Skip to main content

Pizza!

 


My first experience with pizza was not something to celebrate.  I was maybe five years old. I think our family had been out bowling. Not something we did very often. I was terrible at it, but then, I was five. I suspect the rest of my family wasn’t a whole lot better.  Like I said, we didn’t do it very often. But after bowling (I think it was bowling, but I may be confusing it with some other outing. It was a long time ago) we went out for pizza.

This was the early 1960’s and the world was a very different place. Pizza was somewhat rare. I think we had only one pizza parlor in town. We were at that time, the 4th largest city in Oregon, and only one pizza parlor (that’s what we called them back then. Pizza parlors. No, I have no idea why, when the only other thing I remember being called a parlor, was a funeral parlor. That’s not creepy at all). I recall I had some trouble with the word “pizza” as it was not a word I had ever heard before. But I must have been excited at trying something new and different and exotic.

I hated it.

The crust was cracker thin, hard, and bland. The toppings were way too spicy for me. My parents had ordered a “Combination”. I doubt there was a wide selection of different kinds of pizzas to choose from. None of us having a vast experience with pizza, a Combination probably seemed like the safe bet. It probably had sausage and pepperoni and all kinds of things that were a horror to a five year-old pallet. My theory is that taste buds get less acute as you get older. The more you abuse them with spices, the deader they get. So, a five-year-old with brand new taste buds is going to be way more sensitive to spices than an adult. In any event, it was not something I liked and I had no intention of ever trying it again.

Sometime in the next five or six years, my attitude changed about pizza. It had to have involved trying a pizza that did not have pepperoni on it. In fact, I am almost sure that the pizza I fell in love with had Canadian bacon on it. It would have been Canadian bacon with tomatoes, not pineapple. Later I was to discover the controversy of putting pineapple on pizza. I have no strong feelings on the pineapple controversy. It is not my favorite topping, but if somebody hands me a slice with Canadian bacon and pineapple, I will probably eat it.

I wasn’t lying when I said the pizza experience of yesterday is not like the pizza experience of today. Now, even small towns have multiple pizza venues, some still call themselves “parlors” but those are rare. And the choices of the different kinds of pizzas have exploded. It’s like what Baskin-Robbins did for ice cream. There are specialty pizzas and regional pizzas. Like Jazz, New York’s version is different than Chicago’s and they are both probably different than what is produced in Italy, which has its own regional differences.

Pizza has gone from one of my least favorite foods to one of my most favorite. I make no apologies. Deal with it.

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Linear Nature of Time

    Go Go back Go back to the time before Before you did it Before they did it Before it was done to you Before the toast fell on the floor Before the catastrophe Before the mistake Before time’s scars Before   Go Go back Redeem it Rework it Fix it Go back   No you cannot Go back Star Liner
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Walls Don't Work

  At the peak of the Roman Empire, the empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to Brittain, from northern Africa to southern Germany. But the great conquering emperors like Trajan learned that conquering land was easy compared to holding on to it.   In fact, Trajan’s successor, Hadrian, was known for shrinking the empire and consolidating Trajan’s gains into a more defensible set of holdings. This made him not popular among his generals who wanted glory and spoils. But he understood if you stretch yourself too thin, you can wind up with nothing. To consolidate the Empire’s holdings in Brittain, he had a wall constructed from Solway Firth to the Tyne River. Construction began in the year 122 AD. The Empire had never been able to subdue the highland Scottish tribes, so this wall (Hadrian’s Wall) divided the “barbarians from the Romans.” It was a solid piece of engineering with forts and towers scattered along it to keep the “barbarians” out. Hadrian’s successor, Antonius Pius...
Post a Comment
Read more