Dear Blog Reader;
I hope this finds you doing well. We have done it now. The
first snow fall of winter has fallen on us this past week. A frigid Canadian
cold air mass has snuck across the boarder and visited an inch of the white
stuff upon us. Obviously the wooly worms are exacting their revenge for my
Hilly Hundred shenanigans. It will be gone shortly. We will survive this season
of our lives somehow.
Speaking of seasons, the Sharritt household is in the throes
of pumpkin pie season. The lovely Miss Beverly loves pumpkin pie. In fact she
could eat it year round. Fortunately, she married me, and I am able to place
boundaries on her pumpkin pie eating fondness. Specifically, she loves store
bought pumpkin pie. This is an odd thing when you look at it logically. Bev is
an excellent pie maker. It’s true and not just family bias. She entered the
Indy Star’s pie contest 5 years ago and came in 3rd in a
controversial judging decision. The winner was some holiday confection. It was
the middle of summer for goodness sake, and they went with the pie that would
have slipped Santa Claus into a diabetic coma.
Yes, the lovely Miss Beverly is a documented expert pie
maker. However, she is not a competitive pie maker. She loved the creative
part; creating a wild black raspberry cream pie with a lemon crust. She enjoyed
the testing and tweaking. She reveled in having 20 friends over for a tasting.
She disliked the being judged.
The irony is that the lovely Miss Beverly, she of pie making
expertise and artistry, loves store bought pumpkin pie. She of the light and
flakey Crisco infused crust loves the 10 inch Costco cardboard crusted pumpkin
pie. So every October through December, we experience the pumpkin pie season.
This week the hankering overcame the lovely Miss Beverly. I
know the look in her eye. Sitting at the dinner table, she will peer longingly
at the empty kitchen counter and sigh. After a few minutes, she will start to
fidget. Finally, she will get up, walk to the freezer pull out the emergency
tub of Cool Whip and put it into the fridge to thaw out. When she does that, I
know that it is time. It is time to put on my coat, drive to the local Marsh
and bring home a store bought pumpkin pie.
That is why I found myself at the store on Thursday evening
having the following conversation with the checkout girl.
The check out girl
said “I can’t believe this pie is so expensive. The 8 inch pie is only two
inches smaller but costs much less than the 10 inch pies.” (Note to Marsh
management, please train your staff to not ridicule the customer for spending
more money.) Fearing that this youth had
wasted my property tax support of her public education, I tried to help out by
saying “It’s close to the same price.” Receiving a blank stare in return, I
pushed on. I am an educator at heart. “You
see volume is pi r squared.” This isn’t exactly right. That is the formula for
area. You would have to take that product above and multiply it by the height. However,
I figure that you had to start someplace. I will introduce that concept when I
buy a 10 inch pecan pie next week.
Any who. Bambi, or Barbie or Constance
or Jessica or whatever her name was, looked at me in all seriousness and said
“no pie are round.” Who am I kidding? I would have been proud of her if she had
that much wit. I would have walked around the check out counter and given her a
hug. I would have looked into her eyes and said, “very good job. Excellent job!
Geometry may not be your strong suit but you have a literary wit about you.
You’ll be okay.” Actually, she just stared at me blankly. Still uneducated
prepared to buy $5.25 eight inch pies over the $8.00 10 inch pies for the rest
of her life.
The sad part is that sometime during the past week, she or
one of her cohort probably looked up at a math, science, or English teacher and
whined, “Why do we have to learn that? We’ll never use it in real life.” I
believe that there should be a zero tolerance policy for those words in schools.
If you open your pie hole and let those words escape, you should be forced to
spend the next week in a room without your “smart” phone, speaking and writing
in full sentences, pondering where two trains will collide if they leave two
cities, traveling toward one another, on the same track that is located 1.6
miles from your suspension room, at different speeds, carrying toxic acne
producing chemicals that will form a 2 mile diameter “zit zone”, answering the
question; how many phrases can you hook together with comas and semi-colons and
not get a grammar ticket? How’s that for a real world application, dearie?
Answer: It doesn’t matter. A 2 mile diameter “zit zone” will miss me by more
than a half a mile so I stopped caring about your stupid story problem long
before the actual question.
The list of things that are explained by useable knowledge
that can be gleaned from a free public education is expansive; when to fill the
gas tank so you aren’t doing the long trudge of shame with your $20 red gas
can, why do ice cubes freeze together into a solid block when they are
obviously melting, why your fritos are more expensive since the ethanol boom,
or why a 8 inch pie for $5.50 is more expensive, per volume than a 10 inch pie
for $8.00. In fact it is nearly half a cent per cubic inch more expensive. So
you paid about 46 cents too much for your cheap 8 inch pie.
Don’t worry though. As Paul Simon predicted, the world will
ensure that your “lack of education hasn’t hurt you none.” It will put pictures
on the cash registers and have them count out the change for you. It will print
calculated tip amounts on the bottom of your receipt. It will even put a green
logo on the gas pump so that you can feel like you are doing the right thing
while “driving” world food prices up.
It will even be glad to charge you a half a cent more for
your pie and make you feel better in your clouded thinking. Those half cents
add up during the pie season. Now if you have learned something from today’s
lesson and sworn off your 8 inch pie ways, it is important to know one more
thing. While your pie is just “2 inches larger”, you had better get an extra
tub of cool whip just too even things out.
Take care,
Roger
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