Pie?
by Jon Worley

Barbara baked a pie today. Lemon meringue. She does this every once in a while to confirm her southern heritage, just as I affirm my status as a midwesterner every time I whip up a batch of kung pao chicken. In other words, whatever works if it makes you happy.

Barbara is very deliberate in her dealings with the kitchen. All the ingredients must be dumped in just as the recipe says, and each stage much be completed before going on to the next one. Now, she's not always perfect in her execution. When making rum balls for Christmas, she somehow mistook vegetable oil for corn syrup, and when the ingredients refused to cohere, she called on me to debug her procedure. I proceeded to explain to her the difference between Karo and canola. She hurled her nearly-finished pina colada in my face. Fair enough.

She called on me, as she generally does when it comes to vittle rustling matters, because I'm the member of the family who cooks on a regular basis. My kitchen modus operandi is 181.4 degrees removed from hers. I throw things about, constantly alter recipes (mostly because I'm a little haphazard as to measurements and procedures) and actually enjoy myself while cranking out generally tasty comestibles. A homebrew or two is always good for the cooking soul.

This scattershot methodology did not serve me well Thursday night. While assembling a Szechuan sauce for veggies, I lost control of the Hung-Lu wine bottle, sending it into a canister and then a stoneware plate. Luckily for me, I had already replaced the top on the bottle, and no wine was lost (it's a pain to keep dropping $1.50 for a liter of salted wine, you know).

While the bottle survived, the plate was toast. In fact, I thought I had torched the one sitting right behind it on the drying rack as well. But no, I was lucky, as luck goes. At the time, I didn't notice the problem with the canister. Barbara did this afternoon, when she scored some corn starch for her pie. She didn't scream or holler. She just asked, "What happened to the canister?" We both puzzled out that it was a further casualty of the flying wine bottle.

I must admit, I did utter a single expletive Thursday night after I saw the results of my handiwork with the wine bottle (at least as far as the plate went), but I wasn't that upset. It turns out we've been married long enough not to fret over broken wedding presents.

Given the generally clumsy nature each of us possesses, it's amazing we've not destroyed a gift sooner. All I can say is that if this had happened two years ago, there would have been serious remonstrations and demonstrations of angst. But not now. The end result? Friday I went down to the Pfaltzgraff store and bought a new plate. Yeah, we're kinda lucky that we picked Pfaltzgraff stuff years before we even thought of moving to company's base of operations (Pfaltzgraff owns close to half the real estate in downtown York, which is considerably more holdings than you might imagine), and that might have eased tensions somewhat. But even in the case of the canister (which probably cannot be replaced by an exact duplicate), the response was "oh well". It's time to accept the fact that we're old and set in our ways.

For an old married couple, though, we still get around. We still close bars (after many of our single friends have gone home), and we're often among the last people to leave a party. When considering a job in New Jersey, my prospective boss told me "This is a great place to be married". At that moment, I knew I didn't want to live there (okay, so the "New Jersey" part had something to do with it as well). We don't act much like a married couple, except that we do end up in the same bed at night. Then again, we have married friends not much older than us who sleep in separate beds.

While I was writing this, Barbara had problems with her meringue, and I helped out (just kept adding cream of tartar and corn starch until the peaks were "southern stiff"). Despite my Yankee influence, the pies turned out well. And as far as we know, no kitchen implements were destroyed in the process.

Though, as we both know now, we just don't worry about such things nearly as much. A definite benefit of a long-term relationship.

Jon Worley wreaks havoc in an apartment above the Roosevelt Tavern in York, Pennsylvania.

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