The First Pie Story

The Bigger the Better; the Most to the Best

As a youth my mother had a set of three books from which she used to read to me.  Even after I learned to read myself she would continue to read me a story every evening before she went to bed.  The stories were, I suppose, little moral tales, that were written in German, but she translated them to me as she read them, so it was many years before I could have read them myself and by then I don’t know what had happened to the books. 

 They had been hers, I believe, as a child.  Her mother had married (at one time, her mother had married several times) but for a couple of years she had been married to a German and they lived in Mainz.  At sometime during the Nazi years my grandmother took her son and moved to the United States, I believe probably when my grandfather was drafted into the German army.  My mother, however, could not return because she had tuberculosis and was in a sanitarium and I believe she might have received this set of books while she was there.

I don’t know what the name of the books were but they were all bound similarly. The binding on one was red, on another it was blue, and the third was green.  And the story that has always stayed with me came from the green volume.  She read me this story several times, but probably never after we left Muncie and I would have been at best not more than five, so my memory of the story is not exact but I am going to try to relate the essence that has always stuck with me.

The Family Party

In this story there is a family gathering, perhaps a birthday, but the whole family is gathered together and there is a lot of food.  There is a boy in the story, a somewhat greedy boy.  And as the food is passed around, first the appetizers, then the main course, and finally the deserts, he continually attempts to take the biggest piece.  

He grabs the largest nuts but they are bitter tasting, and the biggest piece of fruit but it has a worm inside of it. When the meal is served, he reaches for the largest dumplings and the largest slice of jägerschnitzel.  But the veal is not well cooked and the big dumplings are hollow and doughy.  But finally the desserts are passed around.  He eagerly grabs the largest kirschtorte, but the brandy soaked cherries in the cake are overly fermented; next is the zwiebelkuchen, but the boy forgoes the platter of unleavened cakes and takes half of the tiefe tellerkruste zwiebelkuchen for himself (I guess what we might call a quiche, although my mother always made them without the deep pie like structure but served them as unleavened squares) but the poor boy found the cream in his zwiebelkuchen was sour and not sweet and that the onions also weren’t sweetened with caramel flavoring.  

But finally came his favorite, the appeltaart and he rushed to the platter and grabbed as much as he could because he was feeling really hungry since none of his food had been palatable.  And he began to gobble the appeltaart down as fast as he could, trying to eat as many of the tarts as he could before anyone else could have any. He was standing over the plate of appeltaarts and then suddenly his stomach ached and he retched all over the platter.

Illusions of More

Well trying to have more than everyone else didn’t work out too well for the boy.  I’ve always remembered that story for some reason.  Something similar happened many years later when I went to visit my sister’s family in Delaware for Christmas.  Her husband’s large family had a tradition at Christmas that no one purchased gifts, but wrapped up something they already possessed.  Every person brought one wrapped gift and they put them around the tree.  After dinner we all gathered in the large room in the family home where  her husband had grown up.  (My sister had given me something to wrap because I hadn’t been aware beforehand of their tradition.)  Now I did not know any of these people.  In fact, it was the first time I had met her husband or her three small children from her second marriage.

Well at first it seemed pleasant.  And I thought to myself what a wonderful method of gift sharing.  The smallest child walked to the tree first and selected a gift.  There were various sizes of packages small to medium sized and a few somewhat larger ones—but one really huge box.  I mean really huge.  It stood higher than my six foot one and half inches and was so broad it took two people to lift it not because of its heaviness, simply because it was so wide no one person could wrap their arms around it.  And naturally the youngest child selected that big box first, and two dads carried it over beside her.  I think I was the oldest one except for the mother of the clan, so I went next to last.   (I should point out here that I am considerably older than my sister, that I left home at the same time she was beginning school so we have never known each other well.)  One of the two packages left when it was my turn was the smallest package which is the gift my sister had given me to wrap, a fish hook that had been made into a Christmas ornament.  You weren’t supposed to select what you had brought, but nevertheless I took the small package.  

What I had not expected was that there would be a second round.  In the second round, the oldest could now trade (in reality take) the package they had received for another (nothing had been opened as of yet).  Well the matriarch passed, and I passed , and then the next person was the oldest brother.   And the oldest brother traded his gift for the big box that the young child had taken and one of his brothers helped him place it in front of him.  The next person traded for the big box and all the way down the line, everyone would trade their gift for the big box which got pushed into the room’s center, until we got back to the youngest child, who had by now prematurely opened her package so didn’t get another turn.  

But it didn’t end there.  Now everyone wanted to have a third round and began arguing about who would get the big box and tempers were beginning to flail and people, out of sequence began dropping their packages in front of whoever had the big box which sort of remained in the middle of everyone in the room,as people were running around trying to force their package on another so they could end up with the big box, a mad unorganized game of musical chairs attempting to have the largest present.

Until the mother said “STOP”. And everyone was told to begin opening their packages.  But everyone wanted to know what was in the big box first, and a stepladder was brought into the room, and I don’t remember who had ended up with the big box since I didn’t know any of them anyway, but whoever it was climbed up and sliced it open with a  it from the top and then began throwing white christmas paper on the floor, then old wads of news paper.  When the person couldn’t reach any further into the box we pushed it on its side and they all  started pulling out more and more paper and finally they found a metal box  maybe two inches deep and four inches wide at the bottom of the big box, with a little key attached on a wire to the metal box.  The box was opened with the key and inside the box was one molded candy corn that had apparently been left over from the previous year when someone had received a package of candy corns and hatched on to this vengeance plot to save one of the candies. Well now they all had a big laugh over their foolishness.

But there you go.  A bigger box, the biggest piece of the pie, the private jet, being the boss and carrying a kitchen sink into your newly purchased business. All because the illusion is that the bigger and more important is the most impressive and the best.

More. 

Greed that takes is the beginning of the confusion. Whenever you take more, do you ever really have enough?