D'oh, nuts!

    Fate has a way of upbraiding you.
    If you remember EGD's most recent guest post, a week ago Sunday, a friend related a terrible experience with Dunkin'' Donuts at Midway Airport — service so bad that at least one reader doubted it could be true. It was.

     In my little introductory paragraph, I really laid into Dunkin' Donuts. "Never eat at a Dunkin' Donuts for any reason whatsoever," I urged.

     Though I felt guilty about it. My condemnation was based purely on thinking their donuts are not worth putting in your mouth. I wouldn't do it, and I'd eat a Circus Peanut. Even as I applied the lash, I remembered those many long ago mornings in my early 20s when I'd look forward to breakfast consisting of a pair of Dunkin' muffins in a waxy paper bag and a cup of coffee as I made the drive from Oak Park to my job at the Wheaton Daily Journal.  A bran muffin for the main meal and a chocolate chip muffin for dessert. They were good company in my dead grandmother's dinky blue Chevy Citation. Peeling off chunks of the muffin top, the shiny, dense, best part, life seemed to hold promise.

     Maybe they were sweet and awful and I just didn't know any better. But I still liked them.

     The day that post ran — garnering twice the readership of anything I wrote the previous week (heck might as well say it — earning better stats than anything I wrote all month) — I found myself at O'Hare with my wife, heading out on the trip that we are now returning from (apologies to readers whose comments I didn't post. "AHA! You're on VACATION! You're OUT OF TOWN, not CURRENTLY RESIDING IN YOUR HOUSE IN NORTHBROOK. Which is now EMPTY..." My wife doesn't like me to post that on the blog. People are crazy. Things happen).

     My wife isn't crazy. She is sensible, and eats good food. Sitting there by the gate, she wanted something not in our store of foodstuffs. She wanted a banana. Knowing I was at an airport where prices are insane, I asked, before setting out in search, what the most I should spend on her banana. 

    "It could be five dollars," I warned.

     "Two dollars," she said, sensible. In a supermarket, a banana costs about 19 cents.
     I dutifully toddled over to a nearby market sort of place, with sandwiches and cheese sticks and such. Insane prices. $12 for a modest bag of candy. And no bananas. Nearby was a Dunkin' which had — and you see this coming, right? — a bowl of big, yellow, unblemished, perfectly ripe, bananas.  Price — $1.10 apiece.
    So Dunkin', which I had keelhauled that very day, was offering the cheapest, best foodstuff for sale at O'Hare, not that I did a survey. Having advised others to never patronize the place, I was patronizing it myself. Touché, fate.

     Walking back to the gate, I couldn't resist tucking the banana into my fleece pocket, so that one end poked out.
     I walked up to my wife.
     "Say it," I instructed.
     She smiled, instantly understanding.
     "Is that a banana in your pocket," she said "Or are you just happy to see me?"
     "Both," I said.
     She took the banana.
      "I was going to say it even before you asked," she said.

     My friend, by the way, said that Dunkin' Donuts did apologize to her for their abysmal service, without so much as offering her a gift certificate, not that shed' patronize them again. I would. But only for bananas.