Tag Archives: pizza

Postcards, Righteous riffs

The Sauce Boss ….

Whenever I am asked to meet with a new employee, I always start with the most important question. 

I mean THE most important question. 

I preface it by letting the person know that I’m about to ask them the most important question that they will be asked that day. 

Possibly, the most important question they will be asked all week. 

I let them know in advance that the question is cosmic in its scope.

Then I hit ’em with it.

“What is the greatest pizza of all time?” 

I then take a minute to make sure they fully understand the question’s magnitude. 

“In your expert opinion, across the hundreds of assemblages of crust, sauce and toppings you have experienced in the entirety of your illustrious, pizza-eating career … what is the GOAT?”

As they deliberate, I invite them to give thought to why. 

What is it about it that makes it the greatest of all time? 

The ingredients? 

Where or how the ingredients are sourced? Is it the style? The type of crust? The manner in which it’s prepared? Is it the individuals who make it? The ambience in which they experience it? The location where it’s located? Is it the company they experience it with? Perhaps it’s the time in their life that they first encountered it?

Over the years, I’ve asked the question at least a hundred times.

Everyone answers differently, but they all have one thing in common. 

The way their face lights up when they tell me. 

You should see how such love lives on their faces. 

__

So, I’m waiting out a Sunday late-morning flight delay at the Kansas City airport yesterday. 

Young fella sitting next to me sees me holding a small print of a cat in a cowboy costume that some friends (who know me well) gave me that morning. 

Asks me about it. 

I tell him. 

Then he asks me where I’m going. 

I answer and, out of politeness, ask him the same.  

He tells me he’s going to Paris for 82 days, to intern for a ‘church-planting’ organization … scattering seeds in France. 

Couple minutes later, he’s asking me if I know Jesus, and whether I’ve accepted him as the only way to salvation. 

In so many words. 

I mean, soooo many words.

Meanwhile, the voice in my head starts audibly exhaling in discomfort, “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…” while rubbing the bridge of its metaphorical nose.  

I’m just a guy admiring a print of a cat in a cowboy costume here.

Meanwhile my concerned neighbor is talking all about sin and eternity … with much conviction.

Which I respect both the act and substance of. 

He’s going to make a great intern. 

Says that our days are not guaranteed. Anything can happen. 

“This might be the last flight we ever take,” he says, gesturing to the door to the jetway. 

I don’t disagree. 

He mentions that Jesus is coming back.

Soon.

I suppress the urge to mention that history is littered with a lot of humans who over-estimated their gifts for guesstimating that particular arrival time.

He starts peppering me with a bunch of questions. 

And keeps pressing me for a verbal … like a flight attendant prompting an exit row passenger. 

Meanwhile, all I can hear is Paul whispering in my ear “… with gentleness and respect.”

I genuinely don’t want to be disrespectful. 

For all I know, God might be eavesdropping on his intern.  

I also don’t want to get deep … meaning the granularity of it. 

But I do want to get deep … meaning the heart of it. 

And I know that if I choose the latter, he’s just going to want to further litigate the former. 

But I couldn’t help myself.

So I answered him … by saying that I have a wise friend who knows more chapter and verse than I ever will. 

And that the wisest thing I have ever heard him utter isn’t a Bible verse.

When someone asked him a question he didn’t have an answer for, my wise friend said that he wasn’t sure.

And added, “I’m OK with God knowing more than I do.” 

Which pretty much sums up my faith right now.

It’s taken me a while to get to this cruising altitude. 

I can’t tell you exactly how close I am to any destination.

There are lots of clouds when I look up.

I’m not even sure how accurate my heading is … as I tend to overestimate the scale of things. 

I’m just trying to hold things steady enough to eventually give me a better vantage point.  

Which is no small accomplishment, given my fear of heights and poor sense of direction. 

But I do have some people in my life right now who are generous in sharing their coordinates with me. More experienced navigators who have logged a lot more miles, spent more time with the map, and seen a lot more of the world than I have. Best of all, they are generous in sharing the detours and emergency landings they’ve made … in hopes that I either avoid, or at the very least, take different ones. 

God bless bound-for-Paris Josoo (“rhymes with ‘tofu’” as he introduced himself), but I don’t think I gave him the exit row answer he and his pilot were hoping for. 

But his soon-to-be-summer employer should know that it wasn’t for a lack of intention on his part. 

After a few minutes, I needed to detangle, so I got up to stand where the boarding lines were about to form.

I confess to you that I hoped that neither God nor United Airlines sat us next to each other on the plane. 

But sitting and sifting here, though … I kinda’ regret praying for that. 

Because I just thought of something I wished I would’ve asked Josoo. 

