Pie in the Sky

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If I am to be completely honest, I would have to say that I have not been a playful individual. I recoil at the requirement to dress in costume on Halloween and Purim - which begins tonight - and I’ve never been the kind of person who looks in the closet and is immediately inspired to throw something together that makes her look like Winston Churchill or tuna on toast. In fact, I faintly remember my mother (not much of a seamstress herself) going out and buying me some sort of Queen Esther get-up in the ‘50s, only to have me refuse to attend the festivities at temple. I experience this as a personal failing, an unwillingness to get down and get silly, a reluctance to playact. My only really satisfying experience with costuming came about fifteen years ago when a friend who had previously owned an upscale dress shop made what remained of her merchandise available to people looking to dress up goofy on Purim. She had two black sequined numbers with spaghetti straps, one in my size and one much larger. My husband and I tried them on and lo! we were two-thirds of the Supremes. I got to glom on to his outrageousness, though the dress was nothing either one of us would normally wear to a party.

There are times that call for the ridiculous or the vulgar, sometimes both at the same time.

Pie eating contest, Minneapolis, circa 2010

No witty repartee will satisfy the narrative demands of a refugee crisis. This is not a time that lends itself to games played around a table at the Algonquin. At a recent check-up, I told my primary care physician that I hadn’t been feeling so good and speculated that my heartburn was connected to the war in Ukraine. He didn’t buy it. Instead, the doc, with the ancient what-do-you-want-from-me shrugging gesture of our people said “everything has always been terrible,” followed by some mumbling about Cossacks I didn’t quite catch. I laughed on cue and actually felt better for a fleeting moment. But when I got home, I started wondering about “do no harm” and whether expressing that level of despair was actually a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Then I thought about the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism and whether “everything has always been terrible” is a translation of the First Truth, the Reality of Suffering, only delivered in a minor key like a lullaby in Mariupol. In mid-century America, the land of plenty, of cars the size of yachts, we were taught that suffering was aberrant, that it happened to other people, foreign people, poor people. It didn’t happen to us. But the doctor, inching towards retirement, ready to pack it in, has seen his share of pain and has opted for the real, decided against pretending. He has seen bulemic adolescents, families that can’t afford the prescription drugs they need, dementia patients that don’t remember their grandchildren, and is determined, so it seems, to joke around, to assume the demeanor of Mel Brooks in this world and hope maybe for a better deal in the next at a lower interest rate.

Now I have concocted a fantasy that helps me nod out after the nightly apocalypse on CNN. I imagine myself in a red leatherette diner booth with the Marx Brothers. Groucho is on the opposite corner defiantly smoking a cigar. Chico is on my right telling racy stories. And directly opposite, Harpo is grinning and bouncing up and down like a bobblehead doll. After a length of time, the waitress, deftly avoiding Groucho’s advances, brings four pieces of pie, one banana cream, one Boston cream, one coconut custard, and one blueberry. On the count of three, each of us lifts a plate of pie and gleefully smashes it into the face of the person opposite. All sanctimony, all self-importance vanishes when you have pie on your face, a banana cream exorcism. In the fantasy, after shrieking and howling myself into a froth, I arrive at a red light at the intersection of laughter and grief. I turn east towards Ukraine, the sun on my neck. I’m heading back into the vale of tears, but I’m not exactly the same person I was before the laughter. This must be what life is.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.