Being an Adult Means You Can Have Pie for Breakfast
It can be amazing
My wife makes amazing pies. The fillings are sweet, and the crusts are even better. She’s made a cherry-berry pie in honor of “Twin Peaks” and a caramelized pumpkin pie that inspired delight long after the last piece was eaten. Perhaps the best part is that she encourages us to eat pie for breakfast.
The first time she suggested pie for our morning meal, the kid in me was incredulous. “Really?”
“Why not?” She asked. I couldn’t come up with a reason, so we had pie and coffee for breakfast. It was amazing.
It’s not like growing up I wanted pie for breakfast. I didn’t really know what pie was. We didn’t have pie in our home. My mom wasn’t much of a cook or baker back then. We knew dinner was ready when the garlic toast made from generic, sliced white bread, garlic salt, and butter burned in the oven and the smoke alarm went off. We’d open the front door and the patio door and eat our spaghetti. Mom always burned the first batch of toast.
It wasn’t just a lack of skill that kept us from having pie. My mom has since become an amazing cook with an award-winning recipe published in a cooking magazine. Mom just didn’t have the time, energy, or resources. She was a single parent raising two kids in the projects without the help of child support. We were poor — soup kitchen, HUD housing, selling oranges at the intersection, government-cheese poor. We’d go out on weekends to look for cans to recycle so we could have grocery money. We would check the coin slots of the local phone booth and newspaper stands every time we passed them. Sometimes, we’d make a special trip just to do so.
Mom always worked two jobs and went to school so she could get better jobs. The two jobs were never enough to afford a week’s worth of meals. We were often faced with the possibility of having to skip a meal or eating smaller portions and still going to bed hungry. One year, we ate spaghetti noodles every day. They must have been given out with the cheese. Mom worked hard to make sure we had something to eat, even if she had to go without.
I shouldn’t say that I didn’t know what pie was. I had seen Hostess pies in the store and had friends at school who would share. I had a Big Brother who would take me to McDonald’s and get me a Happy Meal and an apple pie. It’s the only kind of apples I like. On holidays, we’d get invited over to meals for Thanksgiving and Christmas. There’d be pumpkin pie. So, I knew what pie was; it just wasn’t on the radar of possibilities for breakfast.
That’s OK. I could live without pie. Just like I lived without my bike that was stolen from our front doorstep while I ran inside to pee. Like I lived without my dog, who wasn’t allowed to come to the projects with us. Like I lived without my fathers, either biological, who I never knew, or adopted, who had another family to care about. If I didn’t need those things, I didn’t need pie, either.
When I went to college, pie was in vogue. It was a thing to go down to the chain diner late at night and eat pie. I went. I had pie and coffee. I was never impressed by it, and often I left the crust alone. I figured the filling probably had some sort of nutrients.
When my wife made pie for the first time, it was a revelation. Her crust was buttery, sweet goodness. I finally realized why Agent Cooper would order pie with his “damn fine coffee.” When she suggested we eat it for breakfast and I got over the shock of the idea, I realized that part of being an adult is allowing your inner child to get away with something you could’ve never done in your youth, whether it was forbidden or unrealistic. If you were like most kids, you couldn’t have ice cream, cake, or pie in the morning, but being an adult means you can have pie for breakfast.
