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Mom and Apple Pie


There’s a ritual I follow every year for the holidays. It’s something I do to remind myself how fragile life is, and how hopelessly doomed we are. Every holiday I try to make an apple pie.


It’s my mother’s recipe, and although I follow it faithfully, what I end up with is more cow pie than apple pie.      


My mother is 84 and doesn’t bake much anymore, but she once made the best pies this side of the Rubicon. For the past decade or so I have tried to duplicate her efforts, and although my pies have been — for the most part — edible, they’ve never actually looked like food.


The filling has never been the problem. Not really, anyway. I mean, my filling is sometimes on the dry side with an occasionally undercooked slice of Granny Smith, but the real issue is the crust. And I use the term “crust” in the loosest sense.


I know the process is breaking down when I start rolling out the dough and instead of a nice, thin, round pie form, I get something that’s sticky and torn in the shape of Idaho. Invariably I end up piecing it together in a pan, and the top crust goes on in chunks, like so many bad toupees.


There’s nothing wrong with the recipe. Mom had used it for years.


I’ve seen her measure the flour, cut in the shortening and roll out the dough. I’ve seen her lay it into a pie pan as if she were placing a baby in a cradle. Then she’d fill it with apples and cover with another layer of dough. She’d crimp the edges, cut whimsical air holes in the top and sprinkle it with a little sugar before popping it into the oven. In an hour, perfection would emerge.


Maybe I missed a step — like the waving of a magic wand.   I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.


Every year, though, I haul out the accoutrements of misery — the measuring cups, the mixing bowls, the rolling pin, the flour sifter — and I set out all of the ingredients. Then, I do the sign of the cross using a wooden spoon and begin. 


Mom is hundreds of miles away and I’m away from the phone, but her voice is in my head. It comes to me while I’m sifting the flour.


“Ah, that’s nice,” she says. “Mix all the dry ingredients together, the flour, the salt…”


This is comforting. Her voice is soothing, encouraging. But then things get a little confusing.


“Add the shortening a little at a time,” she says.


Um, what do you mean by “a little”?  She acts like she doesn’t hear me. She says, “Did you chill this shortening?”


Of course, it says so right here on the recipe. “Hmmm, seems a little soft. But work it into the flour until it forms lumps the size of peas.”


Um, what kind of peas are we talking about, Mom? Baby peas? Or Green Giant fully grown adult peas? But Mom’s already moved on to the next step.


“Sprinkle in a little water. Always use ice water, not tap water,” she says. “And not too much.”


How much? “That’s too much!” she says.


Mom, you want to do this? “You can do it, just mix it lightly. See how those peas are forming?”


They don’t look like peas to me, Mom. “Don’t get smart with me, now.”


I’m not, I’m just not seeing the peas. “Give me that wooden spoon. Thank you. Now, turn around and  bend over.”


The pie-baking conversation I have with Mom is the same, with variations, every year. And it’s not unusual. I hear her voice elsewhere, too, and I suppose I always will if I’m lucky.


Mom was always serving up little nuggets of advice while I was growing up, mostly outside the kitchen. And, of course, I didn’t take it seriously enough at the time.


“Be polite,” she’d say, and my teenage eyes would roll. “Always open the door for the girl.” 


Sometimes her advice was as vague as her dough-making directions. “Trust yourself,” she’d say. “Believe in your own abilities.”  And sometimes it was a straight out cliché:  “If at first you don’t succeed…” Right, right.


And Mom would sometimes mangle the quote, and it would come out like: “To your thigh self be true.” I knew what she meant to say, but I had no idea what the saying meant. 


When I went away to live on my own for the first time, she gave me a notebook full of recipes — spaghetti sauce, chicken soup, that sort of thing — and along with that she gave me a framed, embroidered copy of the Serenity Prayer. You know the one: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”


Now, 40 years and so many failed apple pies later, I know why that prayer came bundled with recipes. And there’s something else I realize, four decades later.


Mom was giving me more than simple cooking lessons when I was younger, and she was teaching me more than how to be polite in public. She was giving me a recipe for life, and supplying me with the key ingredients.


All I had to do was create something with it. And any resemblance my life might now have to a cow patty is entirely my doing.  


— 30 —

Collected written works  |  Gary Marx

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