<< Go Back

Legends of the Donut Shop

By Terry Overton

Order Now!

Preface


The story I am going to tell you happened when I was a teenager. At the age of seventeen, following a tragic accident, I had an experience that changed my life. This experience included a very special place in my hometown. This place didn’t look like anything special on the outside. It was what happened on the inside that mattered.

Like thousands of other towns, our town has a Donut Shop not far from Main Street. In small coffee shops, donut shops, and cafés, all over the country, groups of men or women meet weekly just to enjoy each other’s company and talk about current events or of days gone by while they enjoy breakfast. The Donut Shop in the town where I lived was just one of those places, and my grandfather belonged to one of those groups of men. These men had lived their lives in hard times of poverty and war and became all the better for it. They were the men who made this great country. They were the heroes of wars and solid citizens who contributed to our world.

On weekends and holidays, I was lucky enough to tag along with my grandfather for breakfast with his buddies at the Donut Shop. I wish I had appreciated it more when I went with him to eat the donuts, sip coffee, and hear the tales told by older men who accepted me as one of their own family members.

Chapter 1


Near Death


This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. There was no dark tunnel with a light at the end, like people say. There were no angels in long white gowns singing, no trumpets sounding, no harps playing. Billowing silver clouds had not opened to pull me into a heavenly eternity. No Saint Peter stood waiting for me at the pearly gates. It was just me floating above the bed for what seemed like an eternity.

I hovered over my own hospital bed in the dark, sterile room and looked down on my unresponsive body, arms poking out from crisp white sheets. Overwhelmed with fear, I was powerless to do anything. I couldn’t move my limbs or talk. Hooked up to tubes pumping fluids into my arms and wires connected to my chest, my body was lifeless. How did I get here?

Abruptly, everything had changed. I didn’t know how. Yet here I was, Wes Williams, in a hospital bed lying as still as a rock. The beeping sounds of metal machines and abundant wires connected to noisy digital displays filled the room. My parents anxiously looked over my bed and whispered in sad tones to the doctor. My current reality terrified me.

Moments of utter darkness and hazy fog passed. Then, the obscure blackness was at once replaced with a warm, shimmering glow of some sort. Inside and out, I had an undeniable sense that I was at last heaven bound. But I didn’t go anywhere. I remained in the hospital room.

I looked down at my lifeless body and waited to be lifted into the heavens. My mother and father gasped, and tears rolled down their cheeks.

I glanced between my worried parents and my limp, unconscious body and wondered about the other folk tales I’d heard. Where was the “life flashing before my eyes” part? Nope, I was stuck up here, looking down. I was weightless, as light as the bloom of a milkweed plant floating in the breeze of a summer day.

The doctor’s raspy older voice provided an update. “There is some internal bleeding in the abdominal area. He’s losing quite a bit of blood. We’ll need to take him down to the operating room again as soon as the table is ready.”

Hold on! The doctor said I am going to the operating room again? I’ve already had an operation? What for?

My dad mumbled, “Is he going to be okay?”

The doctor looked at my dad, then placed his hand on my mom’s shoulder. “My team will do everything we can.”

I heard more sobbing from my parents. Dad held Mom who cried uncontrollably with her head buried in his shoulder. Now, Dad cried.

I regretted seeing them so upset. I wanted to reach down and touch Mom on the shoulder and say, “Wait, I’m right here. I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. Don’t worry, Mom. It’s going to be okay. I’m still here, Dad.” I attempted to reach Mom, but I was too far above her. In my mind, I moved my arm toward her, but nothing happened.

My mom stood at my bedside, took my hand, and squeezed. “Wes, Weston, don’t go…”

I thought she wanted to say something more, but she was crying. Her voice, between a whisper and a mumble, made it impossible for me to understand her words.

I felt another strange sensation. My past life was before me, but not like I expected it. There was no vision of my life passing by like a speeding train. There were no flashbacks of things I thought important, like little league baseball trophies, track meet ribbons, honor roll report cards, or that perfect school attendance certificate from the fourth grade that hung on my bedroom wall next to my bookcase. There was nothing about beginning my senior year of high school, my first part-time job, or even my friends.

Somehow, I was elsewhere. I’d been transported to another location. I wasn’t in the present. I was back in my earlier years and in the one place that felt more like home than my own house. No longer suspended in the hospital room, I wondered, Why here? Why am I in this particular place?

I smiled at the thought of this place. Seeing it was weird. It was strange because I saw a younger version of myself. I must have been eleven or twelve years old, maybe thirteen at the most. Through the glass window of the door, there I was. My younger self took hold of the handle on the outside, opened it, and stepped inside. This small café was where I had achieved nothing at all on my own. This place was different. This was where my heart was filled with warmth and admiration for all the people in the room.

Time shifted again to present day. Back in the hospital, my body was jostled about. I was moved from one hospital bed to a flatter bed. A nurse pulled up the metal rails on the bed. Three nurses rolled me out of the room and down the hallway.

Was I dead? Was it over?

I floated above my body as they wheeled me down the dimly lit, long, stark hallway. One of the overhead lights made a strange buzzing noise as I floated past. The wheels of this flatter bed screeched and bumped on cracks in the tile floor. The hospital staff rolled me along and hustled as if their lives depended on getting somewhere at the speed of light. I suppose this was a good thing because it meant I wasn’t yet gone from the earth. If I had already died, they wouldn’t be in such a hurry.

I witnessed as they pulled my bed into another room and lifted my body on to a metal table. It was a different type of room. The room smelled of rubbing alcohol, medicines, and cleaning fluids.

Was I still breathing? I couldn’t tell. My first thought was: this must be the morgue.

“Be careful,” one nurse said to another.

The words of caution indicated my life was not over. I couldn’t feel the needle, but I watched it enter just at my shoulder. The nurses hooked up multiple machines, and the beeping began again. Intense lights pointed directly at my body. Two nurses draped the crinkly paper sheets crisscross over me. Only a small portion of my body, maybe my stomach or abdomen, was exposed as far as I could tell. My view from above the bed was blocked by the lights, making it difficult to watch what was happening below. The doctor maneuvered sharp metal instruments, causing an unusual clinking noise each time he put one down and took another.

I felt another airy sensation as I floated around the operating room. It felt almost peaceful. I dozed off. Darkness. Quiet at last.

Had I been asleep an hour? Ten minutes? Was I dead? No way I could know.

Time shifted. I was again back in my childhood at the same place. I opened the door and entered the small but warm room with a wooden floor that creaked with every step of a cowboy boot but remained silent for my sneakers. The bright sunlight streamed through the window as it always did in the early morning. I wanted to stay here. I didn’t want to go back to the operating room to wonder if I would live or die. I was here and wanted to stay awhile at this place—The Donut Shop, my favorite place in the whole world.

Order Now!

<< Go Back