Month: November 2012

Since Mondale v. Reagan, I’ve made an apple pie the night of every presidential election. It’s become a tradition. I like to do it mainly because it occupies the time while waiting for election results. It makes the house smell pretty good. And at the end, regardless of the outcome of the election, you have a piece of pie. As the years (and the presidents) have come and gone, I’ve given up on the obvious “American as” metaphor, and embraced the apple pie paradox.

Pie in general, and apple pie in particular, is both easy and hard. Anyone can make a pie. Yes, you can. It’s easy. You don’t need a fancy machine, you don’t need exotic ingredients. You need just the basic staples found in any kitchen. Flour, sugar, salt, butter, apples. There’s a bit of peeling and chopping and a bit of mixing and rolling, but it is doesn’t require an extravagant effort. In fact, you could argue it doesn’t take a lot of head space. You just sort of do what comes naturally. Do what feels good.

Over the years, I’ve learned how to finesse this process into a pretty intense affair. In fact, you could say that election night is the culmination of my entire apple pie season. I start by listening to people talk about apples. It’s crazy, I know, but if you really listen, you’ll find everyone has an opinion about apples. Everyone has a favorite. Most are mono-apple. They find one they like and stick with it. Others go by season. Some go by texture and a select few go by taste. At 50, I find myself in the taste camp. I prefer the Pink Lady for eating out of hand, or tangy/tart Granny Smiths. Neither of these apples are good for pie. Well, not solo. For my apple pie I need a mixture of all different kinds of apples. It’s like an apple melting pot.

Years ago I abandoned the arduous process of hand-peeling and slicing the apples. Here’s why: the folks who invented the apple peeler/corer/slicer knew what they were doing. You can whip through twenty pounds of apples quickly and every slice is uniform, so the apples cook at relatively the same rate. I like this idea. Individual apple slices, agreeing to some kind of uniformity for the good of the pie. In my head my apples have free will. Tonight’s pie has a mixture of Pinova, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith and Organic Crab. A mixture … all types of apples … that’s what makes the best pie. I process them the night before (a trick I learned during Clinton v. Bush ’92). I mix them with a combination of white and brown sugar and let them sit overnight on a counter in a big-ass bowl. I like that they get to know each other during this process. Their juices meld. Out of many, they become one.

I made the pastry dough this morning. Every time I make pie dough, I think of my mother, who told me “Learn how to make pie dough. You’ll always have something to talk about with strangers.” Probably the smartest advice she ever gave me. Like apples, every person who bakes has an opinion about pie dough. I tend toward the flakey. That takes flour; butter and shortening; water and vodka; salt and sugar. (That’s right, I said vodka.) There’s also a bit of diplomacy involved to get it right. Finesse. Agreement. It’s a process of making something unruly behave. For obvious reasons, it’s best to combine the ingredients in the morning and let them chill out. These are opposing forces, after all. Flour does not naturally get along with butter, and water does not naturally get along with oil. All the players in the pie require some rigor followed by some rest. It’s the natural order of things, frankly.

I wait until 5:00 p.m. PDT to assemble and bake. That way, as each state reports their results, the pie is finishing in the oven. Like the process of creating the pie itself, over the years this has taken a turn toward the methodical and ritualistic. Roll the bottom crust. Chill the crust in the pie pan. Strain the apples. Mix the juice from the apples with just the right amount of flour. Fill the pie, roll the top crust. Chill the top crust. Preheat the oven. Top the pie. Beautify the pie. Bake the pie. And wait.

The waiting is the hardest part. You never know. You just never know what you’re going to get. (I learned that the hard way … Bush v. Gore.) The easy part, and often the best part (lately) has been the pie.

A couple of posts ago, my nephew IM’d me on Facebook:

“Hi Uncle, nice story today! But I have a request? I love the stories that I know a little about soooo how about a gramma nobutt and gramps story, maybe one about Xmas eve, God I miss that more then anything! Thanks! Hope everything is looking up in the job hunting 😉, love ya”

I replied, “Can do.” And left it at that. The gramma nobutt he is referring to is, of course, his grandmother (my mother … who had a working butt, but it was flat as a pancake). He called her gramma nobutt but around the house we generally referred to her as pancake ass.

It was an endearment.

