“We Thank Thee, Lord, for food and friends, And all the Good thy mercy sends”

Greetings Dear Ones,

When a gorgeous pumpkin pie the size of a hubcap shot from its store-bought container and blasted out the open back of the SUV like it had been fired from an extra-terrestrial pie gun* and landed naked, face-down in the driveway mud, my first words were definitely NOT “Oh! Goody! Disasters are wonderful opportunities.” No… I said Other Words. Very naughty words. I stared in disbelief at the upside-down pie on the ground. It’s packaging was still exactly where I had balanced it, along with all the other feast-fixings. They were intact. That pie, and just that pie, had its own private agreement with gravity.

Slacker me was very disappointed. Not because I like pumpkin pie all that much; I don’t. I prefer any kind of pies to pumpkin pies but I definitely prefer pumpkin pies to no pies at all. I hadn’t had the time to make a pie in the first place, and now I didn’t have time for a return trip to the store, certainly not the store where I had bought that pie. And that pie had been the crowning glory on what was to be the “Perfect” first Thanksgiving with my family in the new house. The artist in me mourned its perfection. It wasn’t just a vast wheel of pumpkin Goodness; it was a work of Art with perfectly carved finials of crust around the edges. It was, in fact, the Platonic Ideal of a pumpkin pie. My inner Victim instantly recognized the sabotage and suspected this pie of knowing it was way out of our league. Even shattered in the mud, it shimmered with cinnamon and nutmeg charm. Of course we could never have a pie like that… It had to jump ship and commit pie-icide. For folks like us to dare to aspire to a pie like that…what was I thinking?

From the bushes, the chickens emerged as scavengers. They were absolutely delighted to discover the mess. By the time I had the groceries in on the kitchen counter they had pecked off the entire crust and exposed the orange sunset beneath. They were making the kind of noises that satisfied guests make when they discover you used real butter in the crust. Their compliments to the chef were almost more than I could bear. It was worse than watching the Great British Bake Off and not getting to nibble the burnt bits. (Those are always the best bits, eh?)

Where was I to get a replacement pie? If only there were such things as the “pie guns” mentioned above. When my son was young, he used to spend hours building complicated ships out of Leggos, with impressive canonry which he insisted was used solely for inter-galactic pie dispersal. “These are not scary guns, Mummy,” he insisted. “They are not for killing. They are for getting the pies way far away quickly to people who need them. They make people smile.” How does one call out for an intergalactic pie delivery? I wondered. How could I be entering into a holiday celebrating all we HAVE with the idea that there was something missing? There was something bordering on obscene in the irony.

To distract Grundalina Thunderpants from the impulse to lie down in the mud next to the lost pie and snork what she could through a straw, I thought about my work day and an interesting conversation I had had that very morning. A man had entered the workshop asking “Do you know the difference between pants and trousers?” before he even said hello. The eyes above his mask were bright and curious. “Why is that plural even though a shirt is not and they are each just one item of clothing?And what about slacks? Where do they fit in?”

I love questions like that. I love learning about the origins and uses of words. My inner professor lunged for her podium, brandishing the lecture on garments designed to cover our lower halves. “Pants,” she announced, are the shortened form of “pantaloons” and are pluralized because anything that can be bifurcated (i.e. cut in two) is considered plural in our language—same with scissors, trousers, glasses, sleeves etc… There are “two” pants—one for each leg. In America, we use the word pants for anything that covers the legs from the waist to the ankles. In the U.K., they reserve the use of the word to mean only underwear or underpants. They use the word “trousers” for outerwear for the legs. Breathless, fearful that her audience was losing interest, she continued: In America, we also use the word trousers interchangeably for pants—but we tend to imply that the garment has more tailoring—with topstitching, pockets, belt loops etc… and is worn more formally. “Slacks” comes from an old Saxon word for “loose” and they tend to be a fuller cut… Normally, customers glaze over with this much detail but his eyes brightened further. I liked him immediately.

