For the Love of Pie

For years, my cousin and I have agreed that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is our favorite day of the year.  It's early in the Thanksgiving holiday week-end, which stretches out before us with so much happiness still to come.  In my family, there's no pressure to get cooking done, although there's often a trip or two to the grocery store--but because we're doing it together, it's not the drudgery that the grocery store can be in regular life.  There might be a hike on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving; a hike means a walk outdoors, nothing too strenuous, because for the past 15 years, we'd have had a pregnant family member or very small children.  In later years, there might be some kind of group game, whether outdoors (a variant of soccer that's not recognized by any league) or indoors (Chess or something more complicated).

For a few years, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we went to a local restaurant, an old-fashioned cafeteria with a name that combined two letter and the & sign (S & K?  K & W?), that had the whole front part of the restaurant set up to sell pies for $8 to $12 a pie.  You could place your order early and come pick it up, but even if you didn't have the foresight to do that, you still had plenty to choose from.  They offered at least 20 varieties, from standard pumpkin, apple, and cherry to more complex pies like some sort of tropical coconut custard with bits of summery fruit or pies with rum flavors or mincemeat.  They offered not only blueberry, but also blackberry and raspberry.

It was too good for this world.  

We went last year, and the whole cafeteria had closed.  So we went to a local boutique bakery which would sell us a pie for $40, and they were doing a brisk business.  I don't begrudge small businesses the profits they can make, and yet, I know how much the ingredients cost in that pumpkin pie.  So we went to the grocery store and picked up some much cheaper, less glamorous pies.

If we had been in a place with a different kitchen we might have baked our own pies, but the house we have rented for decades has a very small oven with an unreliable heating element.  We can create an asparagus green pea casserole out of canned items or baked sweet potatoes, but we can't do all of that and bake pies too.  Hence the need for pies made by others.

My maternal grandmother made several pies a week, every week, for much of her life.  My grandfather didn't feel like he'd had a meal if there wasn't a dessert, so my grandmother made a variety of desserts for each day of the week.  Pies were his favorite.  I'm old enough to remember when my grandmother used lard for her pie crusts, and lard really does produce an amazingly flaky crust. 

After my grandfather died, when I still lived in South Carolina, I tried to go see her at least once a month.  I remember a time that she made sweet potato pie.  I thought it was pumpkin pie, and I didn't hide my surprise well.  She interpreted my surprise to mean that I didn't like her pie, and nothing I could say would convince her that it was a perfectly fine pie.  

Sadly, she was the type to remember those things.  Everything she served me a pumpkin pie, she'd remind me of the time that I didn't like her sweet potato pie.  If I could go back in time and redo my actions, I'd have a long list of time travel to do, but one of the stops would be at my grandmother's table with an untasted piece of sweet potato pie in front of me.

This morning, I've been thinking about that pie as a different kind of metaphor.  Some days we get sweet potato pie when we thought we'd get pumpkin pie.  It's fairly close to what we wanted:  same spices, same nutritional profile, same structure.  And maybe, if we give it a chance, we'll discover that we like it just as well or better.

Yes, it's probably a metaphor that's been done to death.

This morning, I was also thinking about God as the deity who brings us sweet potato pie.  We might be wishing for pumpkin or apple, but there is God, with sweet potato pie, an earthier cousin to the other pies.  There is God with fresh whipped cream.  There is God with a handmade crust that's flakier than anything we've ever tasted.

We might protest and worry about those 5-10 pandemic pounds we've picked up.  We may think about past Thanksgivings when we had a more athletic physique.  We may think that we can't afford the calories.

I think of God and God's sweet potato pie, all the nourishment that we refuse, all the love in the form of a pie that we think we can't absorb.   

I think of all the ways we make God sad.

Now, of course, I have a craving for pie.  I'd like to stay home and bake, but I'll be headed off to work.  It's been over two decades since I went to work on the Wednesdays before Thanksgiving.