Doughnuts And Cheese

This story is about Doughnuts and Cheese. I enjoy telling stories and I get distracted sometimes. I'll try not to get carried away.
Let me give you some background. We lived in a one bedroom house and we were poor. Scratch that. We were po. Couldn't afford the other O or R. You could always tell how poor you were by how much of the government commodities your family received.
If you got government cheese then you were poor.

We received the cheese, rice, powdered milk, powdered eggs, peanut butter, meat in a can, and some sort of canned milk.
Like, I said po.
I didn't understand any of the intricacies of things because I was a child, my father was doing this for his principles.
He had become a conscientious objector and left the military. Taken early retirement. Brought his family to his hometown. It meant times were tight. I didn't realize it at the time but, my father went through hell to make sure we were okay.
He applied for jobs that he was qualified for at places like Boeing, Lockheed, and General Motors.
He gave the store by our house's telephone number we didn't own a phone.
This isn't a story about racial inequality in Mississippi in the seventies.
Racism just was.
I didn't know anything about it: I was completely oblivious.
I only mention it now because it played a role in our situation.
You see all of those places had called. Lockheed, Boeing, and General Motors all of them wanted my dad's expertise.
However, those jobs were too good for a black man to have.
The owner of the store, and hence the telephone, would only give my dad messages from a restaurant in the mall.
So that is where he hitchhiked forty miles to every day, in order to feed his family.
This old man didn't care that when Lockheed was calling my mother was pregnant, and my father was questioning his religious choices.
Lockheed stopped calling, but Boeing and General Motors still were, as my sister had to be born at the "free" hospital.
A hospital that left packing gauze and scissors inside my mother after a C-section to save my sister.
Nope, no Union benefits for him "He's a good colored boy but them type jobs make Negras uppity."
Facts.
The part in quotes is what I heard myself.
I remember my mother begging my father not to go to the house behind the store and attack that old man. It was a year later when my brother and I were in the store as General Motors called. A year that saw my mother almost die from infection and have to have a complete hysterectomy. A year where my sister made Salisbury Steak and rice a lot.
That and Pork Chops were all she knew how to cook she was maybe 10.
A year when my father became frustrated with being called a boy at 36 when he struggled with his vow to God.
I remember he and my mother talking.
I told you I get sidetracked.
Doughnuts and Cheese.
Long before my brother and I were in the store when GM called my father was working in the mall.
On payday, my dad would pick up bags of week-old bread from the bakery. Those bags were 50 lb of Heaven. Every bread product known to man; focaccia, pumpernickel, rye, bagels, danish, rolls, and of course doughnuts.
Being young and as a byproduct pretty ignorant, I'd root through croissants, onion rolls, sun-dried tomato focaccia, and everything bagels to find plain white bread. It was what grilled cheese called for. I would cut a piece of that "Guhment" Cheese and sizzling moments later perfect grilled cheese! Well, the plain white bread had been in the bag with all sorts of breadstuffs most importantly Doughnuts.
That doughnut glaze had soaked into the bread.
The collaboration of the sugary glaze with the smokey, salty flavor of the cheese was an explosion of taste I was unprepared for.
I liked it.
A lot.
I still do.
I will literally pop a doughnut in the microwave right now with a slice of cheese on top.
That's what this story is about, simply that
Doughnuts and Cheese.