There Can Only Be The Memory

There comes a time when you realize you cannot recreate a memory, and you should not keep trying. My time came last night.

We didn't have pumpkin pie with Thanksgiving this year, and in fact, the frozen Marie Callender's pumpkin pie we bought is still in the freezer, relegated there when we found pecan pie from Trader Joe's and a blueberry pie from Ralphs that we wanted to try.

In past years, when we could reach Vallarta Supermarket in Oxnard before Thanksgiving, I usually went for the Jessie Lord pumpkin pie, made in Torrance, which had baked into it the heart and soul of whoever had made it. It was the one pie that wasn't quite the taste, but reminded me of the slice of pumpkin pie I had had at Six Flags Magic Mountain on a Saturday in early December 2011, when we had gotten free admission for the day after donating toys to the annual Toy Drive.

That slice was found at the Cyber Cafe, and I had seen it, among many, in the case there in the morning, before heading out to all the rollercoasters, and I had been thinking about it all day, up until the early evening when I finally got it. (Read about it here.)

I must have e-mailed Magic Mountain either right after I got home or in the days after, to find out who had made that pumpkin pie. Someone had put their heart and soul into that pumpkin pie that became slices, as prominently as the nutmeg and cinnamon and a crust that showed me that this was not the typical pumpkin pie. This was something rare and special.

I received an email that Monday of pre-Christmas week from someone at Magic Mountain, informing me that the pumpkin pie had come from Sysco, the corporate restaurant food distributor, and I was stunned. How had someone gotten this pie past their monolithic outlook? I needed to know, and I also needed to know of the person, if possible, who had made this pie. 

I searched. I think I had even emailed whatever local Sysco email address I could find to ask them. But I never got an answer. The blessed maker of that pie disappeared into the ether, remaining a memory as potent as the ones that would follow when I began my five years in Las Vegas, smelling deep-seated, devoted cooking from a mobile home in the park we lived in in Las Vegas our first year, then from second-floor apartment windows just after the side entrance to Pacific Islands Apartments, where we lived our first year in Henderson in the back (and our final year, too, that time in the front), as well as the bread pudding I stumbled upon at the buffet at Green Valley Ranch (also in Henderson), and have never forgotten, just like the pumpkin pie. But those are stories for another day.

I vowed back in that December of 2011 to search for other great pumpkin pies when we finally moved to Las Vegas, but really it was just to try to find that slice again, a mission I also carried with me in my first and second year in Ventura. Now it's my third year here, and I got to thinking about that miraculous slice of pumpkin pie again after passing up another whole pumpkin pie at 99 Cents Only last Sunday. A few weeks before that, I had bought another brand of whole pumpkin pie there, from Canada, in my continuing quest to rediscover that particular slice, as if the person who made it might go from baking company to baking company, simply baking with the same heart and soul and moving on. 

Last night, I thought about it again, an idle moment while reading Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South by Rick Bragg, a collection of his columns and longer pieces from Southern Living and Garden & Gun. I am a Southerner by birth, not by blood, but I carry with me Southern tendencies for storytelling as he lets forth, and a love of language that usually takes a few days, but is always worth it. Perhaps reading of his memories of his South, his hometown of Jacksonville, Alabama, got me thinking about that slice of pumpkin pie. And I wondered if it was enough that I had simply had the chance, that moment, to have that pumpkin pie, which was completely unexpected anyway because up to that point, I hadn't really been into pumpkin pie. It was sometimes there as part of past Thanksgivings, but it wasn't one of my favorites then. 

That slice of pumpkin pie at Magic Mountain obsessed me, made me want to know more about pumpkin pie, the traditions it served, the people that made it. But overall, I was always looking for another slice or even a whole pie exactly as heavenly as that one slice. It's not realizing that no future pumpkin pie could live up to such an exalted standard that finally stopped me short, but rather what I already have.

I have that memory of that particular slice of pumpkin pie for as long as my mind lasts, hopefully well into my 118th year. I was sitting at a table outside the Cyber Cafe (the inside had the computers where you could sit and surf the web for a price), the cold outside was a little sharp, but all that mattered was that pie, that it had obviously been made by someone with a huge heart who was thinking about the rest of the world and wanted them to know that they were thinking all the good they could about the world. It was so obvious. The pie was like a gentle family of pumpkin and spices that dearly welcomed you, that encouraged you to come on in and relax for a while, hear a story or two, or perhaps tell your own. And that also made me realize something else, something equally important.

If I keep searching for another pumpkin pie just like that slice, and perhaps find it, then I diminish the glow of the memory of that slice because here is this one, and there may well be more just like it. It's not that I would completely forget my reaction to the pie at Magic Mountain, but it wouldn't seem as important as it once was upon finding its equal.

I want this memory as it is, for another reason as well. I'm doing research for a few novels, indecisive about which one I want to focus on in the first place. Most of these novels are made up of memories, certain ones that I want to mine in order to fully come to terms with traumatic times in my life, and some will fuel short stories where the characters are trying to recreate a memory as I tried with that pumpkin pie. There's even another novel I'm thinking of writing, where raspberry jam tasted so long ago in boyhood is the catalyst for what happens (inspired by when I tasted raspberry jam at Allison's Country Cafe across from the back end of the Pacific View Mall, directly facing the local bus transfer station, and went back a few weeks after that breakfast to buy a jar of my own). 

There are other novels I want to write simply because I want to spend more time in particular places in my imagination, such as when I was a student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, and had the Canyon Call newsroom all to myself to write my article about the men's golf team, whose coach was my cinema professor. I wrote in the late afternoon and felt completely at peace, and it's what has inspired me to seek to write one novel in a journalistic tone and format because while I don't miss the vicious deadlines in journalism, I want to go back to it on my terms, currently studying the structure of long-form journalism, seeking to capture it through a newspaper, as I intend to set this novel amidst the years I lived in Santa Clarita, before newspapers went on an even steeper decline. In fact, I want to include that pumpkin pie from Magic Mountain in one scene of that novel.

I know that there's no way I can write nonfiction or essays about my life. I don't have many of the dates straight anymore, and overall, I usually remember pieces instead of whole days. It's better to fictionalize what I have and be able to use it that way. The pumpkin pie is still there, then. And I am still at the Cyber Cafe, in wondrous rapture over how a park that prides itself on rollercoasters can also think about providing personal moments like that, where a person discovers more about himself than he thought there was before that moment. If you've got to spend hours and days and months and years sitting alone and writing, you might as well have pumpkin pie as it once was, as energy for whatever emerges.