I would have asked him to talk to me about love. 

About love that rejoices in truth. 

A love that always protects. 

Always trusts. 

A love that in spite of everything … still hopes and perseveres. 

I’d ask him to talk to me about love so Great.

Love that never fails … even when all other prophecies cease, all tongues still, and all other knowledge passes away. 

A love whose planes never run late. 

___

By which I mean … I would have liked to ask him The Most Important Question.

At least the most important one anyone would ask him that day, if not over the next 82. 

I would’ve asked him about the greatest pizza of all time. 

I’d take a good minute to make sure he fully understood the question. 

So I could learn what, in his expert, pizza-eating opinion makes it the greatest … out of all the hundreds of combinations that he’s experienced in his illustrious, pizza-eating career.  

Just so I could see how love lives on his face, and feel how it lives in his heart.

Trust me … I would rejoice in learning of his personal relationship with pizza.

Which would expand my humble understanding of how crust, sauce and toppings can go together. 

And all I know for certain is that he would answer the same question differently than anyone else I’ve ever asked.

And that, by the end, I would likely be hungry to experience pizza the way he experiences pizza.  

And if the Spirit was really moving within me, I might even ask him his perspective when it comes to anchovies.

Not to convince him, mind you.  

Just to see if we had any common ground there. 

All of which to say … I’m no theologian. 

I’m content knowing that if there is a God … she probably looks at me the same way I look at prints of cats in cowboy costumes.

But it’s hard for me to imagine that she cares all that much that I don’t like crust. 

My wife Karry doesn’t mind. 

I let her have mine.

Heck, maybe it makes God happier to see us sharing. 

And I would never deign to speak for her, but I imagine that if God made us in her image, then she probably autonomically smiles when she sees how our faces light up when talking about the greatest pizza of all-time. 

Heck, she’s probably just waiting for us to ask her The Important Question.

So she can reply, in so many words, “Have you ever tried it with the Jesus sauce?” 

So that we can see how a love that hopes all things … lives on her face.

So that we might truly know the GOAT.  

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Excursions

To be continued ….

It was significant, though it was nothing fancy.  

Actually, she made just about every detail significant, though none of it was fancy. 

She let me take her to lunch today, just the two of us (since we went out to dinner as a family on Sunday). She got dressed up just a little bit. Wore the brown blouse that she knows I have always loved her in. Was ready a couple minutes early. She let me drive. Let me hold the door for her as she got in, and also as she got out. Took my arm as we negotiated the parking lot slush. Let me pick from the menu, even though she wasn’t interested in anything other than breadsticks and tea. 

Truth be told, she hates Pizza Hut. Has ever since she got the most violently ill after a visit years ago. As has been her custom consistently across the 26 years I’ve known her, she gives you one shot, and that’s pretty much it. 

But she has been known to make the occasional annual exception on or around February 14. When she lets me coax her into a victory lap over some breadsticks and tea. 

That was the precise fare on Feb. 14, 1991, when we spent our first ever Valentine’s Day together gazing out at some fat snowflakes from a booth at the Waynesburg Pizza Hut.  

She’d forgotten about the snow then, she confessed as I recalled the weather report from 26 years ago. 

We both fought the urge to take the full measure of this annual pencil-tick-on-the-doorjamb moment. 

But I made myself vulnerable before her … with the same ease that convinced me 26 years ago that she was The One and Only. I could always tell her anything. 

Confessed to her how embarrassed I was about forgetting how to surprise her. I’ve lost it … from lack of practice. Couldn’t come up with anything for Valentine’s Day for her. Not that we’re big V-Day people. We’re beyond the hype you might say. Still, though … I used to have game. Used to knock her socks off. When I couldn’t afford roses, I once made her a bouquet of roses I drew, told her they were better than the real thing because they would never wither. She kept them for years. Once saved up for a diamond necklace, though the biggest one I could afford was the tiniest one they had.

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Excursions, Postcards

Best Pizza Ever ….

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It’s probably slightly north of coincidental that the best pizza I can ever remember tasting in my life is associated with a last-day-of-school memory.

I was 11 years old.

And within minutes of the #12 black and yellow bus spitting us out for the last time as sixth graders at Hatfield Elementary, my buddies and I were mounted on our bikes … report cards in our back pockets and the whole of summer laid out before us like an open road.

We left the neighborhood by way of Dawson Street (the sweetest, straightest avenue on our hill) down to Jamison, to minimize our time on busy Dixon Boulevard. Then, practicing a patience paid for in countless quarters at the Frogger table, we waited for the traffic to quiet enough on Dixon to allow us to skooch across the short bridge over Jamison Creek so we could hug the right side of Lebanon before ducking into its calm side streets. From there, it was just one single traffic light across Morgantown and a handful of stop signs before sneaking up behind the Uniontown Shopping Center and our pilgrimage’s DUAL destinations.

