Happy Pi Day!
Math runs in my family. The Patriarch was a mathematician for NASA in Houston for a season, projecting flight paths and important stuff like that. He then decided he wanted a PH.D. in math education, which brought him and The Matriarch (who had just become a mother - I was only a few weeks old at the time) to Starkville, where he would spend the rest of his career in Allen Hall, 4th floor, teaching many of you, I'm guessing. On The Wife's side, her mom, dad and sister all taught math at some point in their career - Sister even got her master's and found her husband on campus. That's a story for another day, but suffice it to say: math has been good to her.
Closer to home, being part of a math legacy, I thought it would be a good idea to take calculus at the Ole Alma Mater - four semesters of it, in fact. I made good grades, then changed my major to pharmacy and forgot it all. I suppose the legacy would have ended there if it weren't for Son, who is about to graduate from The School Across Town in chemical engineering, where he apparently uses math in addition to chemistry to measure heat in pipes, or something like that, which must be important if they have a whole department for it.
Why am I giving you this family history of number-crunching? Why am I three paragraphs in and have yet to mention food? Be patient, my friends, for the reason is this: in just a few days we will celebrate Pi Day.
Pi, for those who don't use it every day to calculate the area of a circle, is kind of magical. People who know about that sort of thing call it a transcendental, irrational number. It's been recognized for thousands of years, and because the decimal places are infinite, it's still going. But the first three digits, 3.14, are the most familiar. And in 1988, a physicist named Larry Shaw decided it was time to celebrate on March 14 - i.e., 3/14 (see what he did there?) - and Pi Day was born.
Today the holiday has gained much wider recognition - even the US House of Representatives gave it an official nod of some sort back in 2009. And it is still celebrated at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco where it originated.
Do I need to spell out where this is headed? Have you guessed what sort of food is served at Pi Day Headquarters in San Fran? Yes, it's pie. With an “e” at the end. And I think that's a pretty wonderful way to celebrate anything.
The earliest versions of pies have been around even longer than the pi of math. Well, pi may have been around if someone was drawing circles in the dirt, but I guess nobody was doing that kind of math in the year 6000 B.C. But apparently they had already discovered that pie was good.
And pie is recognized as being a good thing. More than just a comfort food, it's a food that brings people together. The Pie Lab in Greensboro, Alabama, which I have visited twice and written about before, was founded just for that reason. Per their own “about” page: “It's founded on the idea that the simple things, like delicious pie and good conversation, can bring us together and spread joy.” On the wall is a rather famous (among pie people) quote from American playwright David Mamet: “We must have pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.” And I've experienced that - I bet you have, too.
Back in August, I wrote once or twice about my visit to Three Sisters Pie Company in Columbus. My family went for dessert after my birthday dinner, then went again just a week or two later. It's a place that has great pie, good coffee, and a very de-stressing vibe.
In Oxford, many years ago, my favorite place to eat pie was The Hoka. Ron Shapiro, the owner/creator of this legendary cafe and theater, passed away last year and is greatly missed. One of the many legacies he left was his recipe for hot fudge pie - my favorite dessert from the late eighties. Over the last ten years it seemed like I ran into “Ronzo” almost every time I visited Oxford. He would greet me by saying, “Welcome home!” And from what I observed, he was a pretty relaxed dude. Maybe it was the pie.
One might think that the powers that be would make the connection, and National Pie Day would coincide with Pi Day. Alas, it was not to be. National Pie Day, according to The American Pie Council, is actually celebrated on January 23. (March 14 is National Potato Chip Day, and try as I might to make a pie-chip connection, I failed you.) But we are not limited to just one day - there are at least a dozen plus extra days that celebrate individual kinds of pies: pumpkin, lemon meringue, raspberry cream, mincemeat, and fried. And if you want to stretch the point, you can also find official days for pot pie, whoopie pie, and pizza pie. I'm likely leaving something out, but rest assured the people who come up with these days have not.
With all this in mind, I am also certain that celebrating Pi Day with pie, even on National Potato Chip Day, is okay - even logical, given that pi has to do with circles, and the most common shape of pie is circular. Save the chips to get the sweet taste out after your favorite pie. Or pies. It's okay, it's a holiday.