Short Essay

               


 THE  VALUE  OF  PI                                       

                                                                          by Karen Bennett                                

re edit  8-‘14

words  560

            Our seventh grade math teacher turned her back to the class and wrote on the board in caps, THE VALUE OF PI.  Then she turned to us and mumbled something about “three-point-one-four.” What the hell? Pie? Plus, she spelled it wrong. What was she talking about?

My head snapped up. There I was, suffering through a class in Math, basically a foreign language, and lo, the woman breaks into a lecture about dessert! She had my full attention.

Pie, ahhh, pie. The subject whooshed me straight back to the square kitchen table, me swinging my feet, waiting for the pie to be cut and delivered to my waiting hands. My fork was on the folded napkin. I was sitting straight. Was I alone, or celebrating with other family members and company? Bottom line was one or two pies were on the table and my mother was dividing them up.

My mother’s crusts were legendary. She fashioned a ruffled rim, fluted with neat regularly spaced pinches. The buttery, cinnamony Macintosh apples, which wilted in the baking process made them easily yield to the fork. Because we were Pennsylvania Dutch we frequently had Shoo-fly Pie, a confection of brown sugar crumbs over a molasses base. Ohhh, so delicious—and so necessary. And what about pumpkin pies—a subject onto themselves, where the words ginger and cinnamon, perhaps whipped cream, are added to the story.

I was about eight and attending a summertime party the first time I was served a piece of pecan pie. I stationed myself near the hostess, not to miss the dessert. In time the nice lady handed me a china plate with a symmetrically placed piece of that pie. My eyes opened wide. The amber syrup glistening on the pecans looked like jewels. I knew I was on to something serious. Ummm. The sweetness of the dessert threatened to kill me, but I thought eating it was worth the risk. Pecan pie, over the years would ultimately consume me—and me it! 

I directed my attention to the teacher to see what the business of those numerals was. Sure enough she had drawn a pie wedge, its tip in the middle of a circle, with a right sided parenthesis accentuating the central point of the pie. I was confused.

Three-point-one-four?  Okay, so this was math class after all. The measure around the pie is 360 degrees, and therefore the distance of cutting straight across was 180 degrees, right? Based on my numeral expertise I knew we couldn’t be talking about calories, because the only numbers associated with pie in my experience were calories, which were way up there. The calorie count would soar into the many hundreds with the addition of squirted-on whipped cream—non-dairy or full creamy served with a spoon. I was stumped.  So I’m sitting there, all transcendental like, and it comes to me.

The Value of Pie is the tartness of the lemon filling topped by the visual joy of beads of sunlight perched on the toasted meringue. The Value of Pi could be a single person, licking the coconut flakes folded into white creamy pudding from the fork, in the privacy of the bedroom.  Now THAT’S the value of Pie.

About the words, “three-point-one-four.” The teacher was probably saying, “Free pie—want  more?”                                                                         The end