So What Number Did You Get at the Bakery This Morning????

OK, I am sure this must have happened to you before.  A couple of weeks ago, I went to my new favorite bakery down at the Jersey Shore — Muellers Bakery in Bay Head.  Now the Kirnan family has always had an unhealthy obsession with bakeries, especially crumb buns and jelly donuts.  For me it started with my Dad taking me to the old Fishels bakery in Ridgewood, NJ after Sunday Mass where the typical order was 12 rolls (6 hard and 6 soft all with seeds) and at least 8-10 donuts including jelly, crumb buns, cruellers — you get the picture?  Well, my Fishel’s addiction would then morph into a Who’s Who of Best Bakeries over the years, including the Wyckoff Bakery when Jean and I lived in Wyckoff;  Barbero’s Bakery in Hamilton;  Italian Peoples Bakery in Pennington;  Freedman’s in Belmar;  DelPonte’s in Bradley Beach, and even Colonial Bakery in Lavallette where Patrick and I would visit on our bicycle rides.  Well truth be told, before I discovered Mueller’s earlier this summer, the existing gold standard for all bakeries was The Yum Yum Shop in Wolfeboro, NH.  I had been introduced to the world’s best jelly donuts back in 1972 when I was lucky enough to be invited to vacation with my good friend Dan Bradley and his family.  I fell in love with Wolfeboro and the Yum Yum Shop so much that I introduced this great bakery and summer resort to Jean, the kids, and my siblings and their kids when we vacationed in Wolfeboro during the 1990s and yes long before Mitt Romney surfaced!!!

Now mind you that when you go to any good bakery, especially one as popular as Muellers, you go there knowing that on any given Sunday morning, you are likely to be in for a long wait.  After parking my car outside, I approached the store front and you could already see a throng of people waiting to get their sugar fix for the day.  To control the crowds, Muellers uses a number machine, much like what typically happens when you go for ice cream on a summer evening at Hoffmans .  But on this day a funny thing happened to me as I approached the number machine to get my all important ticket.  I noticed the machine was empty — i.e., there were no more tickets inside the machine.  What is a donut junkie like me to do in that situation, especially with so many people already in front of me I couldn’t even see anything other than the sign in the front of the store showing that lucky customer number “7” was being served.  Yikes!!!

Well, several other donut junkies were looking to me for guidance but thankfully one of them blurted out that the manager was in the back of the store getting some more tickets and would soon be out to fix the machine.  I breathed easier knowing that the pressure was off for me to find a solution to this very important real world problem.  Smiles quickly surfaced as word spread that a customer-based solution was in process for all of us donut junkies.  Yes, we may have to wait awhile but our sugar fix was closer to being fulfilled–Hooray!!!  Sure enough, the manager with the new numbers began to approach us at the back of the bakery.  It was as if we were seeing a rendition of Alec Baldwin in that great movie Glengarry Glen Ross where he brings out the new leads.  The manager quickly inserted a new batch of numbers into the machine without any difficulty and those of us without numbers must have looked as if we had just won the lottery or something.  Well, I finally got my number and lo and behold I had a really big number — number “29”.  Ouch!!!  They were only serving number “9”.  OK, I thought,  I guess I have no choice but to wait patiently through this.  But waiting didn’t bother me one bit because I soon became deeply enamored of what people do in these strange circumstances when you are waiting for your number to be called.

The first thing I noticed is that everyone waiting to be called has at least one eye trained on the number board that shows which number is being called and served.  Now I don’t know about you, but when you first get your own number, you memorize it right?  That ticket is the most important possession you have at that moment.  It’s your ticket to fulfillment in every sense of the word.  You need that ticket to be waited on.  So I guess it is no surprise that people keep looking up at the number board watching the number change and then go through sophisticated mathematical calculations of how long it will be before their number will be called — is it 15 minutes, 20 minutes, longer?  What’s unmistakable though is how many people keep looking at “their number” while the number on the number board keeps changing.  It’s as if people are afraid that they are going to forget their number or that their number will change without them knowing it.Then there are the annoying people who have no clue what they really want — in fairness, it may be because everything in that Muellers bakery is truly delicious.  But, as they wait, people have to keep moving to the front of the store, excusing people who stand in their way so they can get a glimpse at every donut, every cake, cookie, roll, bagel, you name it.  And, those with cellphones are really rude, talking loudly as if we really want to hear their conversation.  But there are also some really nice people who kind of give you a wink and a nod telling you in a magical way that they find the experience as funny as you do.  They get the absurdity of what happens when a line is formed in a bakery with a number system, how people are rude, forget their number, chat endlessly on their cell phone, etc..

Well, this story did have a funny ending.  Number “29”, my number, was finally called.  My fix would be fulfilled with a standard order of jelly donuts, crumb buns and rolls.  As I went to pay the nice young lady waiting on me I noticed the number on the number machine now read “32”.  A guy who had come in right after me with a really cute dog taps me on the back and says “Hey, I had number 30 and was outside when they called my number do you think they will still wait on me”?  That was probably the hardest question I had ever been asked by someone — how the hell would I know I said to myself.  He seemed really nice so I said to him, “Yeah, go for it, you have the number “30” they have to wait on you”.   Sure enough the nice lady took his ticket even though the number board now showed they were up to customer number “34”.  As I was getting in my car with my goodies in tow, I saw out of the corner of my eye my new bakery pal with the number “30” crossing the street with his dog and his donuts with a smile on his face as wide as the Amazon.  He shouted out to me “Hey Thanks” to which I answered back “No problem, maybe you should play the number”30″ in the lottery”.

These are just some of the exciting things that await all of us when we go to a bakery on Sunday morning.