Pizza Stories
Nowadays, pizza is about as American as apple pie. No matter where you grow up (or when you grew up), chances are that pizza was a regular family indulgence at one time or another. If you're lucky, maybe you got to have some Gainesville pizza at one time or another. You could almost say that pizza is an integral part of the American experience.
One amazing thing is about this dish is that it defies class and socioeconomic boundaries. The rich eat pizza just like the poor do; you can buy it frozen for less than a dollar, or you can go to a high-end bistro and spend fifty bucks or more on a personal pie with fashionable toppings.
I remember a particular pizza story which has special significance for me. My father grew up very poor, one of ten children in a two-bedroom house on Long Island. Being poor, his family valued food very highly. Also, my father's father worked an unbelievable amount. He held four jobs--two during the week, two on weekends--and picked up extra work where he could. The result was that he often worked over a hundred hours per week, and obviously got very little time to relax.
One of his few opportunities to enjoy himself was when he would have some buddies over for a game of poker. Every time they played poker, they would order pizza, and every time they ordered pizza, they would leave the crusts in the box, and throw the box away.
Well, around this time my father was young boy of maybe eight years old. His older brother (the oldest in the family) was probably ten. Whenever their dad had friends over for pizza and poker, they would wake up, go down to the kitchen, and get the discarded crusts out of the garbage can. They would cover them in butter and eat them together in the early morning hours.
It's pretty amazing how memories like that--especially memories that have to do with food--can really stick out in your mind, and become something that stay with you for the rest of your life. I know that every single time my dad eats pizza, he remember how he and Eddy you to sneak down and eat those buttered crusts together.
Food is very interesting in that way. I guess because food, like pizza, is such a huge and regular part of our lives, it really helps to define us and become a part of who we are. In fact, I feel like half of the stories I tell other people, or I hear about other people, are related to food in some way. I have a few pizza stories of my own, now that I think about it.
Growing up in Gainesville, there was this place that served a really amazing Sicilian pizza--I mean it was huge, I don't know how many pounds of crust, sauce and cheese, and a total of sixteen slices. Well, one time my high school friends and I decided to take a trip down there together (there were like thirteen of us) and have a contest to see how much of the Sicilian pizza we could eat.
We took up three tables outside, and started ordering the pizzas, two or three at a time. When all was said and done, another guy and I were tied for first place with thirteen slices each of that awesome pizza. I don't know if I've ever been that full in my life, and afterward we went down to the beach to basically lay down and try to recover from the experience.
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