Leaving politics behind for a life of pie

Donald Trump has not been reinstated as president; dark forces continue to conceal Hillary's emails; it seems all those school shootings really happened; and no dead member of the Kennedy family has returned to life.

There's your political column right there, pal.

Now for a holiday story about pie.

It was two days before Thanksgiving. Having returned from the not-too-intensive labor of my local news podcast, I sat on the couch, lumpish. Our two cats were asleep. My wife, a realtor, was out "picking up a few things," as she often says.

I'd seen her sticky note list that morning.

Spinach. Cheese. Pie shell. Dessert. Wine. Lottery.

I don't like wine, I don't play the lottery, and I don't care for spinach. The cheese-pie shell-dessert part of the list was my part of the list.

My wife's key was in the lock. The cats woke up. She calls them "good kitties" and "pretty kitties," and they like her very much. She tells me not to leave my shoes under the coffee table when I take them off and reminds me to take my vitamins and forces me to eat spinach, and I love her very much.

She had bags in her hands. She put them down on the kitchen and returned to the living room.

"Who's a pretty kitty?" she asked a passing cat.

"I have something to tell you," she said, looking directly into my eyeballs.

"Oh, God, what now?" I asked.

Prior to my semiretirement, I was a newspaper reporter for 40 years, waiting on a cold concrete sidewalk at the scene of a shooting, waiting for the lieutenant to come tell me what he knew. The cold concrete remains in my blood vessels. I expect disaster.

"We may, in fact, have too much pie," she said.

"Too much pie" is not a sayable phrase in any language I speak, but she explained.

In her quest to "pick up a few things," she'd gone to a rather hipster-ish store where you can buy crumpets and several flavors of hummus. There, she'd purchased the ingredients for a quiche Lorraine, which is a sort of cheese pie. She'd also bought a fresh apple pie and a French meat pie, which is a pork pie much loved by people of French Canadian ancestry. Both my wife and I are of French Canadian ancestry.

Once the news sunk in, I realized that we had two pies, and the makings for a third, and Thanksgiving was two days away, and I could eat pie right up until Thanksgiving dinner. I figured I'd sneak the cats a few morsels of filling from the meat pie. What the heck, I could spare a pinch or two of pork.

These are cloudy days. The air is filled with dead Kennedys on their way back to earth, and you can't even attend a riot without being shot and killed by one of the other guests.

But, at least for now, I have pie. Maybe you have pie, too. I hope so.

The universe is a big place, much bigger than you think, and there's no pie floating around out there in the dead blackness. There's nothing but space trash and the occasional tin can full of astronauts. They get their pie from a toothpaste tube.

We mark our lives with the big noises of marriage and birth and death, getting hired and getting retired.

In between, there is pie.

© 2021, Creators