“Hold on babe, real quick, okay?”
Deidre Pujols and I have just met, talking over the phone for no more than 10 seconds, and her warmth is
already radiating through the phone.
I stumbled across her by accident, really. I was doing Google searches in March about the upcoming baseball
season and decided to find out a little more about Albert Pujols’s life. He’s a walking legend,
especially in St. Louis (“a
drinking town with a baseball problem”), where he plays for the Cardinals. It’s what any fan would
innocently do.
Little did I know that Albert wasn’t the only superstar in the family.
Deidre, affectionately called Dee-Dee by her friends, puts me on hold. She’s on her way to a pre-season game
against the Mets, is a mother of four and has a mind-numbing amount of stuff on the go. Albert may be the
travelling MVP, but Deidre and I really had to squeeze this interview in.
Her face is recognizable in certain media circles because of her cookbook-calendar, In The Pujols Kitchen. She’s back on the phone
now, joking that she should be on the Food Network show Dinner: Impossible because Albert will
call with dinner requests for him — and any number of friends on a visiting team — and she’ll only have a
couple hours to get cooking. But it’s ironic because it’s the rest of what Deidre works at that makes
miraculous things come true.
She’s the president of the Pujols Family Foundation,
inspired by her daughter Isabella who has Down syndrome. The organization works to support families and
children who live with Down syndrome and women and children in impoverished communities in the Dominican
Republic. Deidre’s also a public speaker on behalf of all the disadvantaged her organization cares for.
Baseball organizations encourage players’ wives to get involved with the community, but Deidre’s intentions
have been there all along. Well before Albert broke into the bigs, she was working at a hospital and helped
him pay for college.
Next month, Deidre and the foundation are taking nearly 80 beds to a Dominican community, along with dentists
and pediatricians for the children. Back home, the foundation runs events like father-daughter bowling days
and scrapbooking 101 sessions for mothers.
In the past, Deidre got her cookbook inspiration from the women of the Dominican (“the women in the Dominican
are really my heart,” Deidre says), paying them for their time and ingredients to show her traditional
Dominican cooking. Her cookbook features some of the women she’s met, and all proceeds from its purchase go
straight to the foundation.
“It’s not so much about the recipes,” Deidre says, “I really wanted people to get a feel for not just opening
up a book and seeing something to cook, but the faces behind it.”
She also cooked American dishes because, as she casually jokes again, “nobody should ever be deprived of
knowing what a doughnut tastes like.”
Deidre receives countless emails, letters and phone calls of gratitude, but acknowledges her and Albert’s
celebrity status as a footnote. There’s no egocentricity here. Even when it came down to just having our
interview, she was the gracious one — thanking me for my time, a rare experience for a writer.
“I know I have a lot of responsibility,” Deidre says, “I’ll quote from the book of Luke in the Bible, where
God declared that when you have a lot given to you, you’re going to be required to also do a lot… I don’t
know why God chose us, but I’m happy he did and I’m happy to serve in whatever way it is.”
And it comes down to the little things, more than the grand gestures for all to see — from Albert making sure
he can still be friendly to fans after bad games, to Deidre experimenting in vegetarianism for environmental
and compassionate reasons.
There’s an awe-striking sense of balance and faith in action with the Pujols. It’s a rare treat. We all say
that about Albert’s baseball talents, but Deidre’s the stuff of legend herself.•
Main photo courtesy of Pujols Family
Foundation
