By Jim Hagarty
2016
This is a tale of tragedy, trickery, treachery and maybe even treason. Most of all, betrayal.
You might have to follow the bouncing ball here a bit but I promise I would not relate this story to you unless it was of some vital importance. And I am still a little too emotionally overwrought to write clearly.
Last night my wife and I attended a very nice event and sat down to a wonderful banquet, served at our table which we shared with several others. The most important feature of the meal was the gravy, of course. It is commonly known that if there is no gravy, it is usually not worth the effort to even pick up your knife and fork.
When this wonderful food was consumed and enjoyed, we were advised by the wait staff to hang onto our forks, that we would need them. That is a very encouraging sign at any meal. It means there is dessert on its way. The main course, after all, is just something to get out of the way so that you can have dessert. Tale as old as time.
I need to preface the rest of the story by setting some ground rules. People insist on concocting desserts, pies very often, out of various organic materials that were never intended to be served up to humans as an after-dinner confection. Here are some “foods” that are not suitable for consuming at any time, especially after a meal. Rhubarb tops the list, of course. What depraved person first looked at a rhubarb plant and thought, “That would make an excellent pie.”)? Similarly, raspberries, suitable for jam only, are wholly wrong in a pie. Apples are a wonderful fruit but to use them in any way other than their natural form is just wrong.
And, it doesn’t even need to be said, that people who bake pumpkin pies should be incarcerated, hopefully with a breaking rocks schedule added to their sentence specifics.
But the good new is, the humble cherry can be used in any of a hundred ways and not one of them is wrong. The cherry pie is the human’s ultimate achievement, moon landing a distant second place. The first person to ever bake up a cherry cheesecake needs to be given sainthood status by the Pope.
Dessert came.
What the hell?
Two fluffy cake-like affairs that were unidentifiable and it is a truism that if a thing cannot be identified, it should not be consumed.
My wife was helpful. The dessert I had been randomly assigned was some sort of rhubarb affair. Oh no! It had a redness to it that was not appealing. Little red things sticking out here and there.
The stranger across the table from me had some other substance. My wife declared that it was an apple cake of some horrific assembly.
“I like rhubarb,” said the man across from me, obviously deranged. He scared me a little.
I generously switched desserts with him. He could have my bloodshot rhubarb disaster and I would take his apple monstrosity. He tore into his newfound gift, I laboured over my mine.
When he was close to finished, he got a closer look at everything and declared, “Hey, this isn’t rhubarb. It’s cherry!”
I looked more closely at my dessert. There were green things sticking out of it, items that seemed horribly familiar. They were rhubarb chunks.
I had had a wonderful cherry dessert delivered to me and traded it away, on the erroneous information supplied to me by my own wife, for a rhubarb cake.
Here is the definition of hell. You eat a rhubarb cake, feel faint as you most assuredly would, then fall face first into a pumpkin pie. Fortunately, there were no pumpkins involved in this affair. The authorities have been keeping a close watch on the kitchen staff at this place, which has served pumpkin in the past and been warned not to do it again.
As you might expect me to do and will congratulate me for the having the courage to do it, I made a big stink right there and then about my betrayal. The display of righteous indignation paid off. There was one more cherry dessert left in the kitchen and it was brought out in a special container and given to me for later.
There was silence between my wife and I all the way home in the car following the dinner. I am hoping we will be speaking again by Thanksgiving.
I do not handle this type of trauma well.
