The Pie Whisperer

The kids and I just finished reading (listening to*) The Man Who Listens to Horses by Monty Roberts. The kids love horses and they loved this book. I’ll warn you, there was one violent scene where a man gets beaten to death. There were also a few damns and hells but all in all, nothing worse than a Saturday morning cartoon.

Young Monty loved horses so much that he would spend entire days just sitting and studying the wild horses. How they communicate, how they learn and how they teach. That’s how it happened. That’s how he learned to watch and listen and know them. How could the horses not respect Monty, when he had so much respect for them?

Monty gave the kids and I a lot to talk about. Horse whispering. It’s like unschooling with horses. I’ve already read The Baby Whisperer, which had some great ideas in it by the way. Now I’m all set to read The Child Whisperer, The Husband Whisperer, The Snotty Women at Church Whisperer and in a few years I’ll need The Tween and Teen Whisperer.

I went to another cooking class last week. We learned Pies. The secret to making a pretty Pie crust has eluded me for years. Well no more! Here’s the secret. Leave an inch of crust all around the pan. Then FOLD IT UNDER and pinch the edges all ruffley. There. Now you have a crust with a nice thick, appealing edge. My sister called as I was making crusts today for fresh peach Pies. (No I didn’t eat any.) It was lucky for her because I let her in on the big secret and saved her from one more pie casualty.

Of course that makes sense. “Why?” we asked each other. Why didn’t we figure that out on our own when it seems so obvious? But how could we have known how to make a beautiful Pie when we had never taken the time to KNOW the Pie? It's difficult to experience the subtleties of the Pie when you’re so busy pigging it down.

What we needed was a bit of Pie Whispering; to study the Pie, to listen to the Pie and above all, to respect the Pie. Who could have imagined the communication possible between woman and Pie? With what I have learned about Pie Whispering, I can now take a wild, high-strung pie, who has never been handled and persuade that Pie to accept a roll, and a flute in thirty minutes.**

Or I could have just looked at this web site.

* I highly recommend books on tape in the car for the “If the fighting doesn’t stop I’m going to take my seat belt off and drive the van into the mountain because it would feel better than the pain in my ears” syndrome.

**It’s possible that some of this blog may have been pilfered directly from the back cover of The Man Who Listens to Horses. Like a good artist, I don’t copy ideas. I steal them.