I was always a picky eater. It's just one of those things, like a lazy eye or leprosy, that you're born with. Usually it doesn't effect one's life too much -- apart from ridicule at the dinner table, eye rolling, exaggeration about the number of things you actually will eat, which is always described as being only three or four -- but it does limit you in many ways.

The one type of food that I can say I'm not picky about at all, that I will try any variety of, that I will never turn my nose up at even were I on the brink of death, is doughnuts.

Doughnuts are the I Ching. They solve every problem that could possibly inflict mankind. Doughnuts are little fluffy round holy saviors; delicious divinity with cream filling. Glazed gurus. Bavarian bodhisattvas. They sacrifice themselves for our happiness. Doughnuts are Jesus.

Here on O'ahu island, we are so lost and misguided without a proper doughnut shop, the nearest Krispy Kreme being on Maui, that we have actually formulated a sneaky pastry cartel, flying Krispy Kremes over from Maui and selling them by the box on the streets for ten or twelve bucks a pop. We have been lead inexorably into a life of vice on the doughnut black market.

I like every kind of doughnut I have ever come across. You could stuff a doughnut with spinach and mushrooms and squid and cauliflower and all manner of things that I find deplorable and inexcusable, and I would probably still like it. I like glazed, filled, chocolate, cream cheese, bear claw, cinnamon bun, with sprinkles, with maple, with anything.

But I can't say that I've always felt this way. There was a time when jelly -- even in God's chosen form of doughnut -- was wholly unlovable to me. I was young and foolish, four, or maybe five, and a jelly doughnut was not a thing that I could abide. There came a day, one of the many when I was stuffed into uncomfortable clothes and carted off to church, a thing I chose to stop doing about the age of eight. I was left to kick around the lobby for an hour or so while my parents were in choir practice, and since my older sister had abandoned me on the grounds that I was really annoying, I had nothing else to do but find something to stick in my mouth. What I liked about church was that they often had doughnuts, and so I went to inspect my jackpot.

Imagine my distress on discovering that a jelly doughnut was the only doughnut available. Either from a newfound sense of adventure and curiosity or reckless desperation for some form of pastry, I trounced the first jelly doughnut that looked like it had enough powdered sugar to give Aspen some healthy competition. My first bite was difficult to endure, being that there was plenty of jelly goop involved, but I was a tenacious little sucker, and I persevered in my task until I came to the realization that I didn't hate it.

Such a revelation, such dietary bravado as I had just demonstrated deserved the attention of my parents. Surely choir practice wasn't as important as the fact that I'd tried a jelly doughnut and actually liked it. Leaving the other half of my doughnut on a table, I immediately burst into their choir room to interrupt the harumphing and shuffling of paper that, in my observation, always seemed to occupy the chief of their time (and the time of all grownups everywhere, come to that). I explained to my parents why they should be exploding with pride for me.

I received a patient but indifferent answer, and the polite encouragement to go play somewhere else, which I happily did, having a doughnut to look forward to. I skipped back to my table, joyful in the discovery of a brand new Thing That I Liked, and the assurance that I could now resume eating it.

But when I got back to my table, there was no doughnut of any kind. Gone. Missing. Cruelly pitched by some black-hearted, doughnut-hating monster, bent on depriving little girls of new discoveries. I weighed my options. In such a situation, there was only one tactic. I cried.

Back I ran to the room where my parents were attempting to continue practice with the rest of their choir, which had to be held up once again by a crying little girl in an ill fitting dress, sobbing, "Muh-my doughnut's g-gone!"

Billy knocked my tooth out. My puppy got hit by a car. My big brother shaved my head while I slept. None of these things could be uttered with such heartbreak and shock as, "My doughnut is gone." This was pure tragedy.

The other adults shrugged and shuffled their papers, my parents tried to console me while explaining that, in proper society, people who see a half-eaten doughnut sitting on a table will presume that it's trash, and throw it away. This, I was to understand, is the cruel way of the world.

Which did nothing to make up for the loss of the first jelly doughnut I had allowed myself to love. I shuffled back to my lonely, clean, doughnutless table and thought back to that carefree infatuation, fleeting, unexpected, doomed. It was a love not meant to be. It was my first lesson in the harsh, bitter ways of the world. It was, now that I think about it, my last jelly doughnut.

But I like the cream-filled kind better anyway.