Thanksgiving at the donut shop with grandma

Meal time at grandma's orphanage in Covina, Calif.

Every afternoon my grandmother walked to the donut shop down the street for some coffee and conversation with the other regulars who felt like family. And they must have felt like family to the owners as well, because they hosted holiday meals for them. And one Thanksgiving, my grandmother invited me to join the gathering at the donut shop.

That was cool.

I don’t remember spending any Thanksgivings with my grandmother as a child. Likely because she lived in Los Angeles most of the years my parents were raising my sister and me near Santa Cruz, but also I’m not sure that holiday was very important to her. She didn’t like to bake or cook at all, and never seemed comfortable at social gatherings, especially those with family.

 

I was never really close to my grandmother, always too afraid of her temper and criticism to relax. But the years I was in college we came the closest to being friends, talking on the phone and writing letters at least once a week, and visiting each other several times a year.

My last year of college, I drove up from campus to stay with her in Santa Cruz (where she had moved to when I was a teenager) during my holiday break, so we were both invited to the donut shop that Thanksgiving.

Grandma with my cat the year we ate at the donut shop.

She didn’t cook anything to bring; most of what she made in the kitchen was canned soup, toast and tea. But she did buy a pumpkin pie at Trader Joe’s, put on hose and her best hat, and seemed very happy to introduce me to her family at the donut shop. I think she was quite proud that I was finally completing a university degree as my mother had, especially since for years it seemed I would never move on from community college.

 

I remember feeling proud of her that day, and happy she had found that family at the donut shop. Orphaned by the Spanish flu and raised in a Masonic home until she was 18, my grandmother had struggled ever since to maintain intimate relationships.

She never married or even had long-term romantic relationship, but she did have a daughter whom she raised as a single working mother in the 1940s and 50s. As adults they always had a tense relationship, but my grandmother deeply loved her only child, and was quietly devastated when she was killed in a car crash at the age of 41.

 

From a mostly respectful distance, my grandmother did all she could to make sure my sister and I were taken care of after the crash, especially financially since my mother had been the breadwinner. But for the nearly five decades that I knew my grandmother, everyone in her life seemed to be kept very carefully at arm’s length.

Which is why I think she sought out places like the donut shop, where you could sit and soak in other humans as much, or as little, as you wanted. And then leave whenever you wanted.

At the orphanage in Southern California where she was raised, the dozens of children ate all their meals together in a large dining room. I imagine for my grandmother, eating and drinking in a communal setting like the donut shop must have felt like home, giving her the kind of intimacy she was most comfortable with.

 

But the donut shop was even better, because she was always able to choose whom to sit next to and for how long, usually recording in her daily journals whom she talked with and what they discussed. 

One day it was the woman who “also likes Opera and loves to travel.” Another the man who was unhappy because his dog ran away and his wife was smoking too much. One afternoon she talked to “men, one named Bruce,” about “films and olden times,” and later that week the same men helped her solve car trouble, suggesting she use a hair dryer on her distributor when the engine wouldn’t turn over on cold mornings.

Learning my grandmother had such a support system that day made me so relieved. And to wish that we can all find a donut shop of our own.