Eating Powdered Donuts on a Bicycle

Elmer the maniacal husky and I were returning from a madcap visit to the dog park. It was nine in the morning on a January weekday in the Rose City.

I beamed with a jolly mood. Elmer's antics at the dog park always inspire that feeling. As does listening to tracks from James Brown's Christmas album, which I was.

We were almost home. I was driving a sleepy two-lane avenue through my tony and leafy neighborhood.

I noticed a bicyclist pedaling toward me, about 50 yards away. Right at me, a hunched-over man zigzagging on a kid's bike.

His hands were not on the handlebars. They were carrying a small box.

It was the unmistakable look of a homeless man recklessly riding a bicycle in defiance of basic traffic laws and common safety sense. I'd seen it a thousand times and nearly crashed into several of these wanton riders.

But I never had a man riding a bicycle without using his hands while carrying a box and coming right at me.

I slowed down. I checked the mirror behind me—two cars. No one was approaching me from the avenue's other lane. I began formulating a plan to drive around the bicyclist.

The rider came into view. I recognized him as one of the local fentanyl miscreants. How he was still alive was impossible to imagine but I'm glad he was—he's a member of a family somewhere in America.

At the last second before I began my swerve around the rider, swerved himself, off to a side street at breakneck speed at such an astonishing angle that I issued a profanity-laced hosanna of praise.

Mind you, he was not using his hands.

Before losing him, I saw: his left hand holding a box of Franz's powdered donuts. His right hand held a donut and he was gobbling it down with gusto. The powder fell around him like so much so snow. He was wearing a white face with a semi smile attached to it. Donuts can do that to a man.

I laughed. How could I not? I said something to Elmer about the utter preposterous of what had just occurred. I knew for certainty the scene would work its way into a work of fiction one day.