Pizza ... and everlasting love

I hated pizza as a child. My first and, for many years, only exposure was the Chef Boyardi version that my mother tried several times. It tasted like bug spray on a stale saltine, not made any better by the fact that she made it on Fridays (no meat added!) so that it was just what came out of the box. Of course, we were Southerners living in central California, so she knew nothing of pizza to begin with anyway. It was a failed experiment. The rest of the family ate it, if not with gusto at least with acceptance. Picky eater that I was, I ate bread and butter.

So when I went to college, I could not understand why all of my friends so liked going and eating pizza, but they also heartily consumed spaghetti out of a can and dorm food, so I really didn't think a thing of it. My downfall came on a Saturday morning in the spring of my freshman year. I had several friends on my dorm floor, and we were visiting around and ended up in one girl's room. I'd awakened too late for breakfast and was hungry, and for once was eagerly waiting lunchtime so she offered me the contents of last night's pizza box. I declined at first (pizza: yuck!), then noted that she had a loose pill sitting on her dresser. Being the daughter of my father, whose prime directive on medicine was "Don't dose yourself," I felt she should put it back in the aspirin bottle or prescription bottle or whatever. My friend pointed out that it was neither aspirin nor prescription, but yellow sunshine, then had to clarify what that was. To cover my naive shock (this was about as far from Daddy's directive as I could imagine), I turned my attention to the limp box of leftovers.

Of course, in those days, most pizzas in middle America, or the hills of northwest Arkansas at least, we simple thin crust models. No deep dish, foldable, cheese in the crust variety. A lone triangle of browned ground beef with thin layer of cheese on a pie-like crust sat, lonely and cold. I am not sure if it was my embarrassment that I wasn't cool with being greeted with stray LSD pills on a bright Saturday morning, or my hunger, but I took a bite.

Was it the truth of the maxim that hunger is the best sauce? Or was it really that good? It was wonderful! Over the next few weeks, I had pizza several times (actually, over the next three years, I would have pizza several times a week), and quickly settled on a favorite: beef and black olives, although I ate a number of varieties. When Dearest Hubby and I began, well.. really we never dated, per se, but when we began doing such things that might include pizza, he always acquiesced to my favorite, although I learned that he would also partake of pepperoni or sausage or Canadian bacon on occasion. Over the next thirty-five years, we've eaten lots of pizza on various crusts: thin, hand-tossed, cheese-in-the-crust, even Chicago-style and french bread, but almost always beef & black olive. After one recent foray into deep-dish heaven, I though to wonder why he never really wanted anything different, so I asked. You'd think that after 35 years, there would be nothing I didn't already know, or at least, have figured out on my own. He said that before we got together, he didn't like pizza. Seems his first taste of this faux-Italian delight was a homemade Chef Boyardi from a box that his mother had produced, and he spent the rest of his childhood wondering why anyone would eat that willingly. We were obviously made for each other.