Barbeque Pie . . . or, How you know you're not the same person you once were

I had my second home-made peach pie last week, although this one was made by a good friend who cooks for a living, so I refrained from all pulls to compare hers to mine.

She brought it over for a Labor Day BBQ, and it needed to be warmed before serving. After about an hour, I checked the oven, and it had never turned on. The prior day, my fridge started losing its coldness. I had 20+ people over, my landlord was out of town, and I now had no oven and no fridge. Hmmmm.

My friend reassured me we could eat the pie as it was. But I fretted; room-temperature pie was not my idea of how to offer up treats to our guests, nor would it showcase how good that pie might be. One of the guests had the humorous idea of using the grill to heat the pie, since we were done with all of our grilling. [This in itself was no small task, since everyone brought their own favorite to put on the grill. We had salmon and steak and tuna kabobs and salmon burgers and unshucked corn and pineapple slices – all grilled to perfection by my Grillmeister husband.] I’d pre-grilled rosemary chicken sausages and the kids’ burgers and hotdogs indoors, as the initial possibility of outdoor grilling was slim due to the cold rain jag that ushered in a crashingly early end-of-summer. The stovetop continued to work, even as the other appliances failed.

I used to think I was cursed. Not cursed like in a movie or a gothic novel, but cursed in the sense that if anything bad was going to happen, it was going to happen to me. At times I’d enlarge the curse to encompass my whole family. At other times, I was convinced it was just me.

And sure enough, bad things happened. Bad things that sometimes happen to just anyone, and some bad things that are more rare. Each occurrence of an unwanted event confirmed the curse. I joked about it to friends, and some of them knew of The Curse. But I wasn’t really joking. I felt out of place with regular people who experienced regular events and regular downfalls. I felt trapped into a future of unpleasantness, as by definition a curse doesn’t let up. And on and on the bad things piled up, my sense of destiny plummeted.

But the other day I had a houseful of guests, another dinner party 2 days later for which I needed to be cooking like a fiend, and no working appliances. My husband put the pie on the charcoals in the grill. It came out perfectly delicious, filled with enormous slices of buttery yellow peaches in a yummy, very flaky crust; and it was warmed throughout, exactly the way pie should be, the heat perfectly melding the flavors and textures. [And it was far better than the one I'd made earlier this summer.] I put the perishables from the fridge in the cooler that just happened to be filled with ice for our – did I mention this? – party. I called around to find friends whose ovens I could borrow, and I had two offers without even trying my next door neighbors, who I knew would say “yes” if I asked. I found a same-day appliance repair place online, and my husband who works two full-time jobs and that day was helping arrange a U-Haul truck for a family member to move while also taking care of our son (child care programs in our city are closed on the Tuesday between Labor Day and the Wednesday first day of school, meaning that elementary school families are clamoring to create some patchwork plan to make it through a day when most parents have to work, but the usual places for kids to go are closed), managed to make it back home for the two separate repair people they sent, since apparently fixing a fridge and an oven requires different expertise.

I was held so firmly in a psychic sphere of containment that I measured out my cake ingredients before I left for work, then made the cake batter the moment I got home – I was certain it was going to get baked somewhere - and the fact that it was in my now-functioning oven (with a new igniter), which was tested and calibrated perfectly to 325 degrees, before the repair guy had even walked out the front door – was lovely, but almost didn’t matter.

I found humor and alternatives and knew this would be a great story to tell. I never once thought the pitiable “why me’s” of my younger struggling self. I didn’t use the events to prove anything, except that the moral of the story is to be a really good person to those in your life, so that when something unexpected happens, you’ve got really good friends and a magical spouse to turn to. I felt grateful and blessed. The Curse, which I’d forgotten I used to have, is clearly gone. Perhaps it never existed, and my family just had a long, long string of painful, unlikely events. Perhaps I didn’t actually experience anything extraordinary. Maybe I just lacked the right kind of containment to make hard things seem more bearable. But now, I’ve got a Barbeque Pie story, and it makes me happy.