Free My Father's Footprints by Colin McEnroe Page A

hearts, their arteries, their positions, their resolve, even their visages. The proper response to every scarcity, every injury
     of time, is to harden. That’s why they call it hardship. My mother ended the drought by simply showing up at her mother’s
     doorunannounced (and dragging me along, of course). The two began chatting as if no bitter, silent interval had ever occurred.
    “Do you have any idea how weird that was?” I asked my mother in the car on the way home.
    “We’re Yankee women. That’s how we do things,” she said, as if the manual for this had been written in 1681 and handed down
     from Increase Mather.
    No, denial is not something our family can give up the way you give up butter and switch to margarine.

    Maybe this is a good time to talk about the Court of Pie Powder. To say nothing of the lists of pies that begin each chapter.
    My father never knew it, but his McEnroe forebears came from the tiny Irish village of Mountnugent, in the south of County
     Cavan, northwest of Dublin. I didn’t know it either until after his death, when I started work on this book. I began to wonder
     how I got into this messy business of being who I am, and eventually it seemed as if the only thing to do was go back to Ireland
     and ask people. I found our people in Mountnugent. You’ll meet them later in the book.
    Wondering how Mountnugent—it doesn’t sound very Irish—came to be, I drove up north to the city of Cavan and clawed around
     in some research materials. I discovered the granting, in 1762, of letters patent to one Robert Nugent. This meant that the
     British were willing to let Nugent treat his area as a village, with two yearly fairs and a weekly market and “a Court of
     Pie Powder and all customs and tolls.”
    A Court of Pie Powder, it turns out, is not as nice as it sounds. I suppose you could say the same about a lot of places.
     The term is a corruption of the Norman “Pie Poudreur” or “dusty foot.” The Court of Pie Powder meted out rough justice, especially
     to peddlers and vagrants.
    We could make it into something nice, you and I. There aren’t any Courts of Pie Powder anymore, so we could make it mean what
     we like.
    It struck me, anyway, that a Court of Pie Powder could be something I’ve been searching for all my life. We are, most of us,
     jammed with grievances and guilt. We are filled with suspicions of ourselves and others. I suppose some people are not, but
     you just want to strangle them. Who couldn’t use a Court of Pie Powder, where one’s life is gently kneaded into a pliable
     mass and then rolled out into a fragrant oval, pressed with skillful, floured fingers against the bottom and sides of a pan?
     It’s nice to be kneaded.
    The proceedings of a Court of Pie Powder would be less concerned with guilt or innocence or liability or malfeasance and more
     concerned with sweetness and mouthfeel. Life is messy and so are pies. The best you can hope for is to set the whole overheated
     shebang to cool on the sill for a few decades. The court would be more about tortes and less about torts. It would be a chance
     to sift, to mix, to trim the excess and flute the edges of a troubling existence. It would be a way of having desserts that
     are better than our just deserts.
    The Court of Pie Powder is a fine place in which to treat my father, who once idly invented a pie company as a way of distracting
     himself from the long afternoons he spent in real estate offices, not selling enough houses. His was called the Sarah Whitman
     Hooker Pie Company, and the name was based on an actual Revolutionary War heroine who had lived near where we lived. She housed
     imprisoned British officers at her home and somehow managed to charge them money for it, I think. That was her heroic feat.
     It’s the kind of upper(pie)crust Yankee moneygrubbing that still plays very well among your New England higher orders.
    The Sarah Whitman Hooker Pie Company—“Try a Hooker for a