Apple Pie Moments
It was much earlier than usual on a recent Saturday morning that I was eating breakfast..darkness and quiet still surrounding the neighborhood. Enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee, I picked up my sister’s most recent letter. Yes, most weeks, she and I pen multiple page letters to each other. I do love email but I treasure the art of handwritten correspondence…an art that is disappearing.
The story: a woman at their church had kindly baked an apple pie for my mother and sister, having heard that my mother always loved to bake pies. My mom, until the last couple of years, was a master pie maker…apple pie being the most common, but blueberry, mince, rhubarb, pumpkin…ah, I can taste them now…and always the left-over crust crisply baked with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on it. Her crusts were so delicate, rolled out to just the right thinness. Our family came to believe that thin crusts are the ultimate pie crust (isn’t it true how strongly our opinions develop as a result of family experiences!).
The gift pie had a thick, crumbly crust, apples hidden somewhere in all of the delicious, buttery, calorie filled homemade “favorite” crust of another person’s style. It did not taste right to my mother; it was not a thin crust and it wasn’t her own.
Thus, the comment by her that had me laughing so hard on that dark, still morning, but also my love for her rising as the sun in my soul: “I need to look in an etiquette book to see how to send a thank you note for a pie that is not edible.” I can just see the sparkle in her eye, but more touchingly, I know that saying thank you is something she never misses doing and she wants to do it well and right. At 99, it is still a habit and it is the proper thing to do, even though it sometimes takes two or three days to compose the note. I am sure in the finished thank you that “not edible” was left out!
What struck me in those early morning moments was the contrast between her habits of thoughtfulness, graciousness, consideration for others, and always saying thank you, which have been modeled for me all my life, with the number of books and articles written in very recent years about “civility” and our need to find our way back to it. How have we gotten to a place where we need to encourage random acts of kindness, or post road signs that say, “Beware of aggressive drivers,” and all of the other symptoms of a culture that has become lax in the habits of regard and consideration?
Two things: I am so taken each morning as I greet students at Trinity carpool with how most say thank you to those who open their car doors, say thank you to their parents for driving them to school, and the many who climb out of the car saying, “I love you” to a parent, often in response to the parent’s same words. May we do all that we can to preserve those habits that make such a positive difference.
Secondly, how do we continue to inoculate our children against the habits that sometimes seem to swirl around us of neglected thanks, not reaching out to help another, lack of consideration, and forgetting the basic qualities of civility of which we all want to be the recipients?
We’ll never do it perfectly; however, I know that in those early morning moments I was reminded that I can follow more intentionally in the footsteps of my mother and father and do it better…such as finding the right and gracious thank you wording even when some things in life are “inedible.”
November 11th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Hi Dawn,
I love reading your blog, and this post reminds me of the handwritten letters that I used to send back and forth to my grandfather before he died. He didn’t live close by (like my other grandparents did) so we wrote letters to keep in touch. He would start his letters at the top of the paper and wind it around the edges of the page, going aorund and around until he reached the middle of the paper and had to stop writing because he had run out of room! I think I was about 10, and I thought it was the funniest thing. I had to keep turning the letter around and around to read it. These days, the only time I ever write handwritten letters is when I need to write a thank you note.
In response to your thoughts about civility, I suggest you read Linzy and Alex’s recent posts about not being passive. I think you will be surprised that some of our sixth graders also think that as a society we have lost some of our consideration towards others!
Samantha