“I’m a problem analyst,” he said. “I’m intrigued with language. Language often can reveal where the problem is. I go into big companies all the time and have them tell me where things are going wrong. I listen to how they explain the story. Then I show them how their “problems” are just fantastic opportunities. There is no such thing as a mistake. Every single disaster brings a gift.” He beamed, then handed me the trousers he was holding. Clearly, a “gift.”

I nodded. I knew what he meant—at least on a certain level. If people don’t rip their pants or need me to hem their dresses or tailor their clothing due to some specialized requirement which, sometimes, is the result of a disaster, then I have no work to do. In a way, I “profit” from their problems. But he was taking it much further than that. He meant that the people themselves were blest in some way from having to address their own needs. The needs themselves, not the absence of them, ARE the blessing.

I stared back at the pie at my feet and thought about his sentiment, the energy in his words. Was there a thought with which to try to leverage great value from a smashed pie in the mud? How could I be Delighted with this experience? Clearly, the chickens were profiting. Perhaps they were saving me fifty-seven cents’ worth of chicken feed that I could invest in the stock market and turn into a lucrative IRA fund in three-hundred years… I rolled my eyes.

Then I struggled. I struggled physically with the groceries, with setting things to rights in the kitchen, and getting food prepped for the dinner the next day. But most of all, I struggled mentally with that gorgeous pie in the mud. The best I could do was promise myself a jolly blog about it later.

Against Covid regulations, at least 32 people showed up to dinner this Thanksgiving. There were only five human bodies seated around the table—and three furry canine bodies waiting patiently for “drop-age” underneath the table—but the cast of internal characters each one brought along—the victims, the heroes, the pleasers, the achievers, the slackers, Prudence, Grundalina, Festus T. Bumfluff, Madam Scumblebum… not to mention the inner pussycats, lions and tigers and bears (Oh My!) made for a crowded family weekend. Some of them mourned the loss of the pie; some were relieved that there would be nothing to sneak down and eat the rest of after midnight while others were sleeping. We all talked candidly about our individual journeys between the distances of Expectation and Reality and where true Gratitude could be found. My children are of that wonderful age (in their early twenties) when it is customary to have one’s parents stand trial (without a jury of their peers) for the crimes of their childhood—especially when we look through photo albums and they realize the full horrors of my early fashion choices on their behalf. Over and over, I found myself humbled by the generosity of their answers, questions, and willingness to seek Forgiveness over Righteousness (though I was never fully absolved of putting them in Colonial outfits for the 2008 Christmas cards). I explain that most parents do their best to provide The Best for their children but some “pies” just have their own agreement with gravity. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, things just Flop. It’s up to each of us to then make it for our own damn good.

In this moment, I realize with great sorrow that we teach our children so many things; we give them so many things (“only some of which are actually necessary,” shrills Prudence from her corner) that they may experience Gratitude. Do we give them the ability to see a Lost Pie as an “advantage”? An “Opportunity”? A way to, with laughter born of Resilience, find brussell sprouts as an acceptable alternative for dessert? (Ok, maybe I would be the only one happy about that…) How do we teach them to get out of the mud when they too get stuck, when they can’t get “what they want”? Apart from standing there and singing that Music Together hit single “Oh, My! No More Pie!” what can we do?

The zeitgeist of 2020 has been catching me a lot these days. The mud is deep and slick around my home. I have been laboring more than usual to do good work while taking on exhausting extra projects in the margins—some related to the coming holidays, some related to my new farm, some just the desperate efforts of keeping the chickens out of the kitchen when the door’s left open. It’s hard to look at Hard Things—losses, illness, rejection, and grief and try to find the Good in them—the “Opportunity” for learning or greatness, or even just sullen acceptance that one must now change course. It’s hard to lose not just pies, but the Idea of Pie—the cherished Hope that we can provide/procure/produce some sort of Perfection for those we love so dearly—and still feel Grateful. Sometimes, we just can’t. And that’s OK. Perhaps the shared Hunger, not the food, is the gift.

May you be nourished in Spirit, if not in Pie.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S.After all that, guess who turned up with not one but two small pumpkin pies? The Inter-galactic Pie Gun Hero of the day!