A beloved grade-school delicacy, the classic and simple Sloppy Joe. (photo by Chris Erskine)

The Agony of Waking Up no longer troubles me. Sure, the first minute is a hurricane of confusion; I wonder who I am and how I got here. I check my phone for answers. Nothing. 

Then, three minutes into The Agony of Waking Up, I spring from the bed, feed the wolf, make coffee with too much cream. I light a candle on my writing desk, a flickering fireplace on these ever-darker October mornings.

Off we went for donuts the other morning, a Saturday. Entering a donut shop with Suze, I feel the same joy I used to feel when entering vintage ballyards. 

First, there is the scent of the merch. Then there is the new-car sheen of the trays of chocolate donuts just out of the oven. 

Honestly, if you can’t be happy in a donut shop, where can you be happy? Church? A poker room? The Olive Garden? 

Then we stop for ice for a garden party we are throwing. Eight bags, five bucks a pop, ouch. But the 7-Eleven clerk offers to help us heft them into the trunk.

“He didn’t have to do that,” I tell Suze as we drive away.

Suze loves 7-Elevens, though not this particular outlet since the machine doesn’t mix the Diet Cokes quite right, she says. Like many women, she lives on Diet Cokes.

FYI, the only way I would drink a Diet Coke is if there were a donut in it, perhaps one of the fancier brands … a blueberry Bavarian cream. Then I might drink a Diet Coke.

“Life without music is a mistake,” someone once said.

True dat. I can’t imagine life without music, just as I cannot imagine life without donuts, or Milk Duds, or Malibu sunsets.

As I’ve noted before, we are the sum total of the little things we love. It’s what offsets the frustrations. It’s what gets us up in the morning. 

For instance, in the fall I really crave Sloppy Joe’s. A Sloppy Joe is a time machine to the school lunches of my youth.  In the third grade, we would line up for miles on the days they served Sloppy Joes, tater tots on the side.

I don’t know whether schools serve that anymore. I suspect some scold would flag the non-nutritive elements of a Sloppy Joe and tater tots, ignoring the joy and emotional sustenance they offer a bunch of squirmy 9-year-olds. 

Even in third grade, we are the sum total of the things we love. If you give kids vegan meatballs with a side of grapes, are you not signaling to them a seedless future? What’s the point of learning long division  when your stomach is sad from vegan meatballs?

Third grade was an especially tough year for me. We learned cursive writing, and our teacher (Fraulein Bob), insisted that our small s’s gently kiss the middle line of our ruled paper. Or else. 

Fraulein Bob, a substantial woman with sideburns and a whip, insisted that our t’s tickle the top line of our writing papers as well. Compared to the others, my handwriting always looked like vandalism. It looked like stab wounds.

Meanwhile, Fraulein Bob’s favorite student (Myra Muzeniks), made s’s that looked like little doves dancing across the page. They had the arc of Da Vinci, the whimsy of Monet. It was as if Myra Muzeniks’ cursive writing had inspired the Renaissance.

In third grade, of course, some of the boys chewed their pencils in anticipation of the Sloppy Joes they could smell simmering in the cafeteria. 

If you chewed your pencil, you were placed in makeshift stocks and pillories that Fraulein Bob built in her off hours. Once you were chained up, other kids got to throw stuff at you – erasers, shoes, rocks. Pretty fun.

I never chewed my pencil in the third grade, but my friend Mark Johnson ate some 250 pencils over the course of the year, gnawing them the way dogs chew rawhide bones.

Mark just couldn’t help himself. And Fraulein Bob took obvious glee in mocking him in front of the entire class. 

She’d call him up and have him present his chewed pencil to us. It was one of those fat navy blue pencils they gave to kids who were learning cursive, thick as candy canes, which apparently is how they tasted to Mark Johnson. 

When Mark was done, there would no longer be any paint on the pencil, just tooth marks. It appeared to be nude … the work of savages.

I used to wonder if Myra Muzeniks – teacher’s pet and budding Nobel laureate – ever ran a ripe new pencil under her nose, breathed deep the pine scent and thought: “Wow, I bet they really are delicious,” then slipped one into her pocket for later.

Probably not. But maybe.

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