Me Oh My, I Love Pie

I'll go back to describing The Submarine in a day or two, once I get some photos taken to show y'all. In the meantime, I'd like to say a few words about pie. Is there, or can there be, anything more perfect than a nice slice of warm pie with a bit of whipped cream or vanilla ice cream on the side? No, there cannot. Is it any accident that the dessert we know as pie (and it's not only a dessert! No, no - there's chicken pot pie, fish pie, shepherd's pie, a whole host of pies that can be consumed any time of day or night) is homophonic with the mathematical number pi, used to calculate the perimeter and area of a circle, that most perfect of shapes? No, it is not an accident.

Here's what Andie MacDowell, in the otherwise execrable movie Michael, has to say on the subject: sing it, Andie!

In the past two months, I have consumed a tremendous quantity of pie. It all began when I visited the Family Pie Shop in De Valls Bluff, Arkansas, a cinderblock and tar-paper shack (pictured above) rumored to be frequented by former governors Mike Huckabee and Bill Clinton. The two might not see eye to eye on political matters, but man do they know a thing or two about pie. Indeed, if the half-custard and half-sweet potato pie I purchased at the Family Pie Shop is any indication, pie could very well be the answer to most (if not all) of the divisive political wrangling that's tearing this great country apart.

Since I visited the Family Pie Shop in August, I've had numerous pies, all of them special in their own way. For my birthday my mother made a peach and caramel pie that was absolutely divine. Then, in Perry, OK, at a place called the Kumback Lunch (once visited by famous Oklahoma outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd, who, when he stormed into the place fully armed, assured the patrons that he wasn't there to rob them, just to have a bit of lunch), I had perhaps the perfect accompaniment to the sort of juicy onion burger that one can only find in the Sooner State: a tidy slice of tart cherry pie that I can still taste if I concentrate really hard and tilt my head way back, mouth open. Peanut butter pie at my father's was a bright spot in a pretty depressing week in early September, as was the pre-rodeo, post-onion-burger banana pie in El Reno, OK. And just this weekend Jill's apple pie provided just the right level of sustenance to see me through to the wee, wee hours.

I have just finished my last slice of my first pumpkin pie of the year. This on a day in which I have also had pumpkin ice cream and pumpkin ravioli. Pumpkin is probably going to get its own post here very, very soon.

By now you're probably saying, "Wow, Dr Nuffin must think pie is perfect! Is there anything he doesn't like about pie?" Yes, there is. And it's a doozy. I don't like crust. Unless it's light and flaky, like that of my mother's peach-caramel pie, or made out of chocolate, I generally find it dry and uninteresting, getting stuck way up behind my teeth and at the top and bottom of my gums. I will frequently leave the last piece of crust, that which forms around the rim of the pan, on my plate after eating the rest of the pie. When I was younger, I would normally eat out all the filling and leave the entire crust intact. But as I've gotten older, I've learned something: the crust, as uninspiring as it is on its own, is necessary in making pie as wonderful as it is. It's like the yin to the filling's yang, a standard of comparison by which to judge everything else about the pie, the slight imperfection in a loved one that makes you love them all the more. Crust, quite simply, makes pie, pie. And there's a very important lesson in there. If we all had pie filling all the time, sans crust - sheer, unimpeded bliss - we'd forget ourselves entirely, we'd become wedded to the instant sweet gratification of the filling without appreciating what not-filling tastes like. And the filling itself would lose its appeal. We'd come to expect everything to be filling, and become upset and impatient with things that were not filling. Pie crust, I believe, makes us responsible human beings, conscious of our limitations and appreciative of those morsels of enjoyment that we do manage to sqeeze out of life. Even that store-bought crap.

Me Oh My.

We All Live in a Noho Submarine

One of the biggest surprises that confronts an itinerant academic relocating to the Happy Valley is the area's distinct lack of suitable housing. By suitable I mean affordable, spacious, and reasonably grown-up - there are plenty of grim, '70s-era apartment complexes ringing the main university towns, with beer-stained wall-to-wall carpeting, relentless right angles, and parking lots strewn with discarded red plastic cups and the occasional pilfered traffic cone, but these aren't even worth talking about, much less putting down a deposit for. No, for the discerning 30-something accustomed to urban living and desiring something with a bit of character, something within walking distance of bars and coffee shops and drug stores, something in which one is unlikely to be awakened at 2am by hooting fraternity brothers, the options are few. Unless one happens to be in possession of a trust fund. And I'm not.

It took me four passes through the valley before I found a place to live. The first time I toured a few of the above-described apartment complexes, a few teensy-weensy studios, at least one isolated farmhouse that would almost certainly have driven me mad (like Jack-Nicholson-in-The-Shining mad) by the end of winter, and two decent but slightly expensive places that I put in applications for but failed to get. On the next three passes I dealt with a local rental agency whose agent, whom I'll call Debbie, was friendly and personable and wholly incompetent. My first really intense memory of the Valley is of standing in the rain outside a bar called Ye Ole Watering Hole while waiting for Debbie to come show me an apartment above the bar, her earlier phone call informing me that she would be about ten minutes late proving to be inaccurate by a factor of five. I probably saw six or seven different apartments with Debbie, some of them pretty nice but way above my means, the rest of them pretty crappy and still slightly above my means. I even went so far once as to put in a deposit for a place about a mile outside of town that I was pretty sure I couldn't afford, because it was large and was being renovated and had a balcony, but the owner ended up going AWOL for a week before resurfacing and informing the rental agency that he had rented the place all on his own, thank you very much. I should add that most of my transactions with Debbie's company were being conducted while I was staying with Anthony and Shelley out in North Adams, MA, an area of the world that has yet to be penetrated by T-Mobile - a circumstance that magnified the difficulties of my search considerably, forcing me to travel 45 minutes south to Pittsfield in order to get a cellphone signal (this inconvenience might have been alleviated had Debbie or her boss been capable of calling me at the alternative number I gave them, i.e. Anthony & Shelley's home number, but the introduction of a second phone number seemed only to confuse them further).

