Hayter
article for June 7, 2020
“The
Mysterious Pie Day”
The fifth greatest feeling a
suburbanite can have occurs immediately after he or she has mowed the lawn,
weeded around everything that’s been stationary for over a month, and edged along
the sidewalk, driveway, and porch. I just finished doing all of that. Ask me
how I feel.
Before I get carried away, I must
confess that Kay is the one who mows the lawn. Hey, she enjoys doing it. We’ve
got a good self-propelled mower that will be even better when Amazon sends me
the air filter and spark plug I ordered back in April. I’d go to Home Depot and
get ‘em myself, but as soon as I did, my order would mysteriously show up. While
I don’t believe in fate, I do believe in bad juju. That stuff is all over the place.
Take Kay’s rolling pin. Yesterday,
Kay decided to make a combo cherry and peach pie. I didn’t know it was
possible, but I was on board. Kay gets in a pie-making mood in early June every
four years. I do not fault her one bit. Marie Calender’s Razzleberry Pie is my
preference, but Kay was all gung-ho to pie-bake, so I was the encourager. Kay had
cherries, peaches, and Pilsbury’s refrigerated crust. What she didn’t have was
her rolling pin. I couldn’t be bothered, because I was busy using a narrow,
plastic straw to de-pit cherries. You ought to try that someday.
After the cherry pit massacre, I hid
in my study. I was working on a project when I heard Kay ask me if I knew where
her “shisipim” was. -- Do you remember me telling you that Kay can’t yell.
She’s incapable of screaming, hollering, or even raising her voice more than a
quarter octave. (In physics, a quarter octave is called -- “not much”.) That’s
a good thing… until Kay tries to communicate with me from another part of our
modest-sized home. When she has something to tell me, she verbalizes it with no
apparent concern as to where I might be located. I would get after her for
that, but I’ve been told I’ve got my own foibles.
So, I left my computer and went to
the kitchen to ask Kay to repeat herself. -- “Oh, I didn’t mean for you to come
in here.” -- I get a twitch on the right side of my face when she says stuff
like that. -- She then asked me where I put her rolling pin. Where I put it? --
I asked her if she was looking for the plastic one or the hand-crafted wooden
one. She said the wooden one, which was good because I had tossed her plastic
one into the recycle bin back in November of 2018. It’s now near the bottom of
the recyclable landfill.
I summoned up all my courage and
told her that I had moved her wooden rolling pin because it was always rolling
around in the cabinet. I put it in a place that was easy to remember, only I
couldn’t remember where the place was. Not to worry. I would find it.
I looked all over the house. Got out a step
ladder to look above the cabinets in the kitchen and in each closet. I even
looked in the box where she keeps the Christmas wrapping paper, thinking I
might have stuffed it inside one of the cardboard rolls. (I kid you not.)
May I remind you that Kay will go
four years without needing a rolling pin? Still, she made sure to remind me
that the pin was made by Gene Gore, our friend at church, the greatest wood craftsman
there ever was and ever will be. (I borrowed that from “The Natural”.) After a couple of tedious hours, Kay gave me a
strained smile and told me that she wasn’t mad, she was just upset. There’s
apparently a slight difference between the two. I assured her that I would get
up early and look in the garage and storage shed for the pin. She told me not
to worry, that it would show up when it was ready. I had trouble sleeping that
night. The last time I looked at the clock it was 3:30 in the a.m.
When I woke up I went to the kitchen
for toast. I wanted to have something on my stomach before attacking the
garage. After I got out a piece of
bread, I opened the drawer to get a new twist tie -- because the one that’s on
the bread disappears every single, blab-spitting’ time I get out a piece of
bread. -- I apologize for that outburst. -- When I opened the drawer, I had to
move the rolling pin out of the way to get to the twist ties. I’m not joking! The
rolling pin was in plain sight looking right at me. Not only that, but it
appeared to be smirking.
I don’t know how many times Kay and
I had looked in that drawer the previous day. And there is absolutely no
telling how many times we had been in the drawer during the 13 months since I
“hid” the rolling pin there.
You won’t believe this, but I
occasionally exaggerate. It happens, but not very often. -- What? No, I heard
something. -- Anyway, I am not making this rolling pin story up. There were
some mysterious goings-on in our last house, and it’s apparently followed us
here. It doesn’t frighten me, but, just once, it would be nice if whatever it
is would prank me by weeding, edging, and mowing the lawn. -- But noooo! I get
the “bad” juju.
end
hayter.mark@gmail.com
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