Hello!
I'm glad to be part of this collaborative newsletter alongside such good writers. If you don't know me, I'm the author of a few novels (The Bee-Loud Glade, Fram, and Scratch), and an editor of the literary website Necessary Fiction.
Like so many people at the stay-at-home height of the pandemic, I spent a lot of time walking locally. Those walks and the landscape I poked around in got me writing some wandering, digressive essays to feel like I had more freedom to roam than I did at the time. My first contribution to IN THE ABSENCE OF is one of those essays (here's another, if you're into apples). Some of what I've written about here has found its way into a novel now, too, but that's another story.
Thanks for reading,
Steve Himmer
Behind the elementary school near the tip of our peninsular neighborhood stands a burial ground hosting several rows of identically-sized white marble stones. From the windows of the classrooms at the back of the building they must look like an orderly grin on the far side of the playing field, just above where the land rolls down to the water and the stream of a salt marsh flows into a bay and on toward the Boston Harbor Islands.
What's it like to look up from subtraction to have your eye fall on the dead? I should have asked my daughter before she moved to middle school. When I was elementary age I saw myself in an old cartoon about a distracted boy named Ralph, who gazed out the classroom window at daydream lives as a fighter pilot or a jungle explorer or a seafaring captain or some other midcentury fantasy of American boyhood. What if he’d looked instead upon graves?
The stones are what remain of a sailors' rest home that stood where the school stands today, a place where aged mariners lived out their landlocked decline. Snug Harbor was founded in 1856 "among grand old trees, under which the blue waters of the Bay are seen," according to King’s Handbook of Boston Harbor in 1888. Imagine the stories the residents swapped. The lengths of fish must have increased exponentially with each retelling and the ferocity of storms and the heights of waves grown until all hands were lost. What better audience for old sailors than their own kind? Who else could be trusted to taste the truth in salty lies? Other listeners, ears attuned to the steady sounds of dry land, might hear only the presence of embroidered details and miss the loss at each story's center.
The gravestone with pride of place reads,
Capt. Hanson Gregory
Recognized by the
National Bakers Ass’n
as the inventor of
the doughnut
Born Camden, Maine 1832
Died Quincy, Mass. 1921
His stone is no grander than those around it, no more ornate and no taller. It has more words on it, that’s all. The others give only a name and one, sometimes both of a lost sailor's dates.
Quincy is a city built on memorials, where what is claimed as the nation's first commercial railway was laid to haul granite blocks from a quarry to build Boston's Bunker Hill monument. Two presidents and their families stand in statue form here. A fireman. Angels. Soldiers from several wars. A statue of Robert Burns, for reasons unknown, with his hat on his hip and a thick sheaf of wheat at his side. Even a statue commemorating granite workers themselves. Headstones stand not only in cemeteries but also line up unrooted at the few remaining stone sheds in town, waiting to be chosen by someone's survivors and carved with a name. From the front porch of my previous house I watched solemn families move along rows of ornate and plain options at the workshop and outdoor showcase of a well-known sculptor, mourners in practice for future visits elsewhere once the stone had been set.
Captain Hanson Gregory, the donut’s inventor, has only the plainest of markers in undecorated flour-white marble, not even our local stone. A mundane memorial for something so vast. Members of my own family going back six generations have prouder stones here than Gregory's despite bringing no innovations that outlived them into the world. In the display of frostings and sprinkles at the founding location of Dunkin' Donuts standing at the opposite end of our peninsula where it meets the mainland, Gregory's would be the old-fashioned cake donut. More than enough when made well but hardly worth eating when made by that chain where the donuts are no longer baked fresh on site and the handled donut that gave them their name was retired in 2003 because the machines couldn't accommodate its too-human shape. As bland as an old sailor's story without any lies, though I've heard that the Rosenbergs, founders of Dunkin' Donuts, paid for Gregory's stone.
Inventing the donut is one thing. Inventing the hole is another. And that’s Gregory’s real claim to fame according to his other memorial. A few hours north in Rockport, Maine where I also once lived by coincidence in his punctured shadow, that second stone reads,
In commemoration
This is the birthplace
of
Captain Hanson Gregory
Who first invented
The hole in the donut
In the year 1847
Erected by his friends Oct 31, 1947
Should the "ugh" removed from the spelling of donut on that extra marker should be heard as implied, a recommended reaction to its southern competitor's claim? Is any other groundbreaker acclaimed for their invention of nothing? For their creation of loss?