All this might have been much easier about a year ago, but the fact is, when it comes to apartments, I have recently become completely spoiled. Ever since birth I have lived with other people, mostly my family, but also scores of roommates in college and grad school whose foibles, smells, and eccentricities have provided endless anecdotes and character-building experiences. There was the Filipino transsexual whom I shared a salmon-colored apartment with in the Fenway whose voice exercises were capable of cracking crystal; the doped-out freshman year roommate who suffered from severe kleptomania, stealing everything from Mardi Gras beads to parental checks from the guys on our floor until a few of the fraternity brothers showed up one evening to set him straight; the perpetually happy 23-year-old cheerleader who lived with me and Josh in my last Boston apartment and owned so much clothing she had to put her bed on stilts in order to fit it all in her room. I have had wonderful roommates as well, of course (Josh, David, Declan, Lou, I'm looking at all of you simultaneously), but over the past year I got to where I really enjoyed living alone. Well, mostly alone. I was subletting a room in a Philadelphia condo owned by a professor at Penn who spent most of his time with his wife and baby out in State College, PA, only coming in to Philly two nights a week to teach. It was a large place with a glorious view of the 47th St dog park, washer and dryer in the unit, an old-fashioned elevator, a piano, a fireplace with a television in it, and even an indoor swimming pool in the building. I didn't use the pool much, but man did I enjoy hanging out in that place by myself, walking around naked if I felt like it, leaving the door open when I went to the bathroom, watching (or not watching) whatever I wanted to on the TV. And man did I get annoyed when the owner, in most respects a lovely and generous guy whom I have great affection for, showed up for his two nights a week and started stomping around the place, blasting the television, talking on the phone, turning on all the lights, and eating very strong-smelling Pakistani food, all while clad in nothing but his tighty whities.

This was how I decided that it was time for my own place. The trouble was, in Philly I was paying much less than I normally would have for a place that size, and it turns out what I can actually afford on my postdoc salary (which is nothing to sneeze at, given what I do for it, but not exactly luxurious either) is somewhat less than I'm accustomed to. And so: The Submarine. The Submarine is so called for four reasons: a) living in it forces one to be economical with space in a way that is usually only necessary in underwater naval vessels (and possibly in apartments in places like Manhattan and Tokyo); b) it is sinking slightly on its eastern side, making the floors tilt downward to the east and giving one the impression, if one stands up too quickly and starts walking from east to west across either the living room or the bedroom, of being on an ocean-going vessel that has just been rolled by a wave; c) even in one's private quarters, one becomes intimately familiar with the daily activities of one's fellow shipmates; and d) although it has many windows, for all the light it gets it might as well be at the bottom of the ocean. I first saw The Submarine on that same rainy afternoon that I waited 50 minutes for Debbie in the rain, and it was the last place she showed me - something, she said, that had just come open and in which there had already been much interest, but that I would be given priority on since I'd gotten screwed out of that other place. So I saw the apartment, it looked fine (though I did notice the sinking floors), and I was so exhausted and wet and frustrated that I took it more-or-less on the spot. This was early August, and the place wasn't available until early September, so I then drove home to Oklahoma and didn't see the place for a month.

What I discovered when I moved in will have to wait for another post. I had a very late night in Boston last night with some folks who are older than me and really ought to know better, and it's about time that I got myself to bed.

Friendly Greetings from the Happy Valley

Okay, so I'm sleepy and sitting at the Haymarket Cafe in Northampton, MA (hereafter, NoHo). I'm listening to the wonderful album We Brave Bee Stings and All by Thao - an album you all should go out and buy right now if you have any appreciation at all for the good things in life - and am just about to head back to The Submarine (aka my NoHo apartment; the nickname will be explained in graphic detail shortly) and read a little about the rise of American militarism before going to bed.

But I've been threatening to do this blog thing for a while now, and as luck would have it the mood struck tonight and I've gone and done it, so I want to get this inaugural post out of the way before I hit the sack. The premise is this: I'm in the Pioneer Valley region of Western Massachusetts on a lovely postdoc fellowship at one of the local colleges. The fellowship comes with very few strings attached - my primary obligation is to show up for lunch on Thursdays - and I therefore have plenty of time to do things like explore the area, get to know its inhabitants, buy its organic vegetables, and blog about it all. I'm also supposed to be writing a book and finding a job, but that part will more or less take care of itself. My main hope here is to try to convey, in vivid words and images, what it's like to live here in the Happy Valley (so named for a variety of reasons, most of which will become clear very soon), and also to give some taste of what a person's life can become when he has no professional obligations (apart, as previously mentioned, from eating lunch on Thursday - and did I mention lunch is paid for? But only on Thursday) and very few personal ones. Well, that last part isn't entirely true. But enough.

Stay tuned. The next post will probably be interesting.