Strawberry Pie

Sometimes it only takes the smallest thing for my mind to make an association.

We bought a watermelon to eat on the Fourth of July, but ended up not even cutting it.

Lovely Wife cut it open this past weekend, and it was SO good.

I love how you can start eating a watermelon while feeling thirsty, yet the watermelon satisfies your thirst it's so juicy.

That's the way the one we bought was.

Anyway, I got to thinking about fruit and which ones I liked and have gone through periods of pigging out on over the years.

For instance, when we lived in the Dallas, Texas area, I ate honeydew melons in amazing amounts. It seemed as if I were always able to get fresh ones when we lived there, just ready to cut open and always perfectly ripe. Everywhere else we've lived it has been a gamble as to the readiness to eat of honeydews.

Growing up in Monroe, Louisiana, like many other places in the south, the availability of massive, tasty, fresh strawberries was commonplace.

Sainted Mother would buy a bunch of strawberries and we'd wash, slice, add sugar and eat them with angel food cake and Cool Whip.

I loved letting the strawberry juice soak into the angel food cake until it was a soggy mess before I began to eat it. Simple, fattening, and incredibly delicious.

Quite often though, Sainted Mother would make this strawberry glaze-like thing, and make three or four fresh strawberry pies.

I'm dying as I type this, slobberin' like Pavlov's dog.

So there's these three or four strawberry pies, freshly made at home, with fresh strawberries and that jello-like strawberry glaze gluing the whole thing together and they tasted so good, Mama HAD to make three or four of them, because the first one and a half or two would go pretty much instantaneously. Everybody would immediately eat two pieces. Then the other two might actually last us a couple of days further.

One of my best childhood / teen friends was a guy named Glenn, and he lived catty-cornered across the street from us.

Sainted Mother had learned over the years just how deep was Glenn's love for all things strawberry, so when she would make some strawberry pies, she would have me call him especially, to let him know there was fresh pie to be had.

We still laugh about this one time when Mama told me to call Glenn and tell him we had some strawberry pie if he wanted to come over and eat some.

Sainted Mother and Don C. were sitting in their recliners, and I on the couch in our den watching TV at the time.

I got up and walked over to the phone, called Glenn, and told him about the pies. He replied that he'd be right over.

Well. He must have slammed the phone down, and run at top speed across the street to our house, and as I hung up the phone, turned to my parents to tell them Glenn was going to come over, there was a knock on our storm (glass) door under the carport we all used for entry and exit to our house.

There was Glenn, already standing there, face pressed against the glass, with both hands up by his head and tapping on the glass.

It shocked all of us, because he was literally knocking on the door before I could even tell my parents he was coming.

There was this silent pause when we all looked in surprise at the door to see him standing there, impatiently knocking on the storm door, before we all three cracked up laughing.

I don't even remember sitting and eating the pie, I just remember the shock of it having been literally 5 seconds from the time he hung up the phone until he was knocking on the door.

I guess there must not have been a car coming down our street, because he couldn't have possibly gotten there that fast had he even paused to look for cars.

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Glenn ended up getting a PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology or some other sort of tongue twister like that from Purdue University in Indiana.

He called me out of the blue last fall, and I wrote a post about it; I had lost track of him, and he was able to track me down instead. I mentioned him in this post too.

I forgot to ask if he's still a strawberry nut.