The gramps he is referring to is his grandfather (my father). Both of whom have been featured in many, many posts. So, not wanting to completely disappoint my nephew, who is actually more like a younger brother to me than a nephew … I’m only six years his senior … I turned my thoughts this morning to my grandmother. Emma. Who would have been 124 today. She’s been gone for 22 years, and though this little snippet I wrote awhile back wouldn’t prove it, I miss her dearly. So … Nephew … this is for all of us.

Small Talk

My grandmother wasn’t much for sharing. Born in 1888 and raised in northern Minnesota, she lived in a sod house as a child, yet her family came to be one of the wealthiest families in the Red River Valley. As a young girl she worked at a milliner’s in Duluth. Once, when she was at work, a neighbor who worked for the railroad came into the store and asked her what her name was.

“Emma,” she said.

“Well, Emma, I’m Walt,” he said. “And I was just strolling down the other side of the street and I looked over here and saw you in the window. I told my friend out there—his name is Shorty—I told him that you were the girl I was going to marry,” Walt said.

“Well, it’s a good thing you introduced yourself,” she said.

When Grandma went home and told her folks that she was marrying Walt they disowned her. At her 100^th birthday party her 96-year-old sister showed up with her 75-year-old nephew. This was the first time we’d seen anyone from Grandma’s side of the family. She and her sister had seen each other in 80 years. They didn’t say much to each other. We could tell they were rich and we weren’t. All because of Walt. But Grandma never talked about that.

Grandma never talked about anything.

As kids, we always thought we’d done something wrong. Everyone’s grandmothers would smother them with attention. Tell them stories. As teenagers, my sister and I thought Grandma was sweet, but still a little scary. My mom and dad would make us visit with her. They called it ‘small talk.’ After a few minutes of remarkably forced conversation, we were excused, and Grandma would sit and watch television, or read. Sometimes she’d knit. She was like that. But she didn’t mean to be. She thought she was talking. She lived to be 102 or 103, and I’ll bet that now, at the age of 39, I’ve said more than she did her entire life.

I used to spend Tuesday afternoons with her when she and I lived in the same town. I was encouraged by my family to spend time with her because—according to them—she liked me. She talked to me, they said. So, I’d leave work at around eleven in the morning and stay with her a couple of hours in her apartment in what my friends called the “Old Folks High Rise,” which, in Missoula, Montana was a retirement home that was five stories tall.

A typical conversation went something like this:

“Grandma, what was it like growing up?” I’d ask.

“Cold,” she’d say.

“What did you do for fun?” I’d ask.

“Worked,” she’d say.

“What was Grandpa like?”

“Funny,” she’d say after a few seconds hesitation.

“What was the best thing that ever happened to you?”

“I got a new car once.”

“What was the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

“Your Aunt Lola hit a cow and ruined my new car.”

This, my family considered to be small talk. One Tuesday afternoon I simply had a breakdown in her apartment. It had been a tough afternoon for me. Both of my parents had died within months of each other and I had just survived Hepatitis B, which had kept me quarantined for six weeks. I was 26 years old. Grandma didn’t say anything for quite a while that afternoon, she just sat there and handed me Kleenex. We’d been through some pretty tough patches together, what with me wanting her to talk and she not talking, but this afternoon I was about at the end of my rope. I think I was just about ready to give up trying to get her to talk to me. I could still visit her and sit silently. It would have been a bit of a stand-off, but I was fed up.

After a few moments of listening to me weep, she said:

“When Walt and I were about twenty years into it—around 1928 or so—Walt decided he was going to stop working for the railroad and start a farm. We sold everything we had and bought this farm outside of East Grand Forks. It was a bad spot. We didn’t know it at the time, and we spent a good deal making a go of it. We had to borrow furniture from the neighbors and grow our own food. One day the bank came and took the farm from us. They told us we had a few weeks to make what we could at auction and leave the rest. It was the middle of winter, and we had three or four kids by then. The morning we were about to set off, your dad pulled me over to the chest of drawers and opened up the bottom drawer. A mother mouse had just had babies. He and I watched this mouse make a nest that would keep her babies warm. She would run from one side of the drawer to the other with wood chips she’d pulled from the drawer. Your dad and I tore up newspaper and dropped it in her path to help her.”

Apparently this process took several hours. When I asked Grandma why she took the time to do this, she said “I admired her courage.”

The morning my Aunt Betty called and told me that Grandma had passed away in her sleep, I didn’t think at all about what Grandma had said—or not said—during her life. I did, however, think about that mouse.