Yellow Transparent

The pie was a salvage operation from the beginning. For years I’ve been foraging apples from a suburban Yellow Transparent tree that lives an unpruned and scraggly life in a grassy strip between the sidewalk and street about a block from Hayward Field. The Yellow Transparent is an old-time variety that indulges my propensity for immediate gratification. It’s the first apple to ripen in the summer, and an early harbinger of apple pie season. The fruit does not keep after picking without refrigeration, so the pie must be baked within days. In the world of apple pies, this roughly translates to immediately. The fruit is thin-skinned (like me), and can be sliced into pie-worthy pieces without peeling. Fast and easy. Like summers once were. Like I once was.

The Yellow Transparent typically ripens in mid-July, the same time when Hayward Field was rocking with the World Track and Field Championships. My July had been consumed with intense teaching responsibilities and no wiggle room for incapacitation, especially by Covid. I took the necessary precautions and steered clear of all large gatherings. The World Championships was a very large gathering, which also caused me to steer clear of the apple tree. Then the last week of July was booked for teaching a week-long writing workshop at a creative arts institute in south-central Oregon. These obligations indicated that my annual Yellow Transparent pie would be postponed for a year. This is delayed gratification of the highest order. Not my style.

July had shouldered into August as I drove home from a noon run on Pre’s Trail and lunch with a friend. Intuition led me into a whimsical right turn to the Yellow Transparent tree. It is unkempt and encrusted with lichens and mosses who ride out the summer drought in a dormant state. There was no fruit on the lower limbs. But hope glimmered when I realized the grass surrounding the gnarly trunk was strewn with apples in various states of disrepair.

Transparents are easily damaged (like me). Some were entirely rotten, some were soft and overripe, still others were half-wrecked by giant bruises. But there were some salvageable apples. So I made a kangaroo pouch out of my running shirt and gathered up any fruit that had a ghost of a chance of contributing to a pie. Since the apples would need a lot of trimming, I took two sweaty shirt-fulls to the car, tumbling the yellow and green orbs into a greasy take-out pizza box sitting in the passenger seat.

Seven a.m. the next morning. The latest heat bulge had popped, and cool air blissed through open windows. Cats were fed. Coffee made. I hacked into the damaged apples like a caffeine-inspired ax murderer, piled the irregular pieces into a large bowl, then covered my ruthless tracks with plenty of sugar, flour, cinnamon, and freshly ground nutmeg. Next I assembled my usual recipe for four pie crusts (two for this morning, two for the freezer). White flour, white sugar, salt, butter, lard, egg, vinegar, cooking sherry—all the elements of a happy and unhealthy life. It’s an imposition for me to follow a recipe, so I compensated by being sloppy with the measuring. Sloppiness is the mother of adventure, and I’m never quite sure how the crusts will roll out on the pastry board. This time the balls of dough were perfect. I offset this perfection by doing a half-assed job crimping the edges of the crust together. The top was sugared and sliced with my initials to let off steam (I resonate with letting off steam). Seared for twelve minutes at 450 degrees, then baked another forty minutes at 350 degrees. There is nothing like the smell of toasting fat and flour filling a kitchen.

My first apple pie of the year came out nicely baked, and the house stayed cool. But I’m not kidding myself. The world beyond my kitchen is a monstrous salvage job, and the demands for keeping human consciousness afloat for a few more generations are crushing. This damaged and diminished place is crying out for joy. In the meantime, my emotions flicker past like channel-surfacing on satellite TV. Will someone please teach me the art of blissful hand-wringing? Tell you what—I’ll trade you my apple pie recipe for your wisdom. It’s pretty good pie. I had a slice at lunchtime while it was still warm. No delayed gratification here.