While the pumpkin pie bakes

I baked my first pumpkin pie at the age of ten. Thanksgiving. I forget how this came about; either I expressed a willingness to help out of my mother decided to make me useful. The pumpkin part came out of a can; everything else--the eggs, spices, half-and-half, sugar, salt--was added by me, under her direction. Thereafter, save for a few years in graduate school, when I was at the mercy of relatives and (one year) an old high school friend, then living in the Bronx, where the grocery stores did not carry Libby's pumpkin pie pack--all except for those few years, two nine-inch pumpkin pies became my specialty.

My pumpkin pies are the best, and are simultaneously my only culinary achievement not involving a grill. From my chair, right here, I can smell the pies baking in the oven and feel decades drop away. I think of my parents and brothers and I, the five of us in Phoenix, Arizona, in a house on Second Street, eating in a large room--part dining room, part living room--more than a thousand miles away from any other of our relatives. Sunset came early that part of the year; my parents would open the curtains of the arcardia door, and from where I sat I could see over the table, past my father's head, over the back fence to the summit of Squaw Peak three miles away.

Later on, Thanksgiving became less a holiday of pies and mashed potatoes and more, as I grew older, more of a rest stop as the fall semester headed home. In graduate school I taught at one college in the morning, another in the evening, and in the afternoons I sat through literature seminars and fell asleep with my head in my hand; late I night I studied for my doctoral comps until I fell asleep in my books. And between the tenth and twentieth of November everything would pile up: essays and mid-terms to be graded, plus essays of mine that were due, all of it keeping me up until two a.m., in on the weekends, pushing me past exhaustion. Those last few weeks, the image that kept me up and kept me going was of surrendering my body utterly to my airplane seat, and then five or so hours later to the sofa in my parents' living room.

My Aunt Peggy once told my mother a doctorate was the closest thing a man will ever come to giving birth. Much like a mother of a ten year-old child, it is hard to remember the pain of wondering if my seven years of studying would end favorably. Always another semester to get through, another shelf of books to read, another set of papers to grade--and right toward the end, the sofa in my parents' living room (by this time, Seventh Avenue) where I could stretch out and fall in and out of sleep to the sounds of Brett Summerall and the image of Texas Stadium. Yes, and those pies.