Charles Harmon

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF Pi

Born on Leap Day, I’m still a teenager at 78.

My little sister, born on March 14th, pigs out on pies her birthday.

As kids we went to the International House of Pancakes for pancakes,

to Marie Callendar’s or the House of Pies for pies,

to Winchell’s for donuts, and to McDonalds for Big Mac’s and fries.

One sister won the pie eating contest by shoving her face in the pie.

Another, born on New Years Day. Guess our parents were April Fools…

My brother in arms, born the 3rd of July, firecracker with a short fuse.

Yes, pies make me sigh, but now that I’m old and overweight and have

diabetes I must avoid them, so I won’t die and make my family sigh.

But I remember them well from when I was young and well!

Pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, strawberry pie in summer, cherry pie!

Lemon meringue, chocolate, blueberry pie! How sweet it is!

There was this dumb girl in my math class who was running around

saying, “Pie are square.” Poor little fool! You know that pies are round!

But I was the greater fool as she explained to me that pi is a Greek letter

that represents a mathematical constant that approximates the ratio of the

circumference of a circle to the diameter, and it equals about 3.14 and she

proceeded to rattle off the first one hundred digits of pi from memory!

Looking back at that day back in 7th grade, I actually became good friends 

with that girl with the genius IQ, and I was dumb to criticize her grammar.

She was rattling off pi because it was pi day, created on March 14th to help

kids become more aware and conscious about mathematics. And this was

a revelation that really got me thinking about many things such as infinity,

eternity, how can this number, pi, go one forever? And this really blew the

minds of the ancient Greek mathematicians, one of whom, Archimedes,

first calculated the value of pi based on the ratio of 22/7. Babylonians,

Egyptians, Greeks and Geeks alike all tried to discover this magic number

that goes on forever, this irrational number that divides into infinity.

So I’ll celebrate pi day with a tiny slice of pie with coffee, but I won’t 

go on forever because I don’t want to die for pie or pi, and that’s no lie!