake shop around the corner from the TV studio, and would not be caught dead with a sad, laboratory created donut from Dunkin.

In my personal case, the Italian cafes and the diners of Bay Ridge are always an agreeable alternative to Dunkin Donuts. However, if we are sticking with donuts here as the current object of desire, we must concede that those places are not usually purveyors of donuts, or at least they don’t specialize in them, as Diners are more pie oriented, and Italian cafes more pastry oriented. So those places would not do, as today I was obsessed with eating a donut. I had not had a donut in a long time, and damn it, a donut I would have.

So I made a conscious decision to have a morning adventure and would go to the Donut Stop and have an authentic Brooklyn Dive Donut Shop donut and a cup of coffee. I expected the donuts to be lovingly made by the grandmotherly wife of the owner from a secret family donut recipe that produced exquisite donut deliciousness only for the locals that knew enough to pass by all the other choices because they knew that the Donut Stop was crème de la crème of the…well…cream filled donut.–the Acme of Apple Spice, and the Champ of Chocolate Glazed. I also expected to be regaled with stories from a delightful array of characters sitting at the counter and in the booths, who would be divulging titillating secrets about the neighborhood and it’s rich history in thick Brooklyn accents peppered with folksy witticisms.

As far as the reason it is a big deal, and a bit of a sin for me to have a donut for breakfast is simply because now that I am firmly ensconced in middle age, I have been trying to eat better lately, and breakfast has always been the biggest challenge in my eating better quest because of all it’s decadent pastry possibilities. The men in my family are prone to heart disease and are all usually quite dead before they reach 65, no doubt as a partial result of eating Jewish soul food such as fatty briskets, fried latkes, and fried blintzes and egg loaded kugles. So in my, most likely, feeble attempt to forestall a similar fate, I usually have a bowl of healthy, boring, oatmeal each morning, thereby hoping to extend my kvetching time here on earth.

But today I had decided that I would allow myself to taste the forbidden.

Upon arriving in front of The Donut Stop, I inspected the menu in the window, which boasted such additional non-donut delicacies as the classic fried egg, bacon and cheese on a roll, which though tempting, had to be ignored in lieu of the specialty whose name comprised half the title of the establishment, and that to which I was drawn on this day to possess and ingest.

I opened the door and oddly found a short series of stairs going up to a small unkempt looking place with a tile floor and wooden shelves on the right that functioned as very un-rack-like magazine and newspaper racks with all the magazines lying in stacks on their backs so you couldn’t see what they were unless you walked up ton the shelves looked at the top of the stacks. To the left was the counter, and straight-ahead in the back, and to the left, a tightly packed arrangement of booths and small tables.

There were four men and one woman sitting round the place, talking about city politics in a manner that was not particularly intelligent or laced with folksy brilliance. As I walked up to peer over the counter to try to find and view the donut selection, one of the men who had been eating at the counter got up and moved himself to the proprietor’s side of the counter and asked if he could help me. I couldn’t help but notice that this man, the apparent owner of the establishment, had been at the counter eating, of all things, toast. Plain old toast with a small splotch of butter on it. I had to surmise this was not a reflection on the other menus offerings, but rather a result of his own effort at extending his life.

But as I looked over the counter to the filthy shelf next to the grill, I saw what was a crushingly disappointing, meager arrangement of pathetic looking, limp, donuts. How could a place call itself “The Donut Stop” and have such a limited and sad selection of Donuts? I was devastated.

I couldn’t very well walk out at this point as the owner was now looking at me as if to say, “I don’t have all day, buddy”. So I quickly surveyed my limited choices and asked for the chocolate iced, glazed donut, which he unceremoniously plopped on a paper plate and put on the counter in front of me. I also asked for coffee, which he poured out of a pot that looked like it had been sitting there since the Carter administration.

So there I sat, at the grimy counter feeling like an idiot. I took a furtive glance at my fellow diners who I realized were just a bunch of boring, blue-collar lumps with nowhere else to go on a weekday morning. There were no colorful stories being told by charming characters—no philosophical folksy brilliance. Just a bunch of ordinary Joes.

I looked down at my stupid little donut. I was about to waste all those calories and that cholesterol elevating saturated fat that I was about to put in my body on this stupid donut.

Just then, a middle-aged guy walks in and says to the owner, “Hey Joe! Give me uh bacon, egg and cheeze on uh roll and a cuppa cawfee tuh go!”

I was first shocked that the guy at the counter’s name was, apparently, “Joe”, which is just too much of a cliché to believe, and then took note of  the guy’s order which was surprising, yet at the same time, in New York, pretty standard. I have seen middle aged men like myself all over the city eating cheeseburgers, French fries, eggs and sausage, hotdogs, meatball sandwiches, pepperoni pizzas, pastrami sandwiches—all manner of fat laden, heart stopping and delicious foods—and they don’t seem to have a care in the world about it. As if they are immune to clogged arteries, obesity, and high blood pressure.

I remember years ago when I briefly lived on Long Island, I would take the LIRR train home from Penn Station. There was a McDonalds located right there in the waiting area and I would see guys get on the train with bags of odiferous McDonald’s Big Macs and quarter pounders and fries, and I would watch them eat, not one, but two or three of these hamburgers, and then shove handfuls of greasy fries into their maws and wash it all down with a chocolate milk shake. Is there something they know that I don’t? Are they somehow genetically superior than I am and are not effected by this decadent diet?  Or will they all be dead soon enough—with salty, greasy smiles on their faces?

I watched the egg, bacon and cheese get handed across the counter, just past my nose. My nostrils flared as they filled with the intoxicating aroma of bacon, and I turned back to my sad donut picked it up and ate it. It took about a minute. It was small and didn’t require a whole lot of chewing. Kind of like a too-small scavenged critter being eaten by a desperate predator. I sipped my paper cup of coffee and when I finished, I sat there for a moment, marinating in my disappointment, trying to think if there was a reason to ask for a coffee refill. Maybe it would allow me to stay at the counter and transform myself into the first part of the scene I had originally thought I would find in this place. I thought, maybe I could be the colorful local character discovered in here by some other neighborhood adventurer like myself, who might come through the door at any moment hoping for a local goldmine of authenticity.

But I realized if I didn’t leave soon, I would instead become just another lump, like my brother lumps at the other end of the counter, trapped in the limbo of The Donut Stop, with nowhere else to go.

So I left some change on the counter and headed for the door, knowing I would never return, and thought to myself, that sometimes a filthy, greasy, dive, neighborhood donut shop is just that, and nothing more. In fact—not just sometimes—MOST of the time. To me this is a metaphor for life. Your idea of what the donut will be is often grander than the donut itself.