Pizza Ponderings

It’s 5:26 a.m. Mountain Time here in Denver, and I want pizza. I was at the hotel gym reading Eat, Pray, Love, and Gilbert describes a scene where she and a friend encounter the world’s greatest pizza in Naples. I want some pizza, more than the usual pizza craving that I carry with me each day in general, but there is no pizza available at the moment. Even normal breakfast food is beyond my reach until 7:15 a.m., when the T-Mobile Human Resources events begin. So I am stuck thinking about pizza, feeling my stomach rumble and wondering how on earth I can write a blog entry about anything other than the Eden-esque longing for pizza this book has wood-fired inside of my soul at the moment.

I suppose I’ll keep wanting to visit Italy with extra intensity for as long as I’m reading the Italy section of Eat, Pray, Love. The book will soon shift to India, and I don’t know how much I will long to visit there. I doubt there will be the same pizza imagery. I’m expecting a very spiritual focus. Several people I know from my seminary days have been to India on mission trips. One of my favorite Christian writers, E. Stanley Jones, spent much of his career there. Then there’s my whole Gandhi admiration. So pizza or not, I’m sure I will be quite intrigued with the India chapters. Then it will be on to Indonesia, and I have no idea what might taste good there, either.

Just to balance things I’ll need next to read a book based in Paris. I have a hard time deciding whether I want to see Paris or Rome first. A lot of great writers lived in Paris, Hemingway and Fitzgerald chief among them, and I really want to go there mostly for the inspiration. Now, you can get inspired anywhere if your heart and mind are open, but if I had the choice I would like some homemade French pastries and wine to assist in the inspiration. And clichéd as it might sound, I long to sit with my laptop at one of those crowded cafes I’ve read so much about. I want to people-watch French people and talk to the natives who can speak some English and have no touristy agenda. I really would approach Rome the same way. I want to feel the heart and soul of a unique place, because that touches my own heart and soul in unique places and helps me to more fully express whatever art is bubbling inside of me.

Thinking about bubbling art makes me think about hot, bubbling cheese, the kind you would find across the surface of a pizza. I still want pizza. I don’t have to have it in Rome or even Paris, I would settle for it here in Denver. I would take one of those microwavable deals right now, a pale imitation of the real thing.

Like Rome or Paris, pizza is out of my reach at the moment and I must leverage what I do have at my disposal. So I am off…