My wife and I had the good fortune to attend a Patty Griffin concert last year. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Patty’s work, she is a musician in the Folk/Americana tradition best known for her intimate, stripped-down songwriting style.
The New York Times praised Patty for “[writing] cameo-carved songs that create complete emotional portraits of specific people…(her) songs have independent lives that continue in your head when the music ends.”
While listening to a playlist of Patty’s work prior to the concert, I encountered one of those haunting songs. After the first listen, I found myself re-playing the song over and over – each successive playing leading to a new revelation in my mind.
The name of the song is “Making Pies“. You can hear Patty sing it in this Youtube clip and you can study the lyrics below.
The song narrative unfolds slowly, moving backwards in time. It grows more powerful as the listener begins to read between the lines and piece together an image of the life of a lonely woman and how she came to be that way.
The opening verse tells of a woman taking the short walk to her job at the TableTalk pie factory where she dons a plastic cap on her head and begins the task of making pies all day. It is evident that it is a job she has been performing for many years because when she began working there her hair was not gray.
When she shows a picture of her nephew’s birthday party to a co-worker we understand that she probably has no children of her own to celebrate. She takes on volunteer work at her parish because “it gets me out” and helps her to pass the time. While she sits at the church office typing copy, she occasionally glances at a picture of Jesus’ staring down at her from “way up there on the wall”.
Another photo shown to her co-worker finally reveals the heart-wrenching reason why the woman is alone. Her long ago “sweetheart” was a soldier who went off to war but never came back. Her love perished, along with the hope and dreams of a lifetime – destroyed by the bombs that “rained on the world“.
A rolling tide of thoughts and emotions rolled over me while listening to the song.
First came the realization that TableTalk Bakery is a real pie company headquartered in Worcester, Massachusetts – located less than 30 miles from the town where I grew up. The company was founded by Greek immigrants in 1924 and it continues to operate today, producing over 250,000 pies daily.
TableTalk pies can often be found in my kitchen cupboard, which I like to pair with a cold glass of milk and enjoy as part of a sweet breakfast treat. I will never be able to open one of these pies again without thinking about this song.
I am unaware of the origins of this song or how Patty came up with her source material, but more than likely it is based on a true story. Patty grew up in New England and she probably knew someone or heard from friends or family about the lost love story of “the Greek and his Italian girl“. Knowing that the bakery was a real place and the song is most likely based on a true event made the song resonate with more meaning.
The song manages to be both depressing and uplifting, depending on the emotional state of the listener. In one sense it is heart-breaking because you can see the life of monotony that a once vibrant young woman, now older and gray, has been resigned.
She’s showing pictures of her nephew because she has no kids of her own and is forced to live vicariously through her sister. Clearly, she had aspirations of having a family with “the Greek“, but it was so long ago that when she describes the photo of the two of them taken before the war, she uses the word “Italian girl” to refer to herself rather than “me” – as if the girl in the picture were an entirely different person.
In another sense there is a kind of admiration for the woman’s resilience and determination to carry on in the face of the absurdity of life. There is an extraordinary tale behind her ordinary existence which makes her more than just a spinster to be pitied.
Instead of sharing her life with a partner, she satisfies herself with being happy for her sister and her nephew. She gets on with her life, filling it with things to do, things that take time away from the loneliness. She could choose to ‘cry or die‘ from the injustice and unfairness of life, but instead she chooses to make the best of her lot by making pies.
Suddenly, making pies becomes an act of seemingly limitless courage. Characters like the one in this song are often overlooked by society but Patty Griffin shows how the most inconspicuous individuals often have the most poignant tales to tell.
Everyone who suffers life-changing loss, when you become irreparably changed by the loss of what is most valuable in the world to you, must find a coping mechanism to get them through the day and distract them from the all-encompassing sorrow. The coping mechanism for this woman was to close her eyes and make pies all day.
It brought back a memory of a time in my own life when I was in the midst of dealing with my own life-changing loss. As my young wife, attended by her two heart-broken daughters, lay inside the house dying of breast cancer, I remember mindlessly spending hours outside shoveling the heavy coat of fresh snow that had fallen overnight on my driveway.
My neighbor came by and volunteered to clear the snow with his snowblower, but I refused his offer because at that moment my coping mechanism was to shovel snow. It was the only thing under my control and I didn’t want to stop.
Another thought that occurred to me as I listened to the song is that the war had not only taken away her sweetheart and hopes for the future, but it may also have shaken her faith in God and thrown into question her religious beliefs.
She goes to type for Father Mike because “he ain’t hard to like“, observing that Jesus is looking at her from “way up there on the wall“, somehow indicating that she feels distant from Jesus and that her faith is something she struggles with.
It is not uncommon for people of religious faith to feel abandoned and alienated from God when bad things happen to them and they feel like their prayers are not being answered.
It would be natural for the woman in the song to have these feelings, but the impression I get while listening is that though she feels distant, she has not renounced her faith. I imagine she looks up and feels God calling her still and maybe thinks of this Bible verse that has comforted many of life’s afflicted.
Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
Matthew 11:28-30
May all of you find the resilience and determination to carry on and “make pies” when life-altering tragedy visits you.
Words to Live By... 
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