Pie and Coffee

3/9/08

Pie and coffee appear regularly in literature as a singular event, a late morning indulgence or an afternoon hospitality that provides a delicious alibi for conversation and communion that wouldn't be appropriate across a bare table, a ritual that ensures time for a proper visit yet provides each participant some control over the duration of the meeting.

I have never had pie and coffee, yet I imagine it with an indefinable longing, inexplicably nostalgic despite having never experienced it. Sure, I have had pie for dessert, and at the same time sipped coffee, but that's just having dessert; likewise, I've had coffee with a cookie at coffee shops a few hundred times, but somehow that seems different, like when your mom insisted during your childhood, "But you have blue jeans", referring to a stiff pair of Wranglers when you were pleading for a pair of Levis.

What I crave isn't merely the particular foodstuffs: Pie and coffee isn't a menu item as much as a mindset, a culinary portal that allows simultaneous geographic and time travel; pie and coffee will not simply satisfy an empty belly, but will transport me to simpler times, to a culture that predates my birth, when neighbors visited with each other and our lives were not so neatly seamed at the edges. Modern life creates as a byproduct an insatiable itch, a psychic wanderlust with which we wrestle without a compass, a sense that there is something more out there, yet no amount of more makes us feel complete. As implausible as it may seem, I sometimes suspect that pie and coffee may be the antidote.

I'm fascinated that my brain has imbued a snack with such mythic powers, especially considering that I don't like a lot of pies. (I suffer from a mild case of texturephobia, and with all of the baked fruits, custardy coagulations and sometimes-soggy crusts, pies offer more potential for disappointment than deliciousness.) Though I admit, this is not the first culinary alchemy I have performed: The illusion of Souther Food came first.

I insist that I love southern food, yet there are few items on the southern food menu that genuinely interest me. (The comfort foods: Jambalaya, Gumbo, red beans and rice, etc.) The truth is, I don't love southern food as much as I love my impression of the south, an enthusiasm based on the swaggering groove of southern music, the languid beauty of southern writers, and the visual images planted by Hollywood when portraying the south as steeped in tradition and mythology. The South is a mosaic in my mind, assembled from only select bits of information that have survived my internal sorting process; the ugly tiles never made it into the final work.

I'm not sure which mosaic is deserving of the pie and coffee tile. The midwest, I suppose, since I'm sure I first learned about it through Garrison Keillor. But I don't have enough midwestern tiles to make a mosaic yet, so I fixate on this one little tile, imagining the beauty that could surround it.