I quit my pie job last week. It wasn’t a dramatic thing, it was just time for me to be finished working there. I kind of knew my time was up because the magic of pie was starting to wane for me. The process of making pie every day, in large batches, using the same standardized recipes over and over was beginning to drain away my innate inspiration around it. Technically speaking it was a creative job in that I was literally making something, but it involved no original thought or insight. It was really just a matter of executing someone else’s recipes as consistently and efficiently as possible. Which is not to say I didn’t gain anything from the experience. Getting very methodical and repetitive has its benefits. For one thing it sets you up to work on refining your perfectionistic streak; on making each strip of crust and each batch of caramel your best one yet. You can lock yourself away in meditation while you weight out 120 balls of dough, and you can consider and reconsider all of your life choices while rolling pie shell after pie shell for hours on end. And once you’ve finally finished assembling all those peach, cherry and salted caramel apple pies you’re free to live the rest of your day unencumbered. Which is a gift that not all jobs afford.
But the pie shop was also an important shift for me socially. More specifically, because of the strange and beautiful people that crossed my path while I worked there. I spent six years working in a restaurant where people tended to blend together in my mind, like a long string of paper doll cutouts, rarely leaving much of a mark. But for whatever reason, be it circumstantial or vibrational, that was not the case at the pie shop. From the moment I interviewed there with a blue-haired pie pixie, there was a noticeable distinctness to the individuals that I encountered. There were regulars that came in daily to take shots of tequila at 8 am before heading off to work. There were trans and queer people, both customers and employees. Semi-homeless, drug-addled motherly figures that everyone knew by name and welcomed in without question. Twenty-two year old male feminists wearing vintage 80’s shirts and talking about the importance of sexual politics. Beautiful, sorrowful women who were genuinely terrified of the upcoming election results before anyone else seemed to see the darkness approaching. People who broke a societal mold of some sort, in ways that intrigued and inspired me; in ways that I very much needed to witness and internalize. I needed it more than I even knew. The experience of them was a reminder to me of the immense beauty, complexity and destructive nature of humanity, as well as my part in each of those elements. I am uniquely beautiful, I am unendingly complex and sometimes I’m too wild in heart and spirit to go easy and be truly good to myself.
I want to say that I’ve grown a lot in the last seven months. I got more expansive and thoughtful, centered and deeply rooted, liberated but also devastated. I stood on my pie girl perch and set so many of my deeply ingrained ideals ablaze. I watched them burn like a wildfire and wondered what might possibly take their place. The answer remains an unknown to me. Maybe that doesn’t sound too much like growth to you and maybe it’s not really. But at the very least it’s movement.
I’m looking forward to rebuilding my personal relationship with pie. To reconnect really, from my current vantage point. It’s going to take some sweet seduction to find a new common ground, one that factors in both experience gained and a chance for innocent renewal. I think it’s going to be lovely.
flutedcrustpieco 