When you bake pie for a living, the week of Thanksgiving is a lot like finals week, but with dough and filling and lots and lots of blind-baked pie shells. And the prospect is a little bit terrifying, I’ve gotta say. As a person who relies heavily on downtime for their sense of sanity, facing a week of twelve-hour back-to-back pie prep shifts gives me a bit of a knot in my stomach. But despite my dull terror the week arrived, and I found myself rolling out obscene amounts of dough, listening to the Alanis Morissette Pandora station for approximately 24 solid hours, eating cold pizza and trying to remember to hydrate. Do you see what I mean about the finals week vibe?
But after finals week there are tests and then grades and then a time to celebrate and/or start fresh with new perseverance. In the real world of clocking in and out you don’t always get that sense of completion, let alone accomplishment. At the end of the mad holiday week we as a pie shop had baked more than three hundred pies. And while a massive amount of them landed on what I can only imagine were lovely, appreciative Thanksgiving tables, a sad heap of them did not sell and remain in boxes in the shop’s basement getting stale and moldy because no one wants to face the disappointing fact of their existence. There’s something highly depressing about that to me. And it’s not just because I value pie more than the average person. It’s all the hype around the event, all the exhaustive hours trying to keep the ovens stuffed to the gills, only to witness dozens of buttery, flaky mounds wasting away alone in the dark that feels a bit defeating. Plus by day three of baking your ass off, the lack of sleep, the irritable co-workers and the chest cold you’d been trying to keep at bay doesn’t exactly add to any sense of joy or pride in the work you’ve done.
I had moments that week where I caught myself thinking ‘what am I doing with my life?? Really? I’m slinging pie for a living? How did I get here?’. I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know how I’ve become a 33 year-old pie baker. My professional life is currently centered around pie. PIE. How strange and arbitrary is that? Thanksgiving is its one day a year to really shine and even then it often gets passed over altogether due to overindulgence, or maybe eaten for breakfast the next morning with coffee in a solitary kitchen surrounded by piles of dirty baking dishes. It’s an expected and yet underappreciated part of the classic holiday meal. It’s a sweet extra on top of way too much tryptophan-laced savory fare. I sometimes wonder if it’s even worth spending the time to make a pie.
Is that bitter? Is that dramatic? Is that fitting for where we currently are in history? Where we are in this strange and sorrowful year?
They say you need to find your passion. Seek it out and throw yourself into it, see where it takes you and make a success story out of it. I’m starting to think that’s just foolish modern day fairytale stuff. Or maybe life is like that for some, but for others it’s just another way to feel like we’re not doing things right. Or perhaps it’s best to just close your eyes and have faith in the journey of it all. Because maybe there is no right or wrong way to go about living. Maybe there will be some sorrow in each step of it no matter how you spin it. And maybe it’s all worth the effort anyway.
flutedcrustpieco 