Due to my possession of a vaccine card, today I went to Krispy Kreme. Due to my possession of a vaccine, tomorrow I will see my cousin.

In other words, our celebration of “St. Patrick’s Day plus two months” was a rip-roaring success.

Doughnuts

My “chauffeur” (sibling), who has had little opportunity to take advantage of her vaccine card’s power to provide free Krispy Kreme, decided to finally cash in on this best feature of having a vaccine. (For those of you in a coronavirus-free (or coronavirus-indifferent…) future, the national doughnut chain known as Krispy Kreme is, for the whole year, offering a free original glazed doughnut to anyone who presents a vaccine card at the establishment.)

free doughnut promotional image

The promotional image used by Krispy Kreme to market its free doughnut offer.

We made what was an unexpectedly treacherous journey to our area’s sole Krispy Kreme, navigating over narrow bridges spanning roaring rivers a creek, through far too many construction zones, and, with a bizarre left turn that may have gone several inches in the opposite direction of the traffic whose path we were crossing, into the parking lot of the Krispy Kreme. Thankfully, we had ABBA to help us through it all.

The whole transaction felt, in my sibling’s words, magical. You walk in, you wait for the people in front of you to make their detailed, halting order. Then, they pay (which is also an inexplicably long process). Now it’s your turn. A flash of a card, and the single employee at the counter (there are, invariably, several employees at the back doing whatever it is that employees at the back do) hands you a bag with a doughnut. Without a trip to the register, you walk out, doughnut bag (with doughnut) in hand.

Then, you eat the doughnut, but do you? Others took time for their order and paid money for their doughnuts, but you left without paying; you bit into the doughnut with only the slightest, airiest feeling of substance; and you ate without becoming filled up. A largely unserious but slightly legitimate question hovers in the back of your mind: Did you eat a doughnut, or did you just drive, hallucinate mildly and unadventurously for 15 minutes, and turn back for home?

Did you eat a doughnut, or did you just drive, hallucinate mildly and unadventurously for 15 minutes, and turn back for home?

Though basically the same route, our journey back somehow felt easier. It may have been eased, too, by my discovery – and subsequent consumption – of a missing crumb cake from yesterday’s trip (we had ordered two crumb cakes, but the un-full and possibly slightly delirious vegetarian only found one in doling out the post-dinner dessert).

We returned home with nothing to show for our trip, except a doughnut bag apiece. Our wallets were no lighter, our stomachs no fuller (save from the crumb cake), and our lives were, by all metrics, unchanged.

It should be noted, though, that our gas tank was emptier. I recall some doctor raging, at the time when Krispy Kreme announced the offer, that an American who took full advantage of Krispy Kreme’s ‘til-the-end-of-the-year deal would gain 15 pounds. So how free, they asked, is this free doughnut?

A more compelling argument against the free doughnut is that, given our distance from the nearest Krispy, it would be far cheaper to make a weekly drive and buy a dozen doughnuts than to make the daily drive for a single “free” doughnut. Also, I doubt that, at this point in my life, anything short of force-feeding myself could lead to a 15-pound weight increase.

Despite the cash savings from buying a dozen, the loss of the strange and magical experience of receiving a doughnut free to a select 150-million-member club far outweighs the monetary gain. Moreover, I have no plans to eat a doughnut a day.

Tomorrow

The plan for tomorrow is to visit a cousin. We did a video call with this cousin today, and we will see this cousin tomorrow.