Author and Artist
The Perfect Pie
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
Banana cream pie sugarcoats my life.
Near the freeway exit to Vacaville, California, I’m sitting in a diner booth waiting for a slice of banana cream pie. I stop here often.
Wearing shorts today was a mistake. The red vinyl seat is sticking to the backs of my thighs. Lately, nothing is going my way.
This morning my bathroom scale screamed at me. Eighteen pounds overweight. My annual resolution to get in shape and eat healthier remains an unrealized good idea.
My teen daughter left the house slamming doors. I have no idea why. When I get home, I suppose I’ll get an earful.
At the waiter’s workstation, I can see my banana cream pie order just sitting there. Where the hell is my server?
After the final school bell, the school principal took thirteen minutes to tell me that I was passed over for history department chair at the new charter high school. The lapsed time it took to slam me with the bad news is now irredeemably part of me, another page in a dossier of disappointments. Fuck her for patronizing me, for saying in her grating, gravelly voice, “You’ll bounce back. The district values you in the classroom.”
I should move. Start over.
I might fit in better somewhere else. Minnesota or North Dakota are the leading banana cream pie eating states.
Maybe I should live abroad. The world is full of travelers on the move. Three hundred million people live outside their birth country. But where?
For all that cross-cultural enrichment, there’s no global consensus on the best pie filling. I have traveled the world, done my caloric research and banana cream pie—invented in the late 19th century here in America—is the best. Not that anyone ever asks my opinion.
A proper banana cream pie is made with a creamy, almost runny, vanilla pudding and three sliced, slightly overripe bananas. The sweetened crust should be mooshy on the bottom, crispy around the edges.
In a bunch of bananas—called a hand—a single banana is called a finger. A banana cream pie made with just one banana, that’s akin to giving me the finger. No matter how small the serving, I leave it uneaten.
Like an understanding life partner, a good banana cream pie is quiet when quiet is called for and comforting when comfort is needed. She sticks with me through the hard times, hugging my waistline.
Other pies have come on to me. Apple, lemon meringue, berry and cherry are the most seductive, but none are as lovely, as luscious, as my banana cream pie.
Round, tawny shoulders the color of ivory. Her blonde bananas sparkle. Her custardy, sexy wetness glistens. Her aroma is sugary clean. Artificial whipped cream as white and fluffy as artificial whipped cream.
Like a tart in a dive bar, her curvy, flirty contours seduce me. Instead of driving home to write tomorrow’s lesson plan, deal with my unpaid bills, face my teen daughter’s outrage of the day, I sink into her sweetness.
My vision blurs. I fight off the impulse to order a second slice.
My breath relaxes. I scrape the last bit of pie off my plate.
Until the next time.
