Personal Essay

“I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing!”*

My mother and father always had a dream. Paragons of the foodservice industry for decades, they had served their time in apprenticeship. They had even done their shtick as managers up and down both Florida’s coasts, which is why, given the opportunity, they upped roots and came to Missouri: to follow the dream.
That lofty dream was to run their own business. They purchased the G&S General Store in the sleepy burg of Napoleon, Missouri, and the work that was our life in Napoleon began. Napoleon is a quiet hamlet, boasting roughly 219 residents. According to Wikipedia, about twenty per cent of those 219 residents are below the poverty line. Having lived there, this fact is quite evident. The have-nots don’t just outnumber the haves – they are the population. Sure the haves exist, but they aren’t that rich. Those left in the middle class are expected to be as pious and charitable as possible. It’s the sort of place where membership of the Republican Party and an inbred hatred of learning may be assumed. Few children’s dreams are loftier than running the family farm, and the truly ambitious go to college to become football coaches - quintessential Americana.
I was born two years after my parents’ migration, and quickly learnt the meaning of hard work. Raised ‘over the shop’, I came to appreciate all business dealings. As I grew, I took on more roles in the operation of the store. We dealt in all variety of local needs: milk, eggs, bread, deli meats, groceries, some produce, my mother’s cinnamon rolls, and cigarettes. Everyone in town knew everyone else; we were the exception. We only knew our customers by face or check-stub; they knew each other by great-grandparents, of which it was a proud accomplishment to have no fewer than eight.
My first task was pricing and stocking groceries. There were delivery trucks that would arrive with weekly rations of chips, meat, dairy, candy and cigarettes. Locals would procure eggs and seasonal produce. That means we had to buy everything else. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I grew up in Price Chopper and Wal-Mart. It was not unusual for the list to be two full pages long – with two columns. Price Chopper would invariably be first. We could easily spend an hour and a half and three cart-loads in the store. It was rare to have a grocery bill under $200. Then, Wal-Mart would usually be necessary. Wal-Mart appeared to offer seasonal items more cheaply and had all the requisite paper supplies for our buxom business.
The Friday-night routine would often run: close shop at seven, drive to Blue Springs for dinner at seven thirty, Price Chopper from eight thirty to ten, and Wal-Mart from ten to ten thirty or ten forty-five – never eleven. We would then drive the thirty minutes home and unload. The unloading of groceries is a monumental task that deserves a national memorial devoted to it. One person can only carry so many sacks – especially when that person’s parents insist on paper bags. Then, the receipt was pored over and prices set. Groceries were priced, stocked, and I went to bed.
Some of the best jobs – and the most groceries – came from my mother’s catering. The former director of foodservice at UMKC, my mother was on top of catering. She could plan every last detail and knew instantaneously how many employees she would need for each job. We had a motley hodgepodge of clients. We had regulars and line-item gigs. This is how I met the most people in my early life and, therefore, how I learnt to judge character and determined how I ought to behave in public. To this day, snap judgements about whether a new acquaintance would be worth catering for still pop into my head: too wishy-washy, too mean, too rude, too drunk, too needy, just right. Likewise, I always feel the urge to fill people’s water glasses in a restaurant.
Our most stable customer was, by convention, referred to as the Saturday Night Supper Club. The Supper Club was actually a group from a church called Israel’s Gathering, an offshoot of the old Mormon Church. Every month, they had a supper club that would join together and dine out. Eventually, this group became so large that they thought they’d try a banquet catered-in as opposed to filling an entire restaurant. We were their first choice, and they never looked back. As the years went on, the Supper Club developed its own program aside from the banquet and moved from one Saturday every other month to the second Saturday of every month.
