If life is a doughnut

Because I live in a doughnut city, my life has been measured out in pastry sleeves globbed with blueberry jelly. The doughnut shops of my adolescence stained my essay pages and sorry-I-suck letters with double-double drips, while providing a place where the pangs of youth could settle over a fat sugar circle and a hot cup of lunch-counter coffee. In the '70s and '80s, each shop had an identity, each pastry-slinger a story. So last week, I embarked on a personal doughnut odyssey, looking for what's different in the doughnutscape and what's the same, visiting myriad shops until, alas, I could doughnut no more.