Thanksgiving Pies

Kellee made a pumpkin pie (and an apple too, but after describing the particular details of the making of the pie—e.g., pink lady apples and no others are to be used—she told us she would be holding back that pie from us and sharing only the pumpkin, and we wept and drank more wine, 14 bottles in total.) We would have gotten Kellee’s apple pie, because Dennie was going to be bringing a pumpkin pie; Dennie, however, made an emergency stop that sent the pie flying forward and down, upside-down on the floor of the back seat, and Kellee felt a turkey dinner without a pumpkin pie would be a travesty, so she saved her apple pie for another gathering, the following day. The funny thing about a pumpkin pie is that it tastes pretty much the same no matter where it comes from. Kellee says she uses the canned Libby pumpkin, but even the gourmet pie that Jamie Blake made painstakingly from fresh pumpkin tasted pretty close (she says) to the pie that one might buy at the grocery store. Pumpkin pie is always good, never great or bad. Gina B. also brought a pie, a mostly blueberry with some raspberry. She was trying out a new kind of crust and it was crispier than other crusts and held its own against the liquid of the filling though it burned on the edges. The pie turned our tongues and teeth blue and received the rare compliment from my mother: "I wish somebody would leave us the rest of that pie," Susanna said. Gina did. One can be sure that crust was vegetarian, since Gina is vegetarian. My pies are generally not vegetarian because I use a half-lard and half-butter crust, though if I am feeding a vegetarian I will go all-butter. (Lard, as you know, is pig fat.) My grandmother used all lard, probably because her mother and her mother's mother used all lard and because lard is cheap. Her crusts were never flaky, because my grandfather thought a pie should be something you can carry in your pocket and pick up in your hand. So for him, my grandmother overworked the dough. My pal Heidi still uses lard crusts, but her husband Adam prefers to eat pie off a plate and so she produces fine flaky crusts. Heidi said her grandmother, who is Welsh and lived to be almost a hundred, made all-lard crusts, and that is basically what it boils down to with pies for many of us women--we make pies that are only slightly removed from the pies of our youth. I make apple pies and I prefer tart Jonathon apples as my grandmother did. Kellee makes a vegetable shortening (Crisco) crust, and she told me that was what her mother’s mother always used. The conservative bearing may well be only for the females. Christopher has been making pecan pies these last few years, using maple syrup or golden syrup instead of corn syrup, and he says there is nothing sentimental about his venture into pies. His mother barely cooked, and the only pies his father made were steak and kidney pies shipped in tins from England, and when they cooked, he says, the whole apartment smelled like urine.

Monkey Truck Scrap Metal Run

Christopher and I took some scrap metal to the shredder the other day. The establishment we call "the shredder" has a sign outside, painted by hand, that says Kalamazoo Metal Recycling, maybe to keep up with the times, and there's a box out front 24 hours a day where you can dump small stuff just to get rid of it. We had the bed of my old Chevy truck along with an old rototiller we'd been fighting with for years and garbage cans full of old mufflers and soup cans. All in all it would come out to about seven hundred fifty pounds, and it was no trouble fitting all that stuff in the back of our 1984 Ford 350 stake bed utility truck; it used to belong to a tree-trimming company and has "Tree Monkeys" stenciled on the side. We also got to find out how much the monkey truck weighs, over 6000 lbs. No wonder it gets only six miles a gallon. The shredder is an amazing place, where you can see mountains of multi-colored metal, plus stacks of yellow schoolbusses five high. They weigh you as you go into the scrap yard, and they point you in a general direction; when you get out into that general direction, driving over angle iron and bent nails and old concrete panels and smashed-flat stoves, a guy in a front end loader flies by at about thirty miles per hour, scraping metal shards off the hard gravel. If you're lucky you can wave to him and get him to slow down to ask him where, among the acres of heaped up metal items you can dump your own metal items. I did get his attention on his third fly-by and he motioned us to go over by the pile of old stoves. When I directed Chris in backing up into the pile of old stoves, however, the man in the ten-stories high crane with the magnetic boom was protesting with a complicated set of hand signals, while his magetic boom drifted above us, holding a car hood and what looked like some rusted wheel rims. I finally figured out that he wanted us to go over the big giant mud puddle 30 yards away to unload, and the front end loader guy shrugged as he sped by again, scraping his blade across the metal-littered ground. Meanwhile we saw two other drivers of tiny trucks drive in and furtively dump their air conditioners and stoves off right in the road without asking for instructions, then speed away. Chris and I unloaded our metal into the mud puddle and then headed back to the scale to be weighed before egress. As we were waiting for the scale, I noticed on our left a man in a darkened full-faced welding mask and coveralls, filthy head to toe. "That's the torch guy," Chris explained. "That's a job you can always get. They're always looking for a torch guy here." He was using a big foot-long torch, was cutting apart something like a 550-gallon oil tank, thick steel, and flame shot out all around him. Sparks flew intermittently. We got $35 for our load, enough to fill up the gas tank once. We've got this idea about scrapping out enough metal on a regular basis that we can pay for gas for the Monkey Truck. You've got to find ways to pay for your decadent pleasures.

Swamp House

While I was doing dishes last night, rain began to pour in through the kitchen window frame. I pulled my hands out of the sink, put a quart yogurt container on the sill to catch what I could, and then another leak occurred at the bottom of the window, causing water to run down the wall behind the compost bucket. I threw a towel down. I had already covered my little VW truck with a silver tarp; when I don’t cover it, rain somehow gets in and soaks the passenger side floor, especially behind the seat, and it can take weeks to dry out. This has been the rainiest year ever, so that our dirt road has gotten washed out in places and our wooded acres have periodically contained standing water. Even in normal conditions, our water table is just a few feet down below the blue-black muck. Mold has formed in new places in our house, including some black spots on the vinyl tile. Every bit of leather in our closets has a lichen-colored patina. A spotting of blue mold on the bottom of one wall alerted us that the water was running behind the siding, and so we’ve done some gutter work and replaced wood there, but there’s more work to do. One of the neighbors is suing another of the neighbors over the way water flows onto her property. The rest of us here are striving to maintain a dry civility.

Reasons to Vote, Democratic

• George Bush
• Because Democrats are smarter and more attractive (often in a rustic, less-polished way) than Republicans and they are better conversationalists and they create better poems with more interesting kinds of ambiguity.
• Donald Rumsfeld
• Because Democrats understand that things don't go smoothly in life, even for people who are trying their best, and the Democrats are more forgiving of individuals when things go wrong, and they think it is okay for society to offer help to human beings, say to young single mothers and poets and others who need to be bailed out.
• Karl Rove
• Democrats at least try to protect the poor from the rich and from corporations, which are controlled by the rich; the goal of both the rich and the corporations is to get hold of all the money, and the Democrats try to slow that movement of money. Slowing this movement of money allows us a little time to write about life's struggles either in stanza or paragraph form, either humorously or with great seriousness.
• Dick Cheney
• All this talk of values has no music, no magic, no mystery; it's the masculine without the feminine; it's all shoulders and arms, with no hips
• Rush Limbaugh
• When a young girl gets in a certain kind of trouble with an older man, who might well be a Republican, and she has her whole future before her, she may need a Democrat to help her get out of that trouble.