A couple months ago – time is flying! – Baghdad opened a Cinnabon store. At the time, I was temporarily working in a different office and, as a result that’s too complicated to explain, wound up at a little, private cinnamon roll party here in The Sandbox. They are as fabulous as I remember them, and now they come in different flavors, like caramel. We had some little ones, not the big giant ones, and it was a lovely treat.
For me, that’s pretty much the end of it, since it’s not like I can pop in a car and head to the mall and visit Cinnabon. Not, I guess, that I know it’s in a mall – it’s just somewhere in Baghdad. Our cafeteria does cinnamon rolls here and they’re incredibly tasty, though I try not to get them because … well, because they’re so tasty. And big. Huge. Like cinnabons.
However, last week or so, I noticed a Cinnabon bag crammed in the fridge on the office floor. Our building is configured to where there are multiple offices on a floor and there are 1-2 kitchens on each floor. Lots of people use the fridge, and, just like any other business on the face of the earth, people cram stuff randomly in office fridges. Some stuff just sits there, some gets eaten and some turn into science projects.
Ours has a bunch of milks and juice, like way too much considering there’s a little “grab and go” right downstairs if you really want something. Most stuff originated from there or the cafeteria, so I have, from time to time, helped myself to an OJ or chocolate milk and just brought one in a bit later. Once in a while, something sits there for months and months and you realize it’s likely homeless. I adopted a water bottle for myself and re-homed an unopened bottle of some kind of wine that had been sitting around for over a year.
When a bag from Cinnabon appeared, my heart leapt, but I figured it would be gone by the next afternoon. Really, unless I snooped, I couldn’t even be sure what was in the bag. Every morning it was there when I put my tea in the fridge, though. And every afternoon it was there, too, tucked behind a liter of Sprite.
After a solid week, I considered it abandoned calories. It’s bread, after all. How good could bread be after a week in the fridge? Was it even full of cinnabons at all, or was someone just camouflaging their lunch in a bag with convenient handles and a tantalizing logo? I decided to go for it, so I peeked in the bag and discovered a box built for four cinnabons and containing three of them – the big ones, too! Instead of going for broke, I liberated one. I figured I’d give the rightful owner another chance to reclaim the other two, hoping that if it happened, s/he wouldn’t remember if there had been two or three left.
When I got home, I discovered how good a week-old flavored bread could be – utterly fantastic, at least after being heated up in a microwave. So good that, when the box was still there over the weekend, I took home a second one. I ate that one super slowly, to savor it, assuming that there’d be no way the third roll would go unclaimed or, in the event that it was, still be edible.
And lo, no one removed it from the fridge or even left a nasty note. The box was still there the following work week. At this point, I figured time was running out and went for it. Yesterday, I had half a cinnabon for lunch and half for dinner. Although I could definitely tell they had been in the fridge too long, I have no regrets. And, as of the morning, there have been no “who stole my cinnabon?!” notes on the fridge. I hope whoever abandoned them comes to terms with the fact if you put
The bottle of Sprite is still sitting there, no longer providing cover for the tasty treats. Gosh, they were good.
I cannot recall the last time I ate a Cinnabon in America. My assumption is there’s still one in the Governor’s Square Mall, but I have no idea. We had one in Minsk, but I don’t recall ever splurging on one. In my travels, though, I ran across one in Yerevan and I do remember enjoying a giant gooey treat there. Maybe that’s why I liked Yerevan so much.
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