Pecan Pie Debacle

It was Thanksgiving and most of the family were gathering at Mother”s house for dinner. My then-boyfriend Kevin and I had gotten there a day early and had brought a pecan pie from a really good bakery in the Springs.

Cac was busy complaining (she does this a lot. it’s kind of a hobby.) that our brother, Reggie and his family should not have been invited because they had already had their own Thanksgiving meal at lunch (which they did every year and never invited any of us). She and Laurie had started calling them the “Blunsom double-dippers”. Cac’s other complaints were that they never brought anything – just showed up and ate all the “good food”. Also, Reggie’s kids would bring their “boyfriend/girlfriend of the week” and they would contribute to the eating of all the “good food”.

(As you have probably already discerned, our family is obsessed with food! This is because our mother is British and has no idea how to show love and affection to children. So she would give us food instead. When I had the measles, she gave me a whole bag of those candied orange slices! It is also important to note that Reggie is the favored child because he is the oldest and only boy. If he didn’t like what we were having for dinner, Mother would make him a whole box of macaroni and cheese. CHEESE, we’re talking! Laurie and I used to leave our jump rope on the stairs so he would trip over it on the way down to the rec room with his huge bowl of macaroni and cheese.)

Anyway, just before the Blunsoms arrived, Cac and Laurie decided to hide the pecan pie so the Blunsom Double-dippers wouldn’t eat it all. (Pie is almost as big a deal to us as cheese. Since there isn’t a lot of cheese at Thanksgiving, it was judged to be the best of the “good food” especially because it was bought at a bakery and not one of those frozen Mrs. Smith’s pies that Mother always made.)

So they put the pie in a cabinet in the garage. The Blunsom’s showed up and, as predicted, ate all the “good food”. Cac was particularly upset about the gravy made from the turkey drippings. They ate all of that and left us with the auxiliary jarred gravy. How dare they?! As they were preparing to leave, Mother did something that was the last straw. She started fixing plates of the “good food” for them to take home with them! When they already had their own leftovers from lunch! Did she think we could survive for several more days on nothing but the remains of a 30 pound turkey?! Had she taken leave of her senses?! Then she started packing up pie!!!!!

Kevin, who was always a serious smart-ass with incredibly bad timing and no sense of when he’s in very real danger, smiled an evil smile and suggested that perhaps they’d like to take home some of that pecan pie that was in the garage? In our family, we refer to this as “poking the bear”. I really thought I might have to spend the rest of my Thanksgiving vacation cleaning Laurie’s gray matter off the walls and ceiling of the kitchen after her head exploded! I wish you were here so I could show you what she looked like. I think Kevin best described it. He said she looked like a REALLY angry little garden gnome!

(I just had Wendy read this over and she’s telling me I should be past the stage where I take pleasure in embarrassing my baby sister. In my defense I just want to point out that it was only a couple of year’s ago that Laurie gave up the habit of smearing squishy food on me every time we saw each other. One year at Christmas, she smeared a chocolate-covered cherry across my neck! This was a double insult since she well knows that chocolate-covered cherries are my favorite Christmas time sweet. So it was not only a mess but also a waste of a perfectly good chocolate-covered cherry!)