Happy Pi Day. Go eat a pie!

Happy Pie Day, ya’ll.

pipi
An honest to Archimedes Pi pie.

Yessiree, this is the day you should go out and get you a big ol’ pie and share it with someone you love. Or you might share it with someone you lust for, or hell, just eat the whole thing yourself!

Actually, pies are just a manifestation of what is really “Pi Day.” It being March 14 (3.14) which is the number closely related to the arithmetic constant pi, or the symbol π. Now I’m sure you might have encountered pi at some time or other. That is, if you ever had geometry in high school or college, or you are a mathematician. Other than seeing pi on ridiculous, made-up holidays such as this, I can’t recall seeing the symbol, especially if it was used in its real setting as a ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The common mathematical approximation being 3.14149 which rolls on out to either something akin to infinity or just to a point in which you are tired of another number popping up so you just want to blow it off.

So π has really as much to do with pie as a frank does to being frank or even being a man named Frank. And please, no images of frank pie, a.k.a. Weenie Frank Pie.

MS2  Joshua Derode from Minneapolis, Min., prepares pecan pies for the big Thanksgiving dinner aboard the carrier USS George Washington. U.S. Navy photo by PHAN Rex Nelson.
MS2 Joshua Derode from Minneapolis, Minn., prepares pecan pies for the big Thanksgiving dinner aboard the carrier USS George Washington. U.S. Navy photo by PHAN Rex Nelson.

I’m not much of a pie-eater. A few times a year I might divulge into a slice of something handy and inviting, or vice versa. I like cake better, as a rule, and a candy bar even better but those too are seldom tasted by these lips. I am not much of a sweet-eater of any kind these days, and even when I was, I still didn’t touch much candy, cake or pie. Well, maybe certain types of pie.

My favorite is pecan pie. I think in some parts of the world it is pronounced PEE-can pie. Where I am from it’s Pee-CON pie. Six of one slice, half a dozen of the other. Since I was a big sweet eater when I was a kid, I don’t know why I wasn’t a fan of pecan pie. Goldarn it is sweet, why it’s as rich as six feet up a bull’s a**, as some firemen I worked with would say. I can’t say they knew all that much about a bull’s anatomy. Several of the guys I knew were real cowboys and I remember them talking about jumping up and down on top of a calf to get its heart started after a bovine cardiac arrest.  Well, maybe it has something to do with breeding cattle. Either way, if one might make it up that far inside that orifice, I would just have to say “Good luck, mate!”

l can’t remember for sure if my Mom made pecan pie. I’m sure she did and I bet it was good. It’s just been so long since I remember. A few pecan pies I remember in more recent years. I do recall this female friend in college making one from scratch. I mean she went out in the yard and picked pecans and made them into a pie. Even if it wasn’t the best I’d ever eaten, I certainly had to give the girl a big ol’ Alpha for effort.

The best pecan pie ever was at this popular Galveston restaurant called Gaido’s. This across-from-the-seawall seafood place has been there for years. Texas Monthly  has, for probably the past 30 years, rated it one-star for “extremely good restaurant” with prices averaging $31-50.  It may be one-star but that is one hell of a star as far as I’m concerned. It’s been a year or two since I have been to Galveston. I can’t remember if Gaido’s still has a motel beside it. I stayed there one weekend along some fellow newspaper people for a convention. One of those nights we all ate with one of the tightest bosses I had ever known footing an “eat what you want” bill. Boy howdy did I eat what I wanted, and then more. I was afraid to eat any desert for fears I might explode! But my boss’ daughter, who was my best advertising rep ever, talked me into “just a little piece of pie.”

Lord almighty that was the richest, best pecan pie or any kind of pie I ever had. A bunch of us went to a room and we watched “Barnaby Jones” reruns as we sat there like mummies, wrapped tight in big sweet pie crusts. I don’t know how much we all spent on Alka-Seltzer that night.

 

 

 

 

 

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