National Doughnut Day: It Was the Doughnuts

“What are you going to write about this week?” a friend asked me.

“I was thinking of writing about doughnuts -- it’s National Doughnut Day on Friday!” I said.

Her: “But isn’t your Substack about dogs?”

Me: “Yes but… um… you can’t spell ‘doughnut’ without dog.”

Her: “Actually…”

Me: “Listen. I can relate it to behavior and dogs. I contain multitudes.”

“You also contain doughnuts,” she said.

Touché!

I’m going to give you the behavior-science informed dog training lesson upfront: If you’re training a difficult behavior that needs to be done on a regular basis over a long period of time, and you’re deciding between rewarding some of the time the behavior occurs (aka a differential rate of reinforcement) or rewarding every correct response (aka continuous reinforcement), you’re probably better off going with the latter.

And, if you’re choosing between rewards that are experiential and may vary and take time to deliver — like throwing a ball, say — and a reward that is edible and standardized and quickly consumed, again you most likely should choose door number two. Mkay?

I’m speaking as one who was once on the dog’s side of this equation.

You’ll never guess what the quickly consumed, highly reinforcing reinforcer was!

I Love Doughnuts

The day my father died in 2018 was a terrible day but also a glorious one, as it is when I first learned that the Lower East Side shop, Doughnut Plant, delivers.

I summoned a dozen doughnuts, and, together, we sat shiva. Death is a little easier to face when... there are doughnuts.

Doughnut Plant is a local chain born in Manhattan in the nineties. Its offerings are hand rolled, fluffy, and covered in artisanal glazes in flavors like wild blueberry, Meyer lemon and clementine.

Prior to that day, I’d always visited the Doughnut Plant in person at its original location, on Grand Street on the Lower East Side, just north of the Manhattan bridge.

I first started going there a year or two after it first opened. Doughnuts, back then, were not a major weakness of mine.

I found myself on Grand Street because, as a teenager, I used to go weekly to visit an elderly mostly-blind woman who lived in Seward Park housing, just a few steps away from Doughnut Plant. I was matched with her by the city’s Department of the Aging, which I reached out to because I was dealing with depression, and someone suggested volunteering might help me get out of my own head. Or maybe it’d help me see that other people in the city lived lives more miserable than mine.

Beatrice, who had been born just a few months after the Titanic sank, was, indeed, miserable. Her favorite saying was “The old gray mare ain’t what she used to be,” which is a depressing thing to hear, and must be even more depressing to utter.

Macular degeneration had been stealing her eyesight for years, and she spent most of her time alone at home watching TV through a large magnifying glass and listening to books on tape.

“I’m a real bitch,” she announced the first time we met.

If a person told me this about themselves now, I would run. To paraphrase Maya Angelou: If someone tells you they’re a jerk, they probably are! But I was young and mistook her self-awareness for humility.

Orphaned at age six and raised, reluctantly, by a stepmother in Williamsburg who favored her own children over her, Beatrice didn’t finish grade school and never married. In her twenties, she set out to be a businesswoman, and ran her own electrolysis office for decades on 14th Street. Her half brother had to sign the lease for her because no one would rent to a woman.

She spent many hundreds of hours removing shoulder hair from closeted gay men. Whenever I’d press her for stories, she’d tell the one about her brother signing the lease.

Why did I keep going year after year? I think because every now and then I’d do something that made me feel like I truly was being helpful. Like I replaced her rotary phone with a big-button one, and then further blew her mind by setting up its speed dial. This was life changing for her. During a blackout that left her housebound for days, I carried provisions up to her 12th floor apartment.

These occasional and surprising wins were enough to keep me going.

But, over the years, the visits became more challenging. When I found that maggots had eaten a hole through a pile of old stamps on her kitchen table, I was nonplussed, but she was unconcerned.

Then one day, I took a sip from the coffee mug she offered me and wound up with a cockroach in my mouth. I opened the percolator to find that a family of them had taken up residence in the pot.

A smarter person might have abandoned the whole non-remunerative effort at that point, but not I.

I continued going… but resolved to bring my own coffee.

That is what prompted me to wander into Doughnut Plant one day. But it didn’t seem right to only get a coffee. It wasn’t called Coffee Plant. So, I got a cinnamon bun for myself, and a chocolate glazed doughnut for Beatrice. Valrhona chocolate glazed.

My bun was warm and gooey. Unlike any other bun I’d ever had. It was a life changing experience. I decided I had to taste all the flavors. Beatrice loved them, too. And I think they made her nicer. It’s hard to be mean when you are eating the world’s best doughnut.

Doughnut Plant helped extend my relationship with Beatrice beyond its natural life. But around ten years in, things went south. In quick succession, not long after she turned ninety, her half sister died, then her niece, then her half brother.

She had never had much to say about any of these people, but once they were dead, they became important figures in her life. Over our doughnuts and coffee (mine now always in a paper cup), she’d bellow on about how she was totally alone in the world.

This stung, as it left me feeling a bit invisible.

Hello! What about me over here, sweeping up your maggots, friend!

I soon came to realize that her appreciation wasn’t what motivated me to go see her every week; the doughnuts were. They were what got me from my apartment to her block. And since I was on the block already, it was easy enough to go see her.

Then one day she slipped in the bath and was there ten hours before anyone showed up for help. When she got home from the hospital, I arranged for a social worker to visit her. After their meeting, the social worker called me in tears, saying she’d never had an old person be so mean to her.

On the one hand, I felt like she needed me. On the other hand, I was starting to feel like it was all…more than I had signed up for. Maybe it was time for me to bow out.

But could I really give up Doughnut Plant?

Why I Kept Going

This is where the dog training lesson comes in: If a behavior is happening over and over again, it probably has a function.

But the function might not be what you think it is!

I bet most people who knew me thought I was going to see Beatrice because I liked her, or because I felt good about helping someone in need.

But actually, in those later years, it really became about the doughnuts.

If someone wanted to change the behavior of me visiting this old woman, they would’ve had to shut down the Doughnut Plant. Heaven Forbid!

Or, they could’ve added a consequence to my visits that was incredibly aversive -- enough so to outweigh my doughnut devotion.

Like, say, poop.

That is what happened. One day, when I entered her apartment and found the floors smeared with her excrement. It was all over the floor and her clothes. I told her what I was seeing (and smelling) and she said I was nuts.

The only thing I could think to do was to call the social worker, but she had said she’d never return.

It was then that I realized that our relationship had truly run its course. No doughnut was that good. I suggested I help her find a home health aide, but she hissed at me that she was alone in the world and wanted to remain that way.

So, I subtracted myself from the equation for good.

Ending a weekly doughnut ritual is a surefire weight loss plan. But a life totally without doughnuts might as well be one where coffee comes with cockroaches.

So, I’ve continued to make special pilgrimages there on the regular. I often get two doughnuts when I’m there. One for me, and one in honor of Beatrice.

But now, I eat them both myself. Because… she really was a bitch.

Leave a comment