Pigging Out on Pie

Most every year, I throw myself a birthday party called The Pie Pig Out. Back when I knew lots of musical folk, it was the Goodson Annual Song Fest and Pie Pig Out, my one opportunity to sing Christmas carols and, ecumenically, dreidle carols in honor of Hanukkah. But over the years, I've come to realize that people don't really like to sing when they are stuffed to the gills with Pie.

(I almost always capitalize the word "Pie"...it's that important to my diet.)

When I started my annual Pie Pig Out, I invented a mathmatical calculation to determine what the difference was between serving Pie at a party and what was a true "pig out". I decided that 1/2 Pie per person would constitute pigging out.

This year's menu includes pumpkin, chocolate cream, mincemeat, apple, strawberry, pecan, key lime (Kelly's contribution), and a new invention of mine, grapefruit meringue. We'll see if that's a hit or "No seconds for me" addition. Next year's invention might include a meat Pie or two, or bubblegum cream even.

A Pie Pig Out is the perfect opportunity for experimentation. Because, after all, if the experiment tastes perfectly dreadful, you still have all the other Pies to eat. The mark of a successful Pie Pig Out is that there a few, if any, leftovers.

I've dropped chocolate pieces in the bottom of a pecan pie prior to adding the pecans and baking. I've lined the shell of a pumpkin Pie with apricot jam prior to pouring in the pumpkin innards. (That's one I truly like...got the idea from my daughter Becca, but the pumpkin purists rebelled so I won't be trying THAT again anytime soon. You'd've thought I'd killed a baby lamb or farted in church or something.)

I've blended the chocolate pudding with Cool Whip prior to pouring into the shell instead of leaving the Cool Whip sitting on top. (Bad idea, 'cause the pudding never really sets up as it should and the result is something you have to spoon onto the plate.)

This year, as I pondered the intricacies of the menu, my son Benjamin nixed any Pies he personally doesn't like. I think HE thinks that he'll be able to sample every single Pie, more the fool. Since he doesn't like lemon meringue, I invented the grapefruit idea.

I'm a big fan of ALL citrus and think that lemons unfairly dominate that family of fruit. What's wrong with limeade or tangeloade for that matter? If lemonade is a nice summer cooler, so's grapefruitade. When you think about it, we have lemon chicken, lemon bars, lemon meringue Pie, lemon torte, pastry and pound cake. There are a couple dozen entries for lemon this and lemon that in my cookbook. If the grapefruit meringue Pie is a hit, I think I'm gonna break out of the box and make grapefruit chicken or tangerine bars.

Every year, I get asked why I do the lion's share of baking for a party for myself. Why not make others serve you on your birthday, they ask. Because, I tell them, this is my thank you gift to all those truly blessed people in my life who have to put up with me for another whole year.

Judging Monsters

Today, I literally had to pass judgement on a fellow human being...well, maybe he isn't really a fellow human being because of what he did to a precious little girl. I don't think of him as human, anyway.

I have spent the past eight days pondering, with 11 other human beings, some pretty horrible s***. We had four and then three hold-outs on our jury and I was glad we had them. While I didn't rush to judgement, wanting to hear all the defendant's evidence in his favor, his defense team didn't offer much in the way of evidence to prove his innocence. As in, none.

I was very grateful we had those holdouts because they caused us to remember, not that we needed a reminder, that a man's life hung in the balance. They caused us to review, over and over, our own past experiences, the evidence, the testimony, the way we judge if a person is speaking the truth, the definition of "reasonable doubt", the horror of getting it wrong and putting away an innocent man.

We were admonished by the judge that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Since I have trouble holding two contradictory thoughts in my head at one time, I listened to all the State's evidence while trying to keep this man's innocence in my mind. Trouble was, there was the little girl's own testimony and DNA evidence.

When the State rested, I was prepared for the "on the other hand" evidence and what I (and all the other jurors) got was nada. Zilch. Zero. Goose egg. All we got were a closing statement which contradicted the evidence we'd seen with our own eyes. The Defence even said "she asked for it".

Note to attorney: When you said "she asked for it", that implies that indeed something did happen and the child wanted it. Last time I checked, a 47-year-old male, even if the child "asked for it", should have, could have said "this isn't right." The defendant didn't say that.

I tend to be judgemental, while trying mightily not to be judgemental. Let's face it, we all do it. You see a homeless person or a person who doesn't behave how you would, or a parent in a store, or you name it. We see stuff and we judge it. If we see the whole sum of a person's life and circumstance, we tend to be less judgemental. "On the other hand" becomes an understanding (though not necessarily an excuse) of the behavior we have judged.

First time in my life I have been ordered by a judge to judge. Sadly, we had to vote to put this guy away for life. Sadly because we all secretly wished that the guy hadn't done it. We wished he hadn't done it because we didn't want to ponder or imagine or envision what that poor child had had to endure...what he did to her. For over a year.

Someone commented that the guy was probably abused as a child himself. Don't care. Doesn't matter. My guess is that there are plenty of children out there who are abused and they seek help and grow up to be caring adults who don't abuse. The guy had a choice.

He made the wrong choice and lives are forever altered, forever damaged, forever not the same as they would have been if he'd made the right choice. Souls are damanged, sometimes beyond repair. Several of us on the jury, knowing what we know about pedophiles, thought perhaps she wasn't his first victim. But the judge shielded us from any past history.

So it wasn't gleefully or with joy that we judged the child to be telling the truth, the evidence to be irrefutable. The holdouts eventually became convinced as to the rightness of a guilty verdict. Just as soon as we delivered our verdict, we were able to check the news coverage of the trial, something we had been cautioned not to do during our deliberations.

The man we judged today was indeed a convicted pedophile, something some of us had suspected. The saddest part of the whole thing was that he had been released from prison 12 years ago. Since pedophiles don't stop what they are doing, most probably there is a child or children out there who were abused by this monster. A child or children who couldn't speak out or weren't believed. Yes, our judicial system worked. But not soon enough.

So, to our victim today...you go girl. Go have a life that is full and rich and everything you can possibly dream. Living well is the best revenge, so go out there and live well.