We locked our bikes together outside the Station Arcade and opened its door to let the glorious 8-bit symphony of all those beepy soundtracks wash over us. Without a hint of hyperbole, it was the 11-year-old, early-80’s equivalent of the Pearly Gate’s trumpets.

Pulled our report cards from our back pockets and presented them to the owner for inspection. He was a tall, black t-shirt wearing middle-aged mustachioed man with a receding hairline and a fat jangly ring dangling from his back pocket that held the keys to The Kingdom. As far as we were concerned, he was also The Most Powerful Man In The Universe.

Get this: for every single A on our report card, he rewarded us with a token. Doing the math, four nine weeks + a final grade = 5 possible tokens per class. So, a conscientious, black-and-gold-with-Mag-Wheels-Huffy-riding-straight-A-student could fill both front pockets of his (proly) Ocean Pacific shorts with 40 or so tokens.

To this day, I’m not sure I’ve come across a more powerful illustration of the importance of hitting the books than the sweet jingle of two pocketfulls of Station Arcade tokens.

Far from amateurs on the arcade circuit, we could more than make those tokens stretch across an entire afternoon. Galaga and Dig Dug were among my drugs of choice. I’d camp out at one until I wearied of it, lining up quarters on the bottom left of the screen to secure my spot for the next ½ hour or more. In my 11-year-old-prime, leveling up was as much memorization as hand-eye coordination.

After a few hours carving our initials across more than a few leaderboards, we pressed pause on our assaults and made the short walk across the alley (location, location, location) to the day’s other main destination: Pizza Town.

Owned by an Italian husband and wife who spoke broken English and exquisite pie, the humble establishment was little more than a counter, a handful of non-descript tables and a wise-old pizza oven that breathed piping hot crusty truth by the slice.

New York-style. Generous triangles served on tiny paper plates that made the pizza seem bigger and more appetizing. They made the pizza in advance, then added the toppings fresh before the husband slid the slices into that magic oven on The Big Wooden Paddle with a whoosh followed by the reverberating smack of the oven door closing behind.

I was and remain such a sucker for the human mastery of actions performed in daily repetition. (Washington peeps …  tell me there’s a more mesmerizing sequence than the lunch guy at Shorty’s dropping toppings in perfect measure onto the hot dogs lining the length of his forearm).

As an 11-year-old, I remember marveling at how the owner didn’t need a timer to know the precise moment to pull the pizza so the cheese was bubbly perfect, never burnt. And how he wielded his paddle like a ninja — sliding it one-armed under the pizza to rescue it from the oven and then, in the same motion, yanking it from under the crust to leave a single triangle perfectly squared on its tiny paper plate. Evidently, the owner knew from memorization and hand-eye coordination, too.

I can recall my exact order that day: two slices with pepperoni and the anchovies my parents would never let me get; large Coke served in an eponymous paper cup (the kind that always made the Coke taste better) with the tiny, chewable, kind of ice-machine ice chunks. Paid for with allowance money pulled from my back pocket, since both fronts were still token-stuffed.

While decades have fogged my recollection of the precise flavor profile of that exquisite pie, I can tell you with 100% certainty exactly what it tasted like to my 11-year-old self: freedom.

Achieved only via riding our bikes across town. Earning an afternoon’s worth of tokens. Paid for from money pulled from my own pocket. With toppings of my own choosing.

The experience is as vivid in my memory as it is incongruous with the present moment … Peter and Emma’s last day of 10th and 6th grades, respectively.

When I shared the above recollection with my wife Karry, she couldn’t believe our parents would ever allow us to do such a thing. I could’ve explained it a million different ways, but I just told her that we feared our parents exponentially more than any evil that might have befallen us on a cross-town bike ride to the Shopping Center.

I’m not sure we were any safer in those days. We just didn’t have as many digital media sources scaring us into believing we were in any appreciable danger.

Ignorance? Perhaps.

Ignorance as bliss? I’ll order it off the menu every day.

I don’t spend much time wishing my kids could have experienced my childhood (really I don’t).

But, if I could give them just a taste … I’m pretty sure I’d offer up a slice of Last-Day-of-Sixth-Grade-Biking-to-The Station Arcade-With-Your-Best-Friends-From-the-Neighborhood-To–Spend-a-Report-Card-Earned-Afternoon-Topped-Off-With-Paid-From-My-Pocket-Pizza-Town-Pizza.

To summer vacation.

And hoping the present generation carves their initials on its leaderboard as indelibly as their parents did.

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