A Blueberry Muffin

The late sociologist Erving Goffman coined the term “total institution” to refer to an organization in which people are isolated for long periods of time and which controls and regulates most aspects of their lives. Examples are prisons, mental hospitals, and boot camps. New York Methodist Hospital, where I was recently confined for a bit more than two weeks, may not fit the definition completely, for most inmates spend only a few days there, but during that time patients’ behavior is strictly regulated by bureaucratic rules and their autonomy is severely constrained.

My chief opportunities for autonomy were in the choice of reading matter (The New York Times, The New Yorker, and various novels) and the selection of items from the next day’s menu. Each day we would be asked to choose what we wanted to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner the next day within the constraints of the particular diet which we had to follow (mine restricted sodium). One day I selected for breakfast oatmeal, chamomile tea, and a blueberry muffin, and for the rest of the day I looked forward with particular intensity to that blueberry muffin. When my breakfast tray arrived the next day with the oatmeal and the tea but without the blueberry muffin, I was intensely disappointed.

About twenty minutes after my breakfast tray arrived, a young volunteer came into my room and asked if there was anything she could get for me. “What I want is the blueberry muffin I ordered but did not receive,” I told her. I was simply ventilating my frustration, with no expectation that the young woman could do anything about it. But a few minutes later, she returned with a blueberry muffin. My thanks were profound. The object of my desire was in my hands at last, but not for long, inasmuch as I soon consumed it.

The blueberry muffin I received was not one of those 300 calorie monsters that you see in coffee shops but much smaller, perhaps 100 calories at most. But it was delicious, especially so because I thought I was to be deprived of it. The whole affair was most ridiculous – how could I be so upset by such a trivial matter? – but as a rare opportunity for autonomy, it assumed outsize importance within the quasi total institution in which I was living.

Now that I am sprung from durance vile, I have no opportunity for blueberry muffins at breakfast, which is just as well, since I have gained twenty pounds, most of it from water retention. I’m now taking diuretics to rid my body of the excess water, but until that is accomplished, I’m pretending to be an ascetic. In the meantime, I treasure the memory of that blueberry muffin.