One day not too long ago, having suffered through what can only be described as a series of unreasonable challenges, I decided to grab a coffee and collect myself. I would not necessarily describe my day as combative, but it was close, and came to a head with an uncivil disturbance – my neighbor blowing all his fall leaves down the city’s sewer drain. At a local coffee house, just to shake off my disbelief, I ordered my drink with a piece of pumpkin pie, sort of a last nod to Fall and the slow demise of municipal plumbing.
I rely on pumpkins when life gets dicey. I find comfort in the fact that they are not exactly round, ready to roll around, but slightly oblong in form, and always look ready to settle down where they are, even during my turbulent times. Frankly though, I’m not sure what happens to pumpkin after it goes in my mouth, due to its featureless consistency. I have neither a memory of chewing it or swallowing it once it goes in the pie hole, but it has an anesthetic effect on me. I can only guess pumpkin goes down the same way my neighbor blows his leaves down the sewer, disappearing down a vast hole, mindlessly, with no evidence that it was ever part of the fall landscape.
That afternoon, exchanging sips of coffee with the nothingness of my pumpkin pie bites, I felt its creaminess absorb all my worries. Like a friend who has no opinions on anything, my pie sat there looking interested, but never said one thing, and I fell into a kind of pumpkin haze. A tiny smile perked up in the corner of my mouth, giving birth to hope, and pumpkin peace. For a moment, I even imagined my law-breaking neighbor floating gently over our city, lifted by his Honda 350 leaf blower. The table where I sat was wobbly with uneven legs, and my seat was an horribly uncomfortable, a hybrid stool of some sort, but never mind. I had my balance, my coffee and a piece of neutral pumpkin pie.
My first two bites went down like cake, without effort, but as I unceremoniously sliced into the third bite with my fork, the equilibrium of my pie triangle shifted ever so slightly towards the crust, causing what was left of my pie wedge to tip up, vertical, on the plate. This rarely happens with other pies that I eat, but pumpkin is so homogenized, that any interruption of its specific gravity, any deviation in the slicing process becomes the perfect culinary storm. I had upset the pumpkin scale somehow and I would pay the price.
The thought of my pumpkin, that most uninteresting of all foods, misbehaving in such a detached manner shocked me. I had always assumed that the lightly oily bottom of the crust would be a kind of glue that would stabilize the rest of the wedge. I sat dumfounded in fact, unaware that as my pie shifted, it had caused the table to also shift to its three good legs, causing my plate to begin a perilous slide off the edge of the table. What was meant to be a frantic grab for my pie plate with my free hand instead became an incompetent mishit on the upturned fork which fired off my table as if released from a medieval catapult, then impaled itself in the napkin holder next to me. Incredibly, the elderly couple seated nearby, apparently in a pumpkin haze themselves, didn’t look up at all! My fork was vibrating only inches from their pie, and they didn’t budge!
I realized right then that I had upset one of the most precious laws of physics, The Law of Pie-librium, that is, the square of pumpkin pie stability, represented by P/E is inversely proportionate to its neutrality, represented by our mental state. The formula, which you remember from college, appears as:
P/E ∞ 1/☺︎
This immutable law, being one of the hallmarks of pumpkin neutrality, is best left alone, not altered in any way, even when you are eating. I did have a fleeting moment when I entertained the idea that had my piece of pumpkin pie been less consistent, more bumply, or fruity, or weighty, that perhaps I would have been able to eat it without incident. But then, that is just not the bland and unimaginative nature of pumpkins. So…I shook off that notion, got up off my defective stool and left quietly, out of respect for the indecisiveness of all pumpkins everywhere. One cannot change the immutable laws of nature and pumpkins, and wisdom, in the end, prevails. You either eat your pumpkin in tranquility or live long enough to see yourself become the formula.