Dern ye, ya shoulda taken d’pie!
Pie at night is dessert but pie in the morning is pastry. Take the pie.
I dragged this essay over from the other place I used to write because Hamish wrote a Note and I replied something about a feeding trough and now y’all know how we got here. When there is pie on the line, you take that pie. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. I don’t think a week goes by without the phrase, “Dern ye, ya shoulda taken d’pie!” popping into my head. It’s about carpe diem or living without regret or denying yourself something because of others only to discover they wanted for you what you denied yourself or whatever… read, make the phrase your own and tell me in the comments what it means to you. Or not.
When I was fifteen, I worked as a cook for The Viking Village Smorgasbord on Snelling Ave in St. Paul, MN. It’s not there anymore. In fact, someone long ago turned the building into a furniture store. A few decades have passed since I last clocked in but a handful of stories stick vividly in my brain as if they happened only yesterday.
On one particular weeknight, a farm couple wandered in for dinner. He was wearing his best overalls and she, her best go-to-church Sunday dress. Neither had very many teeth; their faces were ruddy with sun and wind; and their hands were gnarled from years of manual farm work. They held all the cash they were going to spend in “The Cities” in their hands. Whether it was all they had left, all they started out with or simply everything they had planned on spending, you could tell it wasn’t much.
Dinner was $4.95, all you could eat, not including pie. Pie was extra.
As they made their first trip through the steaming trays — filling their plates with fried chicken, steamed cod and mashed potatoes — she had a comment for everything, mostly saying how delicious everything looked. I think she was just happy she didn’t have to cook for one evening. In her mind, her husband was treating her like a queen for a night. When they got to the end of the food line, he confirmed it.
“Do ya’ want a piece of pie?” she asked. He shook his head and said, “No, you go ahead. It cost extra.”
As she responded, “We got enough,” he caught my eye. I quickly looked down, absorbing myself in wiping the line.
“No, no…der’s tax and ever-ting. You go ahead.”
He did, and as the cashier tallied their meal, I looked up to see her counting out the remaining money. I got a sense that it was close, but more than enough to cover the price of another piece of pie.
She looked up at him and said, “Dern ye, ya shoulda taken d’pie!”
A version of this essay is in my first Little Legacy Book, Monkey with a loaded typewriter. And yes, I was using emdashes way before ChatCPT discovered them,. This was written in 2016.
You bring these stories to life so beautifully, G. Love being reminded of the power of your writing.