Coquo, Ergo Sum*

*I bake, therefore I am.

There are many arts at which I am deplorably mediocre or worse. Among them are anything involving needles or fibers, including knitting, sewing, weaving, spinning, embroidering, and quilting, anything involving home decor, ranging from picking a color scheme to putting out a vase of flowers, and anything involving a pencil, pen, or paintbrush. I don't play an instrument and I can't dance. I don't garden, as in flowerbeds and landscaping. I used to have some luck with a camera, but my "eye" (a faintly decent one) has diminished over the years. I write some, but not as much as I once did or thought I always would.

There are many days I feel like the apocryphal evaluation of Fred Astaire's screen test: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little."

Like Fred, I have something I can do a little. I bake. And although baking is not generally placed in the pantheon of creative arts, I find myself turning to it time and time again for some of the same reasons that Fred danced.

Because I am moved to.

I bake for friends and family. I bake for birthdays: a Lady Baltimore cake for my husband's recent 55th, a cheesecake for my stepdaughter Elizabeth's 15th a few months before that. In the past, I baked to supplement my income. I bake for meetings and retreats. I bake for fundraisers.

Apple pies are a specialty of mine. In the last seven years, I estimate that I have baked over 100 apple pies. There have been other pies along the way, but apple pie dominates. I bake them because rolling out a piecrust (yes, I make my own) and peeling and slicing apples and then putting it all together satisfy me in ways few other activities do. I have been known to show up at school levy fundraisers with 8 apple pies in hand and certain locals right on my heels so they can buy one of my pies before they are all gone. (Yes, I am boasting a bit.)

One of my favorite books on (what else?) pies is Humble Pie by Anne Dimock. She sees some of us out there as Pie Makers, predestined to turn out pies in times of sorrow and celebration, in times of need and plenty . Dimock believes that each Pie Maker is "called" to a pie. She writes that being called to a pie "is a deeper, more profound relationship than one's favorite pie or one's specialty. It is closer to destiny or fate."

Dimock is right. My favorite pies are cherry and coconut cream, but I am called to apple. Apple pie makes sense to me in ways no other pie does, and if my apples are already peeled and sliced, I can get from basic ingredients to a pie in the oven in under 10 minutes. As I am writing this, there is an apple pie in the oven, just finishing baking. It will go tonight to the last symphony concert of the season as a thank you to Jaime, our conductor, for a spectacular season. When we come back home tonight after the concert, the house will still smell of apples and cinnamon and friendship.

As of late, I have been baking for the clients at our local free legal clinic. Cookies, not pies, as no one apparently feels comfortable taking a slice of pie (I tried apple pies one month). I started baking to ease the palpable stress of the clients, a tension that has been mounting as the Great Recession deepens and the number of clients rises.

The religious writer Frederick Buechner wrote that "our calling is where our deepest gladness and the world's hunger meets." Watching troubled men and women sit in the waiting area and eat my cookies while they wait gives me great joy. I think of the client who waved one of my oatmeal cookies and said "Hot coffee and fresh cookies! This is the nicest thing that has happened to me all day." He went away happy with his legal advice and happy to find the world a little warmer and brighter than when he had arrived. I know I am not feeding the literal hunger some of them may feel, but I hope I am feeding them in other small ways.

Dimock wrote "if Pie Makers made totem poles, the pies they are called to would be the one they place on the top." I can see my totem now in the Tribe of the Baker: cookies, lemon tart, a cake, pumpkin bread, and, on the top, balancing like Raven, an Apple Pie.