A WORLD WITHOUT PIZZA

Maybe 7 or 8, possibly 9 years. That's how long I'd been in the world before I knew about pizza.

Some of my earliest memories about pizza:

1. "When the moon hits your eye like a big 'piece of pie' that's amore." Well, at least that's what I thought the lyric was until I got it explained to me by a big 11-year old. But I didn't know what pizza was. (I had previously thought Mr. Sandman brought drinks, not dreams.)

2. "Pizza, Pizza, Pizza," one of our local drive-ins would advertize, and that was my first taste of the delicious offering. Probably no one else ever called drive-in pizza delicious. But I liked it at first taste.

3. The Pizza Hut built on land where my 8th grade girlfriend, for maybe three weeks, lived. It was the first or second place in town that served pizza. The red checkered tablecloths, well, it was what a pizza place should look like. You know, I still miss that hamburger pizza they made. It's kinda hard to find a hamburger pizza anymore, and their's really was good.

4. The Pizza Roma near downtown. The first Italian restaurant I had ever been to. It was half restaurant, half bar, so I never felt really comfortable in there until I reached legal age.

5. Shakey's Pizza, elsewhere. My little commune didn't have a Shakey's, but I sure looked forward to going to one when I was out of town. I mean it was a Pizza Parlor. And they had all kinds of toppings and, I think, different crusts. At least they were different from the normal crust I usually ate.

I've sampled a lot of pizza since those early years. It's hard to imagine my world where pizza didn't exist for several formative years. Maybe it's a good thing; maybe I'd never have been able to get in that catcher's squat position I played back then. Or maybe I would have never been able to get out of it.