BURGERSCOOT

When I was old enough to drive, my father would occasionally hand me some cash after dinner and tell me to go to the Marie Callender’s up the street to pick up a pie. Usually it was pumpkin, one of his favorites. This should have been a simple arrangement: he bought the pie; he got the pie. Instead, he paid for the whole thing and usually ended up with one slice.

My father wasn’t the kind of Dad who would complain loudly about the pie being gone the next night, but it must have been frustrating to buy a pie and get only one slice. I’m sure Marie Callender sold pie by the slice since it was a restaurant and wanted to take advantage of the dine-in crowd. Still, neither he nor anyone else in the family ever thought about buying individual slices during these moments when my father was hankering for a slice of his favorite pie.

We’d all get our slice after I brought the pie home and conveniently forgot to give him his change back. The problem was, by the time he came home the next night, the rest of the pie was gone. In retrospect, this wasn’t only rude; it was embarrassing, though I didn’t know it at the time.

After getting jiped out of many a pumpkin pie slice, he gave me some money one evening after dinner and told me to pick up a pecan pie. The rest of us groaned. Mind you, I had never had a slice of pecan pie at this point, but I’d seen at least one, and it looked very unappealing. I was about 17 or 18, so what did I know? I remember not even liking the name — pecan pie. It sounded like a pie made of an exotic bird. I guess because it reminded me of a toucan, like Toucan Sam, the bird in the Fruit Loops commercials. And I didn’t like that cereal either. Captain Crunch all the way!

I like to think my Dad’s curveball was to make sure he’d get at least a slice the following night out of the pie he bought–one that night and another the following night, since we all sounded like we didn’t like or wouldn’t like pecan pie. Much to his frustration, we all gave pecan pie a shot and liked it, if not as much as pumpkin. So, sometime after lunch the next day, we emptied the pie tin.

Just to be clear, we were not a fat family. None of us were obese. My father, mother, brother, me, and my sister (if my sister was around, it was only to visit; she had already moved out). Still, if it was only four people, we could buzz through a whole pie in less than 24 hours.

One fateful night, my father delivered an unhittable screwball and told me to buy a rhubarb pie. I never heard the word. I got the cash from him, asked how to spell rhubarb; nobody knew, so I spelled it phonetically on a piece of paper. I remember the first time I saw a rhubarb pie. It was in my candy-green VW Scirocco. I opened the Marie Callender box before I drove home. It looked okay. Maybe like a cherry pie that was a little pekid, but not bad. Watermelon had the same color, and I liked that alright. (Ooh, write that down: Idea for Watermelon Pie. Jack, you are a genius!)

The rest is history: my father loved it. It wasn’t up there like pumpkin, but he enjoyed it. It was almost inedible to other family members and me. I did suffer through a single slice. I should have seen that warning sign — eating something I really didn’t like. I’ve been obese for the last twenty years or so. I’m looking around for something to blame for my fatness. Rhubarb pie! That’s it, shaking my fist at the Google Images page. And to hell with you too, Williams Sonoma Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Filling! And you can follow them, Karen Kuchen Strawberry Rhubarb – 2 Pack! Oh, and a special fuck you to the beautiful strawberry that wants to degrade itself and go in cahoots with an ugly rhubarb. Why would you do that, beautiful Strawberry, hang out with ugly Rhubarb? Even that name sounds like a dance among barbed wire. Leave me out.