What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [71]
Forty-five years after she first waited tables at the diner, and a few weeks shy of her seventieth birthday, Loretta Thayer reopened the Silver Leaf Diner. Patrons lined up outside all day. Again, the family went to work: Mike, farmer and a former local police officer; Rick, a construction foreman at Fort Drum; Randy, a state police officer; their wives; Loretta’s daughter, Linda Lou Green, and a flock of grandchildren. She also hired six full-time employees and a couple part-timers to keep the diner open from 5 A.M. to 10 P.M.
People have formed some bad pie habits since Loretta reopened the diner. On opening day, patrons devoured 156 slices from twenty-six apple, cherry, lemon meringue, berry, chocolate, coconut, and banana cream pies. Loretta did not bother to advertise. Still, it took no time for word to spread and for folks from the St. Lawrence River region and farther to start making pilgrimages to the diner for a slice of Loretta’s homemade pies.
Wayne Fairbanks, a retired navy commander, is often waiting to eat breakfast and a slice of pie when the diner opens at 6 A.M. “It’s always good because it’s homemade. It’s not made in a factory. There’s a big difference. I guess it’s the crusts that make it, but then, in season the fruit is always fresh, too,” he said, after finishing off a piece of apple pie with vanilla ice cream. “Either I come by in the morning or around four o’clock and have a slice. Sometimes I’ll have two. I don’t often miss a day. I used to bring my mother here, and she’d eat two or three pieces of chocolate pie. I talked to the doctor, and he said, ‘Let her, it’s not hurting her.’ I guess not. She lived to be a hundred and two.”
There was an awful lot of chatter among the diner’s pie customers who favored the banana cream pie. But I’m not a banana cream pie guy. I confess, it doesn’t seem quite pie to me, though I was not about to argue the point with Loretta’s fans. They, it seemed, had the right idea about how to talk about pie: simply. Pie, after all, does not bear much description. It is an existential product that prompts an either/ or response. Either it’s good or it’s not.
I looked at the pies inside the pie keeper. My heart was with the apple pie, with its laced lid crust sprinkled with sugar crystals. It was not the most beautiful-looking pie. Neither were the other fruit pies. They were not pies perfected for a Gourmet magazine photo shoot. They had none of that plump puffiness. They also did not have that shellacked sheen of aged plaster that is found on pies mass manufactured for most roadside eateries. The pies themselves were the pie equivalent of the Silver Leaf: more reminiscent of the cozy imperfections of home than the efficiencies of business.
As soon as the pie plate landed on the counter in front of me, its cinnamon smell wafted upward. I had some misgivings about that. This was filling made from fresh local apples. It would have been good to taste them pure, I thought. On the other hand, the filling immediately passed the eyeball test: neither too saucy, as when canned filling with corn syrup is used, nor too firm. In a journalistically careless way, I ate my pie without resting to take notes. I had a better idea why Wayne Fairbanks showed up at dawn, pie addict that he is.
Months later, when I could no longer remember the tastes of the pies, I asked Loretta to overnight me a few slices, for research purposes only. When I heard her reticence, I promised not to judge them on the basis of whether the crust held up in delivery. Sent on a Monday, they arrived Tuesday morning. In winter, the apple tasted even better than I remembered. The fruit had what others might call integrity. It tasted like what it was. It painted summer on the tongue. That was even truer of the blackberry and raspberry pies. Their fillings, with seeds visible, bore no resemblance to the gloppy berry fillings that are standard diner fare. And then