This is how you make a pie

First Step: Preheat the oven.

On the day I scheduled to make a pear pie with my friend Casey, Chris decided to pack up the kitchen. Now, Elise and I hadn't lived on our own before the three of us moved in together, and since it didn't make sense for us to get three sets of everything, all the kitchen equipment came from Chris. So when he packed, we were left with no skillet, no spatulas, no saucepans, etc. Gloria Wood's "Hey, Bellboy!" rose to a frenzied crescendo of shriek-like singing while I scrubbed the stove top and he packed away our only mixing bowl. Gloria's needling insinuations were perfectly irritating as he rendered the next five weeks just a bit more difficult for all of us.

Second Step: Mix together the filling.

Casey came over with his own Mary Poppins bag of necessities. He brought all the ingredients and a few of the supplies. Best of all, he brought pears from his family's virile tree in Indiana. His father cans the pears himself, tons of them, Casey says, and they still have bags of fresh pears to give away. We had two beautiful mason jars to work with. Casey has his Polish grandmother's recipe by heart, and has been making this pie since he was a child. There aren't many ingredients, it's a simple, delicious family recipe. He did it almost by feel, which made me apprehensive since all I've known about baking so far is that you have to be very precise. Draining the pears with our hands and the lids of the jars, since the colanders were packed, we then improvised with different soup bowls in order to mix together the pears with sugar and cinnamon.

Third Step: Make the crust.

The dough had sifted flour, milk, and lots of oil. My favorite part of making the pie was shaking the oil and milk together using the rinsed-out pear jar. While I crumbled the dough together between my fingers, Casey urged me to add more oil, which I did hesitatingly, cautiously, making him laugh as he urged me on. I formed the oily dough into a firm ball with no crumbs. We broke it in two and he smashed half of it down onto a sheet of waxed paper, and placed another sheet over the dough patty before I rolled it out. Casey is playful when giving directions, and I can imagine him at the head of his classroom, with the little kids listening to him. They must like him: He talks to you like he believes you can do wonderful things.

Our pie dishes are identical, and they are both slightly larger than what any recipe calls for. The dough, though rolled out paper-thin, didn't quite make it to the top, so we patched it together as best we could. It was cracked and patchy, but we figured it would do.

Fourth Step: Pour the mixture into the crust and cover with a top crust. Bake for forty-five minutes, or until golden-brown.

As we had rolled out the dough, the sugar had started breaking down the pears, and there was more liquid in the mixture. We poured that into the crust and covered it with a top crust. At that point, Kyle rang the bell. I love being around Kyle (who steals the show in a great production you must see!). He's always making me laugh, befriending servers, and telling stories. Kyle cracked jokes while Casey and I padded down the top crust with milk and sprinkled it with sugar. We put the pie in the oven, set the timer for forty-five minutes, and we went out to get Cokes and ice cream.

When we came back, the pie still had twenty minutes to go. We made rum-and-coke floats and had just a deliriously good time waiting for the pie to finish. I told them about the kitchen stuff being packed away, and Kyle looked me up and down with pursed lips and said, "Gurl, it seems you've been busy relying on other people when you should've been believing in yourself."

Fifth Step: When it comes out, sprinkle with sugar and serve with vanilla ice cream!

This is Kyle all over

They showed me the proper way to cut a pie--not into quarters right away, because you don't want to expose the sides to air. The pie was delicious, but Casey and Kyle agreed it should have more sugar. I had misunderstood Casey when measuring out the sugar, and added too little, but I liked it just the way it was. The crust was flaky and the pears were perfect. We ate quickly and jumped into a cab to go to a cabaret show in Wicker Park. The show was in the back of Davenport's (which is the perfect name for a bulldog!) and the audience was made up of intoxicated performers. The singer had a beautiful tenor voice and a very straight collection of songs--Maroon 5, JT, and Allen Stone. It was called "Mixtapes for an Ex-Girlfriend," and whenever he almost made you feel something, he made a joke about it. Like how my grandmother hugged us--she embraced you with one arm, but then put an iron hand against your chest to prevent you from getting too close.

As you can imagine, some of the songs were angry, some were bewildered and broken-hearted, but then he ended with Jason Mraz's "You and I Both." I hadn't heard that song since sophomore year of college. The words came back to me as he sang, but fresh and new. It's a song about splitting up, but it's full of tenderness and forgiveness, and was a lovely ending to the show. It's a pop song, so it's made to manipulate emotion, I know that, but maybe because of all the drinks I'd had...I closed my eyes and they burned and there was Vanessa. There was Andie, and also Elaine. And then Wil and Eric and Dan and Paget and...this procession of people who I loved so much for such a brief time, before we plummeted away from each other into our different narratives.

So this is how you make a pie: You take something you have and something he has, you make it into something new and better, and then you share it with whoever is around you. If you can afford it, you have a couple drinks and a scoop of ice cream. Your friends will go their way eventually, but you'll have that evening to talk about when you run into them again, whenever that may be.