Mary has a positive genius for obtaining gift cards. I don’t know how she does it and it’s probably a good idea that I maintain my obliviousness, just in case there’s ever a circumstance where people are shining bright lights in my face and asking harsh questions.
Anyway, one set of gift cards that we ended up with, was a pair of $25 gift cards for Dunkin Donuts. Now, I wasn’t even aware there was a Dunkin Donut here in the Colorado Springs area. But apparently there is. Lucky us. I think. The truth is, it’s been something like four, or maybe five years since last we dined on the delicious deep fried dough goodness. Well, that’s if you don’t count beignets, which we don’t because they’re from New Orleans and too good to actually be classed together with a Krispy Kreme cholesterol bomb. Donuts are just something that don’t come up in our normal breakfast menus anymore, seeing how we’re trying to live to the ripe old age of sixty.
Now this isn’t the case with our relatives. We seem to be completely out here in alien country when it comes to what the rest of America, or at least the part of America that includes either of our families, considers breakfast provender. On each visit we fail, miserably and completely, in anticipating our visitors’ needs. We stock fresh fruit, wholesome breads, English muffins, crisp rashers of bacon (and who doesn’t want to wake up to a rasher, it sounds so much better than a few strips of bacon doesn’t it?), and the ingredients for freshly made pancakes with blueberries and Grade B dark amber maple syrup. Don’t let anybody tell you different, the good stuff isn’t Grade A – it’s the Grade B. Take it from us and America’s Test Kitchen.
But in each and every case we’ve discovered that our families don’t want hearty, tasty, filling, and nutritious morning meals. No, what they want is Donettes. They want Krisy Kreme, or failing that Dunkin Donuts or failing that, any fried dough with sugar frosting. They need, they demand, they insist on breakfast cereals with the maximum amount of high fructose corn syrup sweetener allowed by law. They don’t drink our fresh roasted, freshly ground coffee – they want Cokes for their caffeine jolt. We are just not in tune with how America now approaches the morning meal.
So anyway, we’re probably going to send the cards to someone in the family who’ll appreciate them, since it’s not our thing anymore. And we’ll sit here in the morning eating our organic fruit and sipping our fair trade coffee and toasting our whole wheat bread with seventeen essential sources of fiber. And from now on, when family comes to visit we have handy little maps prepared with the locations of the nearest convenience stores marked so the children (think of the children!) will not be forced to starve, because everything in the house has some nutritional value.