Humble Pie

HUNTINGThe Humble Pie.In the beginning there was nothing.And then there was the Word.And then God said, Let there be Light.  And so there was Light.And then came the heat.  So human beings, who proliferated on the Earth, could stave off the cold.  And fashion implements.  And cook.  Above all, cook.  Boil and roast and bake.   One of the easiest dishes humans learnt to bake, since the beginning of Time, was the Pie.  A crust, with a filling.  And the filling could be so versatile, so divergent! Anything and everything could go into the Pie, to suit any and every taste;  the seasoning too could vary, to please the palate.  Some of the Pies were baked with the choicest of victuals.  Sometimes anything and everything went into the making of the Pie:  a hotchpotch of mismatched leftovers.  Such Pies did not even last long enough to be savoured and ingested.  They crumbled within a short time, and the mess had to be cleared up by other Pie-makers.  As Pie-making became more complicated and competitive, Pie-makers congregated into groups to make Pies jointly, so the Pies became bigger, more crusty, more weighty.  Each group looked the other askance, warily at first, then with increasing hostility.  Of course, there were some  Pie makers who could not rest content in their own group.  They wanted their fingers in other Pies as well!  Sometimes  their  fingers got bitten off when stuck into other Pies.   If fingers were stuck into other very large pies, there was tragedy.  Because such fingers got sliced off, not merely bitten.  Carving knives are required to carve up large Pies, a bite isn’t nearly enough.  But those sticking fingers do not have the sense to realize that!Then some groups came together, and loose confederations of Pie-makers came into being.  As confederations grew larger, recipes became more rigid, weights and measures more precise.  The individuality of Pie-making was getting lost in the mechanization of the entire process.   Some groups  baked Pies they themselves could not digest!One disgruntled Pie-maker decided to give up Pie-making for a while  and go round the world, tasting different Pies, till he found a taste that was to his taste, which group he could join.  The night before he started on his travels round the world, the Archangel came to him in his dream to bless him for his forthcoming sojourn.  Before parting, the Archangel whispered in Konphuzaid’s ear, (for that’s the name of our disenchanted friend), “Be sure to try a  bite of the Humble Pie.  You will know it the minute you taste it.”This was a new one on Konphuzaid.  But he was determined to obey the Archangel to the letter, and grab a huge bite of the Humble Pie, and determined to seek it out, wherever it may be lurking in the world. Konphuzaid trudged round the world, throwing himself into an orgy of Pie-eating.  He grabbed huge bites of each Pie, in his anxiety not to miss anything, and to eat his fill of each taste.  That of course led to the inevitable result.  Sometimes he was forced to eat a mishmash of Pies of differing groups in the same day, leading to terrible rumblings in his insides.  The fillings don’t agree, he would mutter to himself, they don’t agree at all.  To make matters worse, the conglomerates of Pie-makers readjusted from day to day, and the fillings changed accordingly.  Konphuzaid was mixed-up  in the  mind and sore in the stomach.  But still he soldiered on.  No one knew of the Humble Pie.  No one had heard of it.  No sudden revelation came to him, as he gulped Pie after Pie after Pie.  Ultimately,  tired and dispirited, Konphuzaid returned to the point of his beginning and lay down his weary self, praying for another audience with the Archangel.  He was determined to get to the bottom of this Humble Pie business.The Archangel reappeared in his dream.  Konphuzaid could not forbear a glance of reproach.  “I searched high and low for your Humble Pie,”  he grumbled.  “But could find it no place.  You’d better tell me now, before you send me again on a wild Pie chase, where to find this esoteric Pie!”“My dear friend,”  smirked the Archangel.  “You have taken many bites out of it, without even realizing it was the Humble Pie that you were eating.  Each group makes it,  each group has to eat it, sometime or another.  The secret lies not in the Pie, but in one’s tongue.  The wise know well when they are eating the Humble Pie, and hence always bite off only what they can chew, and chew only what they can digest.  As for  the fools --- they grab huge bites of everything they can lay their hands on, whether they can digest it or not!  That’s when the stomach begins to grumble, when there is upheaval in the intestines, and we all know what’s let loose then, don’t we?”****