Anticipating Pie
Someone asked me to tell the pie story the other day. It's a story that makes people laugh. Not like the stories my husband tells, of strange foods and strange countries, of scaling and conquering, of firsts and bests and physical feats. Pie isn't like that. Pie is comfortable. Pie is safe.
It was the thing my older sister chose to make, for the first time, when my mother was in the hospital and she was in charge of the cooking. Never mind that she misread the recipe, creating a hopeless, fragile circle of dough, too frail to move from the table to the pie plate without breaking. We stood around the kitchen table, offering ways to make it right, each suggestion sillier than the last, until it became one of those stories we tell each other, our arsenal of things we share.
Never mind it was my sister, who couldn't have been older than seventh or eighth grade, cooking for the eight of us plus two hired hands. Never mind we secretly despaired at the missed opportunity for pie. Never mind anything dark beyond our glowing circle, our kitchen, our table, our pie. It's the memory of the silliness that sticks to us, like the crust had stuck to the table, a scene that always looks a bit floury and white and dry around the edges in my mind.
And by now, every year the Thanksgiving pie is perfect, and we each make two or three of them, as if making up somehow for that memory. I was the one who first counted them, some small attempt at fairness, I suppose, no more or no less for each one at the gathering. And once they were counted there was no going back. Each one of us should eat our quota.
And we eat. Three, four, even five pieces each some years. We put our names on the family web site to commemorate our feat, those of us who dare it. We tell our pie story to our friends.
We are remarkable at unremarkable things. We have made our story about the pie. As if the other stories we might live were unrealistic expectations, or despair, or would take us beyond the kitchen window, the one that always looked as if the enormity of darkness beyond might push itself in on us.
What if, instead of anticipating pie, we were unremarkable at remarkable things?
It was the thing my older sister chose to make, for the first time, when my mother was in the hospital and she was in charge of the cooking. Never mind that she misread the recipe, creating a hopeless, fragile circle of dough, too frail to move from the table to the pie plate without breaking. We stood around the kitchen table, offering ways to make it right, each suggestion sillier than the last, until it became one of those stories we tell each other, our arsenal of things we share.
Never mind it was my sister, who couldn't have been older than seventh or eighth grade, cooking for the eight of us plus two hired hands. Never mind we secretly despaired at the missed opportunity for pie. Never mind anything dark beyond our glowing circle, our kitchen, our table, our pie. It's the memory of the silliness that sticks to us, like the crust had stuck to the table, a scene that always looks a bit floury and white and dry around the edges in my mind.
And by now, every year the Thanksgiving pie is perfect, and we each make two or three of them, as if making up somehow for that memory. I was the one who first counted them, some small attempt at fairness, I suppose, no more or no less for each one at the gathering. And once they were counted there was no going back. Each one of us should eat our quota.
And we eat. Three, four, even five pieces each some years. We put our names on the family web site to commemorate our feat, those of us who dare it. We tell our pie story to our friends.
We are remarkable at unremarkable things. We have made our story about the pie. As if the other stories we might live were unrealistic expectations, or despair, or would take us beyond the kitchen window, the one that always looked as if the enormity of darkness beyond might push itself in on us.
What if, instead of anticipating pie, we were unremarkable at remarkable things?
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