The Danger of Apple Pie

I’m not going to apologize anymore when there are gaps between my posts. Suffice to say – if I’m not posting there is a good reason. In most cases it’s because there was some problem with the animal husbandry experiments I’ve been running.

We all know how gifted I am when it comes to science.

I want to tell you a few things about what’s been going on, but I don’t want to take too long because I hate missing the late night episode of Matlock, followed immediately by Barnaby jones…. superior television all around. It’s not just those shows so much as the fact that I am fascinated by crime fighter with white hair. Murder She Wrote, Diagnosis Murder, Ironside, Mission Impossible, Quincy etc… I think it all began when I was a little kid.

If you are anywhere near as old as me, then you remember, when TV was still interesting, a treat, a reward. Something you got excited about. Anyways, there used to be – I believe it was the Sunday night NBC Mystery Movie. It was a rotating format of made for TV Movies, some of the movies featured crime fighters like Columbo, McMillian and Wife, McCloud and my personal favourite, which I am pretty sure ignited my white-haired crime fighter fetish, “The Snoop Sisters.” It was about two little old ladies, who fought crime. I have no idea why I remember them, nor the show, I probably only ever saw it once or twice… as far as I can remember it’s never been on since and if it has, I’ve never seen it. But for some reason it is embedded, clearly and with pin-point accuracy – in my brain.

Obviously something about the two old, white-haired ladies struck my fancy, at that tender age I had no way of knowing what the attraction was but I do remember, taking long bike rides – far, far out of my way…. cruising local retirement homes, the intoxicating smell of soup, support hose and the indescribable smell that follows the elderly….. a mixture of hard candies, wool and formaldehyde. To what end, was my fascination? I can only speculate but, well – let’s pull that thread another time…

To a kid, really old people are pretty scary, when I was little we lived in an apartment and on the ground floor, lived the apartment manager who was himself probably at least 175 years old, incredibly he lived with his mother, who was born one manger over, the afternoon Jesus was born… like – she was old. Really old, more like a loose collection of walking dust than a woman. Nice lady from what I can remember, but still scary.

Every so often she would come out with her giant child catcher net when I was playing in the backyard and drag me into her house. The inside was forever dark, she must have had lights and I assume electricity but I never saw it, and I was never, ever in the house when her son was home – I know weird right – maybe there was a reason I never saw them together, maybe there was a reason the lights were never on when I went in…. maybe the son – WAS THE MOTHER!!!!!!  I was living one floor above a real, life, honest-to-goodness Norman Bates.

Ok not really, in fact, she was very nice but completely bonkers. When she called me in she always lead me right to her front room where she had an enormous old piano and she kept trying to teach me to play and sing ‘God Save the Queen.’ In those days no one worried about the dangers of little kids blithely entering strangers homes….

This one time, we had unsuccessfully sung God Save the Queen three times in a row and she just got up and walked away……….. c.r.e.e.p.y….. ummmm old woman….. old woman… where are you going. So I followed her – I assumed she had gone to light the oven where she intended to cook me alive. Alas, she had gone to the kitchen to fetch me a nice piece of apple pie for singing with her… again remember, these were kinder, gentler times, you didn’t have to worry about finding me in pieces spread all over the city, my head atop a pike down in the warehouse district. Anyways – she sliced me off a nice looking piece of apple pie, being a kid, I ate the pie.

Poor little old me, I was just a kid – how was I to know the pie was weeks and weeks and weeks old. She was not really all there by that time….. and I’m sure there was no malice in her heart…. but let me tell you this, after that piece of pie, a few hours later – I experienced the most profound and devastating bout of diarrhea the world had ever known…..

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So there it is then, a little glimpse into my youth and I’ll leave it to you to decipher the meaning, i’m not sure if it influenced my feelings about the elderly or not…. I don’t know what it means but I know this… those Snoop Sister were da Bomb….

Have a Great Day