I feel like a wily old fish in a calm part of a stream. McDonald’s is casting its line toward me, and the bait is a hot apple pie.

I haven’t had food from McDonald’s in 40 years. I haven’t had their iced tea — which I would occasionally drink even when I didn’t have their food — in 20 years. That is also the last time I set foot inside one of their stores.

It’s a personal choice, and I bear no grudge against anyone who does go there. One reason I no longer frequent the place is that I went there so often in my youth that I kind of overdosed on the food. I have much the same reaction to tequila.

But now McDonald’s has baited its hook with nostalgia and is angling it toward me.

A hot apple pie. The siren song of my marginally misspent youth.

A hot apple pie. The perfect ending to a meal when a milkshake somehow doesn’t count as dessert.

A hot apple pie. The flaky crust surrounding a filling the approximate temperature of the surface of the sun.

How did it taste? I have no idea. The filling instantly burned off the taste receptors on my tongue the first time I tried one more than 50 years ago, and nothing has tasted quite right since then.

But the whole concept of a McDonald’s hot apple pie captured my adolescent imagination. It certainly expanded my conception of what a pie could be. You could hold it in your hand and eat it without spilling apple pieces all over the floor or, let’s be serious, my pants.

It was a part of my culinary childhood as much as those chewy sour cherry candy things and taco-flavored Doritos. Also, tacos.

But when I became a man, I put away childish things. Now my pies lean more toward pecan or bourbon-pecan or chocolate-bourbon-pecan, and they cannot be held in your hand, especially when topped with vanilla ice cream and maybe a little caramel sauce.

Everything would have been fine had McDonald’s left well enough alone. In 1992, during a national spasm of health consciousness, the company decided to replace the fried apple pie with a baked apple pie.

The baked apple pie has 230 calories. The fried apple pie has 220. The baked apple pie has 11 grams of fat. The fried pie has 9. These facts make me laugh.

Now, 34 years later, McDonald’s is bringing back the fried apple pie in celebration of the country’s 250th birthday.

I get that McDonald’s is a major player in American culture. But selling a hand-held, fried piece of dough with a molten lava filling as an altruistic act of patriotism seems a little much. And so does calling it “a bona fide national treasure.”

And while I’m burying McDonald’s instead of praising it, I’ll just mention that the company is also erecting a 35-foot fried apple pie sculpture at a little ice cream shop right on Route 66 in Joliet, Illinois. They’re calling it “a gloriously larger-than-life monument,” but they’re also calling Joliet “just outside Chicago.” It’s 40 miles away.

The pie is going to be available for a limited time only, and they mean it. They started selling it June 23 and they’ll stop selling it on July 4, which is sort of an act of patriotism in itself. That seems like an awfully short time to offer it, when they had to completely create a new production line, train people how to make the pies and design and manufacture the cardboard boxes they come in.

But clearly they know what they’re doing.

I have a decision to make, and not many days to decide. Should I break the inertia of my 40-year streak of not going to McDonald’s in order to have a hot apple pie once more? Would it be as good as I remember? Was it ever that good in the first place?

Can you ever go home again?

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