One story is that on June 22, 1847, Gregory was at sea as a young schooner crewman transporting a load of limestone. He always shipped out with a box of his mother’s cakes ready for baking but those dough balls were hard to cook evenly — overdone on the outside, raw in the center — leading him to experiment. That's how he discovered or uncovered or recovered the hole, whether by poking his finger through one of the cakes or by spearing it on the spoke of the ship’s wheel in a storm or by cutting a circle with an upturned tin box as three different versions would have it. He has multiple origins himself, both Camden and Rockport according to his dueling markers, so no wonder his invention does, too.
If it is his invention at all, because donuts appear in Washington Irving’s writing about New York as early as 1809, perhaps more along the rough, crispy, unpunctured lines of Dutch oliebollen. Branches and swords must have suspended dough rings above fires a long time before that, whether we’d call those donuts or not, whether anyone present thought to recall the invention as an invention instead of a way to cook in the moment, but Hanson Gregory like any old sailor was happy enough to claim credit for cutting the first donut hole “ever seen by mortal eyes.” When asked by the Washington Post in 1916 if he was pleased with what he’d discovered, he replied, “Was Columbus pleased?”
Gregory went on to tell the Post — in a pair of apt if accidental comparisons to other men famous for discoveries they may not have made — that he'd attempted to patent a donut hole cutter, wary of Peary's failure to patent the North Pole or Columbus America, "but somebody got in ahead of me."
How many other things fell down that hole? How many earlier fried dough innovators? Hanson Gregory’s mother, for one, whose own baking made his discovery possible if anyone did. Any earlier inventions of donuts and holes have been swallowed by his story getting sole credit, which is an old story in its own right.
Imagine a hole as your legacy. That an emptiness is what you leave behind. Then don’t imagine it because we all know. Or will when someone else shops for our stone. Hanson Gregory doesn’t know he's remembered for contributing both something and nothing, and if someone else really invented the donut they don't know they’ve been robbed of their fame. The hole is deep enough to contain all of that. Packed with absence and erasure along with bacon and jalapeño and other fillings never imagined by Gregory's mother.
A hole contains my own history too. The granite trade and its emptied spaces brought my family from Scotland to Quincy, emigrating to quarry stone and carve a new world and its markers when their home landscape in Aberdeenshire ran dry and could build nothing else. A century later I reversed their route across the ocean to fill some holes in myself or to see the empty space where I'd started.
Days after arriving in Glasgow for a year's study abroad, I bought a jelly donut at the Greggs bakery beside George’s Square. This was long before the peninsula where I live now, before coincidence delivered me to where generations of my family already stake their claims in the ground. I didn't expect to live here any more than Hanson Gregory expected to end his days in that old sailor's home. I wasn't looking so far ahead then, not at where I'd wash up these two and half decades later nor even where my donut was facing as the piping tip puncture wound in its powdered flesh erupted upon my first bite. Bright red jelly streamed down the front of my shirt behind my half-unzipped jacket. My aim — the donut's aim, really — was perfect. Precise. The kind of quotidian clumsy ballet you want to show someone but in a city where I'd just arrived and didn't know anyone yet, where I was more absence than presence, there was no one to laugh nor to marvel nor to hand me a fistful of napkins that wouldn’t have been any use. No one to remind me of that awkward moment for years afterward every time we ate donuts together nor to make the story more exciting with every telling.
The jelly set. The shirt stained. I could do nought and I hope I made that pun in my mind, that I laughed. I more likely said something crude as a sailor at rest. A holed donut, the donut of Hanson Gregory's creation, holds no sticky secrets nor hidden threats. Its emptiness is a smooth sea.
George's Square that morning was piled with flowers. Barriers were arranged to form spaces for the city to fill with its grief for Princess Diana, absented that week in a Parisian tunnel. I grieved more for my shirt which sounds crass but no more so than any fact. No more than my lack of interest in the other names arranged in rows behind Gregory's stone. What forms a presence or an absence can't always be predicted and a small loss loomed larger for me. A humbler stone in a quieter corner.
We leave what we put into the world and also what we take out. The space we clear for others in our departure and the gaps in our histories that leave room to dream, and the holes from which everything grows. The places we set out for and those we don't. The stones that fade over time, names and dates eroded, until they could be anyone, anything, or no one and nothing at all.
I zipped my jacket. I left the jelly to be laundered later. Whatever shirt I was wearing that morning in a different city also built of sea and of stone I'm unable to picture it now. The jacket, gray fleece, lingers unworn in my basement near the burial ground but the rest is erased.
What a delight to read a new piece by Steve Himmer!