Now, it’s just me and the pie.
It didn’t start that way, of course. It came as a gift from the Significant One.
I mentioned apple pie, sure. I’ve never made one, and I’m not starting now. A man needs to know his limitations.
When she showed some passing interest in the idea, I put on a little more pressure. Then, she showed up with a bag of apples. My low-key campaign had a winner—me.
Then, I pushed the envelope. I can be too much. I am a small-dose kind of guy. I’m fun, but I’ve seen people’s faces when they feel I have an agenda or when I plan to stick around long beyond the original plan.
I felt myself recoil— slightly— when I said it.
“Could we have crust from scratch?” I winced, looking away, knowing I might have crossed the line. I felt dirty for asking. She was only in town for thirty-six more hours. She had other things to do, too.
As I squinted, slightly blinking my eyes like an old dog who knows he shouldn’t have been on the furniture when the folks walked in unannounced, I heard her say, “I’ll make a good crust for you.”
The following words then slipped through my lips, “Like your mother’s?”
I felt like I’d said George Carlin’s seven dirty words that you couldn’t say on television. Don’t look them up. Things have changed, and everyone uses them on television now.
I waited for her answer for what seemed like a lifetime. Instead of feeling the impact of a rolled-up newspaper, I watched her going through the cupboard, searching for the essential ingredients.
“That would be good, wouldn’t it?”
I felt the weight of the world lift from my shoulders. Sometimes you say the right thing the wrong way or the wrong thing the right way; this this was the latter.
“Maybe we can have Sammy over; he likes pie.” I was getting cocky.
“We should; we certainly can’t eat a whole pie by ourselves.”
When you have pie, you shouldn’t eat it alone. Two people? Yes, but you need more. Add a third, and you have a reasonable crowd for pie.
Herein lies my dilemma. The pie is fantastic. Sammy came for dinner. We had pie. The Significant One pulled her famous disappearing trick the following day, leaving on a jet plane.
That leaves me and the pie—alone. She placed it in the 70s-inspired Tupperware pie vault. It gives me good feelings of pie days gone by.
My mom had a Tupperware pie container. Mom had Tupperware for every single food group.
I don’t think we ever had the single-slice Tupperware traveling pie containers, but I’ve seen them. There were enough of us in the house so that no single slice of pie was ever left behind, let alone enough left to take to school like the smug kids with the single-serving pie containers from Tupperware; they had small families.
No, I am not having company over for more pie, and I shouldn’t be eating the pie for breakfast. Again.
Pie, every day, is a beautiful thing, but it’s not a good idea. However, I cannot let good pie go to waste, especially with a homemade crust like her mother’s.
Instead, I am slowly eating the pie directly from the glass pie plate—two to four bites at a time. Don’t judge me; I try to eat it properly in a symmetrical fashion by taking diagonal cuts with my fork. It doesn’t matter; no one else is coming by for pie.
Oh, I could have gone in hard and just taken bites from the middle, but I’m a guy who thinks pie should come out of the plate in wedges, even when I am doing it with a fork sans knife.
So that’s my story. I’m now five and a half days into the pie. I’ll get through it. I’ve skipped lunch for pie twice, and I sneak intermittent bites late at night before I take out the dog. I’ll admit I’ve had an extra bite or three when I bring her back inside after going out. That’s why I leave the fork on the edge of the sink for a few minutes before placing it in the basin to wait for a wash.
For now, it’s just me and the pie.
It’ll be gone by Saturday.
From the Jagged Edge of America, I remain,
TC