The Pizza Slice

the mid-month post

I am of the opinion that one of the most holy things you can do is walk into a pizza place in the city of New York, order a slice of pizza, have it handed to you on a paper plate, take that plate and that pizza out onto the busy sidewalk, and eat that pizza slice while walking down that busy sidewalk, ideally in the dark.

A good time to do this is the first night you arrive in the city, after you’ve checked into your hotel, when you come back out on the street, hungry in your body for food and hungry in your mind for the city itself.

Another good time to do it is if you’ve spent the whole day running around exhausting yourself—as New York practically demands you must—working or hustling or being a tourist or whatever it is that you’re there in town to do, so now you’re tired and hungry, and this ritual offers you an almost magical degree of restoration.

I did it that way once on a winter evening during a business trip, when it was super cold and, as I walked along, tired but happy, eating my slice, it—I kid you not—started to snow. Now I suppose you can be from a lot of places where this won’t seem all that remarkable to you. But the California kids among us understand: it was a miracle. The falling flakes so slow and beautiful I could hardly breath. The hot food and the cold air. I mean. Just. Come on.

And, fair warning, there may be more than one story around here about eating hot food on the street before we’re done. More than one story, too, about someone saying something weird to me. More than one story seeing an object in a place it ought not to have been. You know that one aunt who always gives you socks for your birthday? Maybe the gifts of the world are like that—figure out what works and then just keep on giving that.