august philippic

A gentleman enjoys his pie, and bakes it on occasion. For those seeking pointers, Dawn Coyote dishes out the goods over at Fond Adversaria.

Can anybody deny the symbiosis between pie and religion? Think of the church supper, or the diner where people turn to pie at times of existential crisis. Er, well, I know I do. Hence my perilous flirtation with Type 2 diabetes. There’s a Carson McCullers short story, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” about learning to love; the idea being that a person can start small and work one’s way up. I’ve always wanted to write a sequel: “A Ditch, A Grotto, A Pie.”

The best pies are like eighties music: they make one feel alive as they wallow in angst. Is there anything that electricutes my nerves with the same anxiety as a crust? It drives me into the worst excesses of Depeche Mode. I will have pie. I will be my own personal Jesus.

Reach out and touch me.

Favorites:

1. Chocolate Mousse
2. Apple
3. Peach
4. Key Lime
5. Pecan
6. Cherry
7. Berry (any variety, preferably wild blue)

I should dispense an honorable mention to a coconut creme pie that I met just this weekend. I do not know from whence it came, but man did it liven up a dull party.

mrs. august would like my readership to note the following:

Hummpff.

Addendum Jan. 22: “Not yet made dinner” meant not made dinner last night. I frequently make dinner. Although, dinner last night was not very good. Breakfast was awesome though — french toast with cinnamon apples.

Tags: grooves, Virginia by august
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There are cadences of the voice that I can mimic but not duplicate, and one of them is the sound of my great grandfather saying grace. He ran a chain of grocery stores in the Twenties and Thirties, so his table was abundant even in difficult times. He knew of his fortune and expressed his gratitude mainly at suppertime, when he asked those gathered to bow their heads in prayer.

I knew him much later in life, when his fortunes had not exactly turned, but at least abated. Danville, Virginia was not the same town in 1975 that it had been in 1920, and from the looks of things it had hardly been a metropolis even at the height of its long tobacco boom. The old house smelled of smoke, but not whiskey (unlike the home of my grandfather, where bourbon was drunk in copious quantities starting around breakfast). It scared me, that home. It had stern Victorian turns, stairs that were forbidden to me, twisted, aggressive lamps. I tended to sink myself into a large chair and watch the football on the occasions we visited, which were not many.

One of the reasons my grandfather was an alcoholic (I suspect) was that his father was a zealot of temperance. My great grandfather’s face was as foreboding as his abode, and his God was a vengeful one who did not suffer the little children much latitude. By the time I encountered him age had desiccated him, leaving him with little of his earlier brimstone. He made clear, however, that he was a force in the world because he was on the side of the righteous, and that those who would be righteous (or those, like me, who didn’t know good from evil) would do well to do what he said.

Yet, when we bowed our heads in prayer, this awesome God softened, as if He, too, could smell the mashed potatoes and gravy, the black-eyed peas, the butter in the biscuits. “Lord, we thank You for the bounty we are about to receive,” (a pause for breath – my great grandfather was a conductor of words). “We ask that you bless this food to our bodies, oh Lord, that we may do Your work, and that Your divine grace may fulfill us all the day long.” Nobody talks like this. It was as captivating to me as any record. I could even hear the capital letters. “Bless our families oh Lord and keep them safe in their travels,” (me! I got that he was talking about me) “and guide them in their lives as You guide us now.”

A convention has developed in my family, for even today when we say the blessing we follow the form dictated by my great grandfather, that at this juncture in the prayer some pro forma mention be made of the less fortunate. I cannot now say if that was a later emendation or if it was in the original text. My great grandfather pulled around the corner and quoth: “In the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen,” and the rest of us amened in unison.

I think even then I was suspicious of God, or at least of invoking the name. He was an instrument of shame, and the effect on my grandfather (forever ashamed of himself, apologetic, secretive, and inadequate before the menacing deacon) only became clear to me later in life. But the artfulness of language still resonates with me, as do the smells of ham and cigarettes, the sonority of Virginia accents, and the chords of voices joined in grace.

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The year is 1987. Five southbound teenagers are traveling north on I64 to William and Mary Hall, where R.E.M. are playing on their Document tour. The evening will be recorded in Rolling Stone as one of the worst concerts R.E.M. ever gave. They had recently become a fraternity favorite, and the drunken moshing of Sigma Nus screaming “Leonard Bernstein” at just the wrong moment would prompt Michael Stipe to flashlight a couple for security to escort from the building. The southbound teenagers would enjoy the concert, would avoid the hard, human crush, would speed back through Norfolk (where they had started their trip) and on to North Carolina, where they sleepily take the S.A.T.’s the next morning.

Each of the boys has told his parents a different story. August says he is going to North Carolina, spending the night with friends so he can be well-rested and prepared for “Clint Eastwood is to codfish as [blank] is to mackerel.” Ben’s parents believe he is spending the night with Phil. Phil informed his parents he is going to the beach with August. All but Allan edited out the part about R.E.M. Allan did tell his parents about R.E.M., but left out the S.A.T’s. Fortunately for all concerned, the respective parents never wind their way through this spool of half-truths.

The point was that North Carolina gave the S.A.T’s a month before Virginia. By slipping across the border, we could then get in two rounds before college applications were do, thus doubling our chances of a decent score. And if we then rewarded ourselves with a trip to the beach, did we not deserve a little time in the ocean? And when we discovered R.E.M. was playing in Williamsburg, well, why not?

Put it this way; I would never have risked my college education on U2. On the subject of incomprehensible lyric: what the hell is pride in the name of love?

Back to the five teenagers, one of whom was a me barely recognizable to me now. R.E.M. made sense to them. Not at the concert, where they felt beamed into a world we weren’t ready for, but in the truck on the way from the S.A.T.’s (disaster!) to the beach the next day. They had a tapes of Murmur and Chronic Town, and the twangy harmonies seemed to spread through the grasses along the Alligator River (oh shit, Jefferson I think we’re lost). They were so happy to be in motion: lower wolves. It was dark when they reached the beach, and they talked of all the people they thought they might be, but it didn’t work out that way (gardening at night). They had passions they did not understand and could not articulate, loyalties to spaces they didn’t realize were demarcated. They found twisted harmonies and dissonances; they drank heavily, slept it off, went home. They understood what was to come, but of course they had no idea.

Tags: grooves, Virginia by august
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