The Church of Happy Donuts

By Cole Manley

I remember your hands. Your huge soft hands holding my tiny fingers as we walked down 24th Street. That was where I fell in love with Karl the fog. With the cold cold San Francisco air falling gently over the painted ladies. The fog in all its wondrous mystery, billowing over Twin Peaks, from where my 3 year old mind saw the edge of the world.

Back then, my world was much smaller. It was a few blocks of Noe Valley, from my preschool on one end to the fire station on our block to the Happy Donuts on 24th Street. When the fire trucks screamed past, I would scream with them, and come racing over on my Little Tikes bike to our living room picture window, where I would peer down and catch the red blur, if I was lucky.

“What do you want to be for Halloween?” my mom asked. “A fireman!” I squealed. And so I was. This was a few years later, to be fair. When I was 3, my parents dressed me up, to my inconsolable horror, as Big Bird from Sesame Street. I proceeded to win the Noe Valley Halloween contest for best costume. To this day, the photo of me in my Big Bird costume--yellow feathering with a giant yellow head--is one of my mom’s favorite family stories. In the photo, I am frowning and look utterly miserable. But I was cute.

The land of donuts and Big Bird and fire trucks was a safe world.

The fog made it safe. I’ve always been a bit irritated when people complain about San Francisco’s fog. For me, Karl has always been an old and comforting friend, the kind of friend who checks in on you when you’ve lost someone close.

To this day, when I drive up 280 to the city, and see the fog rolling down the magical hills, I smile. There you are, hello again. And may you always greet new arrivals to the city, as you did me.

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Every Sunday, you would hold my hand, and we would walk, and they were small steps back then. But they are walks I wish I could go on with you every day now. You would wear your big blue jeans, the pair that always seemed one size too big, and your blue jacket with your deep red button-down. You would carefully place your black Stetson hat on top of your receding hairline, and off we went. Me taking three steps for your one.

My mom knew that this was our weekly Sunday ritual--the church of happy donuts.

Let me take you on one of our walks to the church of happy donuts.

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The first thing you have to know was that this was a very unconventional church with an odd cast of disciples.

My dad was not a religious man. He was a proud atheist. He was deeply suspicious of any authority figure. The more power you had, the more my dad questioned your motives. You could be a God or a capitalist, but my dad would brush you off all the same. It was a skepticism for authority and a belief in the masses that came from two main sources, the first, his rebellion against the conservative Irish Catholicism he grew up with in upstate New York, and, the second, his structural critique of capitalism and his belief in Marxism.

My dad would often say that any belief he had in God was beaten out of him by the nuns. In those days, in the 1940s and 50s in Little Falls, New York--where my dad’s family hailed from--Catholic schools believed in corporal punishment as much as they believed in mercy and justice.

John Manley turned away from Catholicism, and he began questioning the injustices he saw around him. But, it may be a surprise to those who knew him later in life, that through 1970, at least, my dad was fairly conservative politically. When the March on Washington happened about 57 years ago, on August 28, 1963, my dad was in DC, and he saw the marchers converge on the Mall, where they heard Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis speak.

But my dad was not among the listeners. To his regret years later, he remained in his office building studying the House Ways and Means Committee.

It was not until years after he had become a respected scholar of the US Congress at Stanford that my dad translated his distrust of authority into a belief in Marxism and a critique of capitalism.

My dad would often say that Vietnam finally worked its way into his psyche. The war in Vietnam shocked my father into a reckoning with the structures of power in the United States. Marxism sounds like such a grand and complex theory, but, for my dad, it was a very straightforward and a very personal undertaking.

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“Do you see him there, Cole?” My dad motioned with his other hand as we slowed down along 24th Street, near the parking lot that’s now a Whole Food’s with Teslas.

I looked towards where my dad was pointing and saw a homeless man, although my 3 year old self just saw someone who looked fairly sad, a man sitting on a torn orange sleeping bag with a Starbucks cup with loose change. My dad spoke softly and carefully to me as we got closer.

“He doesn’t have a home. That’s not right, Cole. Everyone should have a home.” My dad spoke with quiet anger.

Every Sunday--for as far back as I can remember--my Dad would carefully look towards the man and place a twenty-dollar bill in his cup.

“God bless,” the man would say, and my dad would nod.

With a few words of hello and thanks, we would continue walking, although I am sure that I looked back over my shoulder at the man in curiosity, from time to time.

One Sunday morning, on our way to church, we came upon his customary spot, but it was empty, and he had gone. My dad said something like, “I hope he’s in a better place now.” And he put the 20 dollar bill back in his wallet.

We never saw him again.

---

It was only a few blocks from the parking lot where our homeless friend sat to the church of happy donuts. A block away, you could smell them.

The rich sweet aromas of the donuts. Of the glazed chocolates, of the old fashioneds my mom preferred, of the jam-filled sugar donuts that oozed their strawberry fillings all over your sticky stubby fingers.

But, most importantly, the maple bars. The maple bars arranged in neat rows in the display case, beckoning to me at eye level.

My dad’s favorite donut was the maple bar, so my favorite donut was the maple bar.

I still love the dated interior of Happy Donuts. In the one on 24th Street, a mural of bakers fills the back wall. Behind the rows and rows of donuts, you can see portraits of bakers at work, preparing the dough, taking donuts out to the shop. The bakers appeared so realistic to my young eyes that I half expected the tall baker with the black hat to come walking out of the wall like a Hogwarts ghost and douse some powdered sugar in the air.

It was a magical and sugary space.