This brings us to the incident in question. Picture it: Thanksgiving in Napoleon 1999**. The week of Thanksgiving was affectionately referred to as ‘hell week’. For regular Thanksgiving seasons, my mother would be responsible for about 50 pies, 20 turkey dinners, Sunday Lunch Special at the store, most of the turkey dinner at our church, and endless mounds of three-bean salad. This year, it just so happened that the Saturday Night Supper Club had their banquet the evening before d-day (Sunday). Of course, they wanted the seasonal fare, so add a few more turkeys and a dozen pies to the above list and you get hell week.
Thanks to my mother’s foodservice training and expertise, everything went without a hitch. People came all the week before to pick up order after confounded order. Gradually, there was light at the end of the tunnel. This Thanksgiving, however, my mother had one fault: she decided to get creative. After fifty years of pumpkin pie out the wazoo, she took the liberty of making only one pumpkin pie for the Supper Club, whilst making a fabulous array of other delicacies: custard pie, strawberry-rhubarb pie, gooseberry pie, apple pie, peach pie, cherry pie, banana cream pie, coconut cream pie, chocolate cream pie, lemon meringue pie, etc. At the banquet, however, it appeared that no-one shared my mother’s estimation of pumpkin pie: they all wanted some. With one pie, we ran out after serving dessert to the first table. What followed was the ridiculous spectacle of a foodservice professional reasoning with people about what type of pie they might like in secondment to pumpkin pie. We had plenty of servings left and they were dished up into carry-out containers and stacked in buss tubs for ease of transport.
After cleaning up from the banquet, I headed upstairs to make a feeble attempt at dinner before collapsing in my bed. My parents were still cleaning up from the banquet and preparing for the next day’s turkey dinners – probably an all-night affair. After diligent searching, high and low, my only recourse from starvation was the bus tub full of desserts. As I had not eaten all day, I was rather hungry. Also, I objected to pie crust, so as I consumed the guts slice after slice, I left each crust perfectly in place – even lattice pies. I lumbered off to bed and fell into a satisfying sleep.
The next morning, I needed breakfast before church, so I consumed more slices of pie. After church, I high-tailed it home to avoid working the laborious turkey dinner, choosing instead to cashier the lunch rush. On sell-out days like this, it was not uncommon to have to sell our own lunches. This particular Thanksgiving, such was true. Once done with cashiering and in search of lunch, I was forced to resort, yet again, to the bufs tub of pies. After this stint, I had sufficiently finished off all of the pies, leaving a pristine collection of white carry-out containers, aligned en pointe, containing unmolested servings of pie crust. Pleased with my work, I decided to appropriate myself a nap.
Whilst all this was going on, there were fundamental logistical problems with the turkey dinner at church. Although my mom provided most of the food, the church ladies served and organized it. It was clear that they never would have made it at UMKC foodservice when, in the course of twenty minutes, they ran out of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, dressing, and cranberry sauce – in short, they ran out of turkey dinner, quite the problem for a turkey dinner. In proper form, they rang my mother, who instantly sprang into action. After solving the church crisis in fifteen minutes, my parents sat down to wash lunch dishes. The phone rang again. It now seemed that the church had run out of pie. Having actually planned for the church to run out of pie, she was quite pleased with herself as she ran upstairs to retrieve the bus tub full of pies from the kitchen table. As the church was notorious for not returning our wares, my mother began sacking the carry-out containers. As she placed the last container into a sack, she decided that it felt quite light and that she should probably reserve this stunted serving. Opening the container after seeing the church people off, she was horrified to find a perfectly unmolested serving of lattice pie crust. She went on, however, pleased in her mind that she had averted this narrow catastrophe.
When my mother asked at dinner whether I knew anything about the gutted pie, I could only jubilantly respond: “They were all gutted.”
My mother has long wondered just what happened that Thanksgiving Day when the church turkey dinner ran out of turkey dinner, and when, upon inspecting their newly-gotten booty of dessert servings, the unbecoming church ladies opened container after container of pie crust, but answer came there none.

*Alka-seltzer marketing slogan
**In memory of Estelle Getty, famous for her role as Sofia Patrillo on The Golden Girls.