Peter Pan 4Eva

Obviously you go to @peterpandonut for the donuts. Obviously. But for me they were always a to-go thing, purchased at the cash register from the young Polish girl in the old-fashioned pastel uniform, eaten on the street or in the park or back at home. I even took them to other people’s homes a few times, like you’d take a bottle of wine or a bouquet of flowers. 

I don’t recall ever eating a donut at the Peter Pan counter, though. The counter was for muffins. Big, beautiful blueberry muffins. Sliced in half and warmed up (On a griddle? In a toaster oven? I can’t remember.) and slathered in salted butter. Warm, buttered, blueberry muffins on heavy diner-style ceramic plates, very bad coffee, and at least one hunched-over local septuagenarian : that was the Peter Pan counter experience.

These are not those blueberry muffins. These are for my three year-old and barely sweetened, let alone buttered. But as I was making them this morning, I was thinking about those Peter Pan muffins, and about how different Greenpoint 2022 is from Greenpoint 2004, and about how tastes change, and septuagenarians become nonagenarians if they’re lucky, and who is sitting at the counter these days, and who is eating a toasted blueberry muffin with butter anymore, and will that even be something Theo will be able to order when he grows up?