The doughy texture and sweet maple frosting kept us coming back to this church of bliss and peace and happiness. The preacher was an elderly woman who commanded Happy Donuts and all of her happy customers. She would look down at me as I tried to order my donut and chuckle and laugh and smile. “Hello!!!” she would say loudly and kindly to me as I carefully feasted my eyes upon the donut selections. My dad would then translate and complete the donuts order, and we would happily sit at the plastic tables with the swivel-chairs.

One Sunday, we were sitting at the table on the swivel-chairs that I loved so much. My dad was reading a newspaper, one of his other favorite hobbies, and, when he looked down from the paper towards me on the chair, I was nowhere in sight.

My dad was frozen in fear. He looked all around the bakery until he decided to look underneath the table, where he found me, a bit dazed and confused, as I had twisted my swivel chair so violently that I had fallen off of it to the linoleum floor. I was probably just enjoying my new window to the world of the bakery, but my dad found the whole episode quite traumatic.

From then on, he paid his newspaper a bit less attention as we munched on our maple bars.

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When we moved to Palo Alto when I was 4 or 5, we found a new Happy Donuts location along El Camino. This one’s maple bars were just as delicious. And they had a giant chocolate donut affixed to the ceiling in the middle of the shop, which always tickled my imagination. At 7, I was less morbid than I am today, so I did not fixate on what would happen if, one day, the donut came crashing down on its unsuspecting disciples below.

As I got a bit older, I would sometimes try new donuts, the apple cinnamon bear claws or the cinnamon buns--monstrous delicacies. But I never strayed too far from the reliable maple bar. My dad would not have let me.

After second grade, we moved from Palo Alto across the country to a strange town named Westport, Connecticut, an hour outside New York City. Sadly, there were no Happy Donuts franchises on the East Coast. No one sold maple bars, either.

We found a few new donut shops. But it never felt quite the same.

Whenever we would visit our family back in the SF Bay Area, once a year or so, we made a point of stopping at the original Happy Donuts along 24th Street. There, the images came flooding back, just as the fog crested Twin Peaks, and I was transported to a time and a place that felt so very warm and familiar.

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No one quite knows, do they, when the last trip to happy donuts will be?

The doctors mentioned cognitive impairment at first, then dementia, then Alzheimers, then Lewy-Body dementia--a series of diagnoses that didn’t seem to matter all that much. My mom and I could see the effects of these diseases on my father, the unceasing progression. The momentary forgetfulness at first. Leaving a shoe untied. Then the loss of certain skills and abilities. Struggling with socks, then struggling with shirts.

You don’t have to go into details with Alzheimer’s. Or, at least, it feels almost disrespectful to highlight the many ways in which this disease attacked my father. John Manley is a proud man. He is a strong man. He speaks forcefully.

One time, when I was 13 or so, my parents and I were on vacation in London and checking in to our hotel. As soon as the receptionist greeted us, my Dad said, “Manley.” It turned out that the receptionist had asked us, with customary British politeness, how we were doing that fine evening, and was a bit taken aback when my dad had responded with his last name. He was just alerting her to his desire to be checked in as quickly as possible, but, for a second, she questioned the sanity of her new hotel guests.

John Manley is the kind of person who does not display his emotions very readily, but, when he does, you feel them as if they are your own feelings.

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The doctors did not know about Happy Donuts.

They thought that they were treating just another old man felled by “cognitive impairment.” Some of them didn’t even believe that my dad was that sick. My dad was still using his PhD vocabulary to analyze the philosophy behind doctor’s appointments during his doctor’s appointments, so some doctors just presumed that no one’s brain could use such words and be so sick.

They were wrong.

One of the doctors my mom saw with my dad, during the hundreds of appointments they went to over the past several years, had an even stranger response to my mom telling him that John had Alzheimer’s, and that there were serious symptoms developing.

The man looked at my mom and dad and laughed a bit, telling her, “Oh, Alzheimer’s, not that bad, my dad has memory problems, and everyone just turns into a happy drunk.”

We never saw that doctor again.

---

During the pandemic, my dad and I kept enjoying our happy donuts. Every Sunday, I would drive to the Happy Donuts on El Camino with my mom, and we would go to my dad’s senior living facility in Sunnyvale.

For my dad, the donuts had become one of his final pleasures. Life had been savagely transformed by both Alzheimer’s and the pandemic. There were no more trips to Marie Callender’s for key lime pie. There were no more drives to the San Gregorio General Store for Irish music on the weekends, where we met our family friends, George and Joey. George’s store is a land of poetry and lavender candles, a place where coloring books and Steinbeck sit next to ribald postcards and animal hats. It’s where John Manley, normally stoic, fervently nodded his head in rhythm to the music, a Sierra Nevada in hand, and where I first danced as a toddler.

Like my 3 year old world in Noe Valley, my dad’s world was becoming smaller.

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It is August 2020. It is a Sunday shortly after my 27th birthday, and I am on a sacred mission. I am going back to the church of happy donuts, for possibly the last time.

My dad’s order has changed slightly over the years. He now prefers two maple bars, so that’s what he gets. We arrive at my dad’s apartment, and, as is our new custom, I stand outside his room on the ground floor, with my dad at the screen door.

He smiles slightly as he looks towards me, and I hand him the donuts. It only takes us a couple minutes to devour the donuts together, but I feel, during these brief respites, that he is happy. He sometimes sits in his rocking chair on the porch and looks gently towards me, saying quietly, “That’s a nice sight.” The great redwood trees filter the sun towards our faces. A gentle breeze cools us, but there is no fog on the hilltops, none that we can see, at least.

When my dad looks towards me as he eats his maple bar, there is nothing Alzheimer’s can do. It is losing a battle that had been won the moment we first set down 24th Street, nearly three decades before.

I cannot hold my dad’s hands, as he had held mine. I cannot hug my dad, as he had hugged me. I cannot take him to Noe Valley.

But we have our maple bars.