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Section: Life & Leisure

More Pies to Come
By Susan Hannen

On weekdays during seemingly endless summer afternoons, my sisters and I would fall into long reveries about where we might go on the weekend when our father was at home. It would have been unthinkable for our mother to keep the car for the day and take us anywhere without Dad. He was the driver of the big black Buick that had a backseat as spacious as our living room.

Saturdays were reserved for lawn-mowing, minor house repairs, grocery shopping and picking Grampa up from work at Simond’s Saw and Steel Mill. Saturday was payday, and it was ritual for Grampa to treat us to spaghetti supper at Rinaldo’s, just down the road from the mill. Sundays were for mass and daytrips in the humpback whale Buick.

Destinations were chosen, not for scenery, though that was always nice, and not for any educational edification, but for the foods that we dreamed about all week long. The long list was intoned like a sacred litany, the smells, sights, and tastes lovingly recalled with grandiose similes: “Ball’s fudge is like having a piece of heaven on your tongue.”

A decision to go to the village of Olcott on Lake Ontario met with hallelujah–like enthusiasm. That particular trip encompassed so many gastronomic possibilities that it was hard to fit them all into your brain at once. We became dervishes at the prospects: Ball’s candies, Reid’s white hots with sauce and chocolate shakes, Clark’s banana and coconut cream pies, Bye’s caramel popcorn. So many delights, so much comfort food.

Another trip might be to Randleigh Farm where you could lick an ice cream cone while watching the cows get milked by machines through plate-glass windows. Dad would always point to each cow and say, “That’s the strawberry cow, over there’s the chocolate one, and next to her, vanilla.” We believed every word.

In addition, there were Park Avenue hotsy-totsies, Mrs. Randolph’s fresh, fried doughnuts, handed over in a greasy brown paper bag from her kitchen doorway, and — for my parents — a trip down to the Shunpike road for Jack Raft’s kick butt hard cider, served unceremoniously in jelly jars at his oilcloth-covered kitchen table. While the grown-ups took refreshment we would run around the gone-to-seed old farm marveling at the outhouse, jumping from barn rafters into hay piles, and alternately chasing chickens, then running in terror away from them.

I guess it’s at this point that I write something about “the good old days,” and how nothing will ever be as good as it was when we were kids. Though the impulse is strong and nearly irresistible I’m going to fight it and fly in the face of the conventional conclusion to this stroll down memory lane. Certainly I’d consider selling my soul to be back at Clark’s low-ceilinged shack, going through the torturous process of choosing a slice of pie from the many varieties.

But that’s just one of many moments I daydream about going back to. I console myself with the thought that heaven will turn out to be whatever I imagine it to be. My own heaven will be composed of all the people, pets, places, days and things that gave me peace and happiness here on Earth. I know that sounds hopelessly naïve and childish. So be it — because this vision means that heaven is still under construction, and that, in the hallowed words of Carly Simon, “These are the good old days.” And there are still more pies to come.


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