My mom put her heart and her hopes into that pie. If she wasn’t going to become a nun, she was going to get married—to my dad. First, she blind-baked the crust. She stirred the milk, sugar and eggs on the stovetop, cooking the vanilla custard. She sliced the ripe bananas and covered the whole lush thing with a generous portion of fresh whipped cream.
The candles burned down as the two prospective mates enjoyed their meal and, finally, after the last bite of pie had been swallowed, my dad leaned back in his chair and said to my mom, “Maureen, that was the best pie I ever had. Will you marry me?” No matter that he called her by the wrong name—her name is Marie, but his hearing was challenged even then—she said yes. The pie sealed the deal.
Pie went on to play a role in my childhood. After my parents got married, they left Wisconsin, spent two years in San Diego (where I was conceived) and eventually settled in my dad’s hometown of Ottumwa, Iowa. I was born third in line out of five kids. My mom was so busy shuttling us to our piano, cello, swim, tap, ballet, gymnastics, tennis, pottery and sewing lessons, there was no time left for baking. Therefore, my first pie of record—a slice of banana cream, forever my dad’s favorite—was consumed at an old-fashioned diner called Canteen Lunch in the Alley in Ottumwa.
It was on a Wednesday. I remember the day of the week, because as a dentist my dad had Wednesday afternoons off. Instead of escaping to the golf course like other medical professionals did, he picked up all five of us kids from elementary school in his little white Mustang and took us to the movie theater. We went to matinees and saw films inappropriate for our age, like Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver. We didn’t care. We got to be with our dad. And eat popcorn. And get away with something we knew our mom would not approve of. She would inevitably find out.
“To-om,” she would reprimand him when we got home, dragging out the syllables of his name. We always giggled when he got in trouble, thrilled to play a role in his game of defiance, a game I learned well and continue to play.
After the movie, he always took us to the Canteen Lunch in the Alley, a hole-in-the-wall, squatty, square-shaped, cinder-block building that, as the name implies, is situated in an alley. The Canteen, opened in the 1930s, was where my dad had developed his love for pie as a child and where nothing had changed since. Nothing. Not the speckled Formica countertop, the red vinyl-covered bar stools, the red-and white-checkered curtains or the pie safe, full of creamy and fruity homemade pies.
My dad lined up all five kids around the Canteen’s horseshoe-shaped counter, each of us sitting on our own swivel stool, and we proceeded to pig out on loose-meat burgers called “Canteens.” Our burgers were followed by pie. We each got our own slice. No sharing was required. My dad understood the importance of pie. He believed that no matter how stuffed our small bellies, there was always room for a whole slice of banana-cream goodness. He taught us to have reverence for this dessert, to start at the tip of the triangle with our forks and work our way back toward the crust. To let the meringue dissolve slowly on our tongues. And to moan with pleasure with each and every bite. We ate. We moaned. And we groaned from being so full.
Part of this pie initiation was also the lesson of saying thank you. We had to be reminded after the first few outings, but we eventually grasped the idea.
“Thank you, Dad,” we all chimed immediately after our burger and pie feasts.
Gratitude and pie. I never could have fathomed at age seven just what a critical role the combination of these two concepts would play in my future.
By the time I was old enough to learn any baking skills, we had entered the era when modern conveniences—like packaged pudding mix and premade pie dough—were the rage. Even my Midwestern grandmothers bought into these newfangled shortcuts, as they both had full-time jobs, and didn’t have time to make, let alone teach me, any of their old-fashioned recipes, pie or otherwise. At least my mom granted us kids full access to her kitchen, where we took turns making JELL-O 1-2-3 and no-bake cheesecake from a box. I also had my Suzy Homemaker oven, in which I baked minicakes by the heat of a lightbulb, but not pies.
Pie didn’t feature prominently in my life again until I was seventeen. I was on a bicycle trip, heading down the West Coast from Vancouver, British Columbia, toward San Francisco. I was traveling with a fellow camp counselor from Iowa after our summer session at Camp Abe Lincoln ended. Pedaling down Washington State’s dark and mossy Olympic Peninsula, we came upon a rare and welcome opening in the thick forest and feasted our eyes on an apple orchard. It was early September, so the trees were loaded with red, ripe fruit. The branches, so heavy-looking from the weight of all those juicy apples, seemed to be begging for relief. For two young and hungry cyclists, this was an open invitation to stop for a free snack. Besides, with all that bounty, who would miss a few? We got off our bikes, leaned our mighty steeds against the log fence and began to help ourselves. We had picked only three or four apples before an old man came storming out from the crumbling white farmhouse across the acreage.
“Hey! What are you doing on my property?” he shouted. His hair was white and uncombed, his face covered in gray stubble. His jeans were baggy and dirty, and he wore a grubby T-shirt yellowed from years of wear. He appeared unsteady on his legs, yet he charged at us with so much force we reeled back. For all our first impressions of him, he must have equally had his own ideas of us. He had every reason to be suspicious, dressed as we were in our black Lycra shorts, tight nylon shirts with rear pockets bulging with gear—and now apples—and funny little pointed shoes. Then again, given the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, he probably couldn’t see us very well.
“We’re riding our bikes down the coast,” we said. “We’re so sorry. We didn’t mean to trespass.”
He looked at us more closely, sizing up our tanned, athletic bodies and our cherubic faces. And then he softened. “Well, in that case …” The next thing we knew we were inside his home—making pie with our stolen apples. This grumpy old man, it turns out, was a retired pastry chef from the merchant marines.
The inside of his farmhouse was dusty, with stacks of old books and magazines piled up next to his threadbare sofa. The presence of kerosene lanterns and absence of lamps around the living room indicated that he didn’t have electricity. We moved into his kitchen, where a large, round table crowded the room. Collecting his ingredients from the deep, dark cupboards, he dived right into what would be my first pie lesson.
To make the dough, he used two dinner knives, moving them against each other in opposite directions, to cut the butter into the flour. He added just enough water to hold the flour together. Then, he used his craggy, weathered seaman’s hands to form two dough balls, and put the dough in his propane-powered refrigerator. While the dough was chilling, we helped peel and slice about ten small apples, saving the peelings for his compost and putting the slices into a bowl with the juice of a fresh lemon.
Dusk approached and he lit the kerosene lamps, so we had to finish baking by the dim lantern light. He rolled the chilled dough on his wooden slab of a kitchen table, first heavily flouring the surface, then flattening the dough into a circle with a heavy wooden rolling pin. We helped arrange the sliced apples in the pie dish. He added a cup of sugar, a few tablespoons of flour, a few shakes from his cinnamon jar, and placed a pat of butter on top. He covered the apple heap with the top crust. His hands crimped the crust’s edge, moving around the circle with the deft and speed of a seaman coiling ropes. Whatever marines he’d sailed with were lucky to have him on their ship; spending months at sea were certainly made much nicer accompanied by his homemade pies.
As our pie baked in his propane-fueled oven, gradually the musty smell of his house was replaced with a heavenly apple-cinnamon-butter scent. We fell asleep that night in our sleeping bags on his living-room floor, content and nourished by pie. From that moment on, banana cream, be damned. Apple pie was my thing.
I’m not saying it pays to steal, but thanks to the apple-thievery incident, I continued to make pies throughout my college