Pie (𝝅) Day

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Math and I have never been more than nodding acquaintances. It wasn’t till I enrolled in Astronomy in college that I realized how completely math ruled the universe. This was somewhat disappointing to me as I had hoped that I could learn to understand the Heavens by dint of my youthful background in Roman, Greek, and Nordic mythology—and perhaps the complete Wizard of Oz collection? (Because I was not athletically inclined like my brothers, reading everything available in small local libraries on military bases was my only fallback defense against boredom. It was also useful to avoid the chores my parents insisted should be a part of their children’s family responsibilities.– “Where’s Janice?” “I dunno. Probably off reading somewhere.”)

When I was a teacher at Bingham High, the math department instructors offered extra credit to students who provided actual pies to celebrate Pi (𝝅) Day—March 1.4159265359 and so on—which is just around the corner. They’d set up long tables in their hallway, load them with a wild variety of student-supplied pies, and offer paper bowls and plastic forks to anyone who wanted a slice or two. It rapidly became one of my favorite days of the year. Why the hubbub over a mathematical calculation? Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, a figure essential in all kinds of calculations—like designing and building a robotic science station called Rover, then figuring out how to get it to Mars, for example.

For me though, it was always all about the actual pies. In college I lived with 7 other girls in an old home behind a barber shop across the street from what is now LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo, Utah. Next door was a basement apartment of boys–at least two of whom have been close friends to my husband and I for the last 50 or so years. It was from that crowd a shy 17 year-old girl learned the definition of the word “hijinks”. One seriously snowy winter week, my friends and I filled the dozen stairs down to the only entry of the boys basement apartment with six feet of packed snow. They had to climb out a narrow side window on their bellies to get to class for several days—not easy carrying a backpack loaded with heavy books in the time before computers. There was, of course, ongoing retaliation.

The highlight of our friendly rivalry came the day my friends and I decided to host a “pi fight”. My roommates voted for cheap crusts loaded with shaving cream—after all, there was a barbershop out in front with plenty of supplies, but I argued that if I was going to get a pie in the face, I wanted to be able to lick my lips. Over the course of a couple of days we made 20 cream pies—coconut, banana, chocolate. We held a summit with our neighbors to agree on the rules of the battle: we picked the following Saturday morning in the early spring as the date and set out the battlefield boundaries as the back lawn between our house and the horse corral behind us. We also divided the pies in quarters, so there would be ample ammunition for each participate to be armed with four or five weapons.

Lining up up on both sides of a table of pies, our designated starter (one of my roommates) yelled “GO”, and war ensued. It was great fun (although it alarmed the horses), but it we ran out of weapons way too soon. Plus, some of the male participants kept stopping to eat instead of attack. That’s when chaos took over. Some unnamed villain grabbed a hose and started filling buckets. Then garbage cans. It was cold in Provo in the early spring. We were all shivering, but neither side was willing to admit defeat.

We fought tooth and nail until one of my roommates fled into the house to escape the deluge. A boy with a hose (now my husband) followed her. Screaming, she ducked for cover in the kitchen. A firehose of water followed, flooding everything. There seemed to be no end. One side inundated the other, then back again. Finally, my roommate Merri got disgusted. “I have to study,” she declared. She disappeared down the stairs to her basement room.

Our basement was only half finished with two bedrooms and a random toilet/shower/sink combination sitting in the middle of the unfinished section surrounded by a shower curtain for privacy. (We called the downstairs “ghetto” for a reason.) By this time, the war was petering out as a dozen participants began wringing water out of their T-shirts and jeans. My roommates and I surveyed  the flooded apartment. Might as well start the Saturday chores since everything was already wet, we concluded. We checked the job chart and dug in. Except for Merri. She had disappeared.

I found her downstairs sitting on her bed, her physics book open in front of her as she scratched some complex equation on water soaked paper with her right hand. Her left hand was holding a cheerfully patterned plastic umbrella over her head. Water was dripping unimpeded from the upstairs, through the 40 or 50 year-old uninsulated flooring, down the edges of her umbrella, and onto the bed. Everything was saturated. She appeared not to notice.

“Merri,” I interrupted her. “Aren’t you freezing?” She looked up in surprise. Even all-out war couldn’t distract her. Math. Still winning after almost 3,000 years.