I’m looking for the perfect donut. As far as goals, great quests, or life changing discoveries this may seem a little light. I mean, some people dedicate their lives to altruistic endeavors to make the world a better, safer, cleaner place so finding the perfect donut may seem frivolous. Let’s face it, every grocery store and gas station has donuts. Little Debbie and Hostess have given us baked sugar convenience for years, bad bakery is easy to find. However, perfection can be found if we dig a little deeper and let’s not dismiss the transformative effects, especially when shared, of a donut created, not manufactured.

That might be a lot of big words to say donuts are good – let’s eat them. The options are endless. We can have them whenever we want, but somehow Sundays are the best day and in Milwaukee we have more than just donuts. We have traditions so familiar, so everyday, that it’s can be hard to recognize them as traditions. They seem ordinary, we take them for granted, but if you step away and you find yourself without, you start to realize how special and necessary these small comforts are in our lives.

These things will change as we grow older. We go to school, we get new jobs, have kids, move away, come back, fall in and out of love, we do some of this or all of it and then we do it all over again. The circumstances of who we are is a constant evolution no matter how hard we fight to keep things the same. But there are those small comforts.

Like I said, the best days are Sundays. There’s nothing like a Sunday off, no work, maybe some chores, but that’s not really work. Nobody cares is you drink a beer while you cut the lawn. The best Sundays I can remember had a very specific menu and it was always the same. I took it for granted, just stuffed my face and smiled, until I moved away and it wasn’t there anymore.

Nineteen eighty something. Sundays started with a trip to Elm Grove to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. When I was tall enough to see over the handle and old enough to be left alone with the lawnmower, it would be my Sunday chore to cut the lawn. Before I was put to work, though, there was coffee cake from Meurer Bakery and when I was done there was hot ham and rolls from Sentry Foods and maybe chocolate chip cookies from their Crestwood bakery, the big ones that came stacked in bags of a dozen. In the afternoon, the family sat out back and talked about adult things, the kids would play, and we all listened to Bob Uecker call the Brewer’s games. Robin Yount was at shortstop and I climbed a tree with my belly full of Sunday.

Then I grew up and I forgot. No, that’s not quite right. I hadn’t paid attention, took for granted the simple comforts, didn’t listen to the voice of my home and went to find another someplace else. Still, in the other places, I gravitated to the baked goods of where ever I was, that best piece of Sunday. In Portland there’s Voodoo Doughnut. Their motto, “The Magic is in the Hole,” give them a risqué edge, making it silly and fun for adults to eat donuts topped with Captain Crunch, Oreos, or their person shaped Voodoo Doll filled with raspberry jelly and pierced through the chocolate icing with a pretzel stick. Their Bacon Maple Bar is amazing and the first time I’d ever eaten bacon on a donut, but Voodoo Doughnut is complicated and they spell donut with too many letters.

In Seattle, I found Top Pot Doughnut, again with all the letters. The Northwest delights in the complications of the proper. It’s a hipster thing where they take everything so seriously that it stops being fun, I mean, their beards are amazing, but seem like a lot of work. Top Pot was good, relatively simple, they have an apple fritter that I swear to God weighs four pounds. After you’ve eaten it, you spend the rest of the day feeling ashamed of yourself. The fritter was good, really good, so four pounds of butter, sugar and apples was worth the guilt and it went well with their brown flavored coffee.

Top Pot and Voodoo are fine, but they’re an experience, not a tradition. Every donut (not doughnut), was a momentary indulgence. It was like having a lot friends, but no family. There was no hot ham and rolls, no Uecker pushing that deep hit ball to centerfield, coaxing it with his voice to “get up, get up, get outta here…GONE!” There was no sense of home.

Milwaukee is home. This may all be nostalgic, but that comfort from the past is necessary to who we are now. Not in the sense that we can somehow make things better because of some ideal from the past, but because there are traditions that give us comfort so we can find a way to build a new future.

Milwaukee is changing, finding ways to evolve. The challenge is to do so without falling into the trap of reinvention. We need to keep our traditions, we need our Sundays, and while many of the bakeries are gone or changed, we still have some, we still have Grebe’s.

The one donut that can only really be found in Milwaukee is the cruller and nobody has a better, more perfect cruller than Grebe’s. There are French versions out west (yawn) and grocery store versions (meh) all over the upper Midwest, but Grebe’s has something special. The cruller may not be Freddie Mercury, it’s more John Deacon, but who wants to live in a world where there is no Another One Bites the Dust. Crullers are very rock n roll and discretely sexy.

But Grebe’s has more. Of course they do, they’ve been around for over eighty years. They know this city, they’ve listened and paid attention. They roll with the seasons, offering flavors to suit, there are paczki before the start of Lent, specialty cakes for any occasion, daily lunches, and most important hot ham and rolls on Sunday.

It’s these things, the Sunday sorts of things that ground us even its just for that one day. It’s our time to rest before we move forward again. These small comforts are our foundation, what we build on when we are compelled to build and they will be necessary in the months to come. Small comforts to tide us over, a small piece of normal.

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