Pizza and Kissing and Memories

I sat there at the kitchen table, eating my slice of pizza, my four daughters sitting around me talking and laughing.  They were each eating pizza of their own, in their own ways.  Hallie had a slice of pizza with ham, and she was eating the slice whole, bite by bite starting at the small end and working back toward the crust.  It made me smile because when she was tiny she would start at the crust and work toward the other side, and we always wanted to correct her and then I realized, who was I to say that was the wrong way to eat it?  Hanna had a slice of cheese pizza, and with a butter knife she was carefully cutting it into bite size pieces.  Heather also had a slice of cheese pizza, she had requested that I cut her slice up into bite size pieces for her and she was eating them with a spoon.  Hanna had donated one of her crust pieces to Hazel who was happily gumming and gnawing on it.  She is eight teeth strong, and waking up twice nightly as the pesky molars burrow their way out.  I was nibbling through my sausage/ham/bacon combo.  Of course, I wanted pepperoni but, as crazy as it sounds, I just couldn't find any.

I sat there on that night, cold wind blowing outside, residual heat from the oven warming the kitchen. Listening, half listening, not listening.  We make homemade pizza about once a week around here, but usually its on the weekend and Devin is home with us.  We make it all together, the girls helping us with toppings and dancing around the kitchen.  That night it was just the girls.  Devin had come home early from work while I was still picking Hallie up from school, packed his bag, and by the time I got back from the school he was in the kitchen in his work clothes with an apron on finishing up the dough for the pizza.  "Just put it in the oven for 15 minutes when you get back from taking me to the airport and you can have it for dinner." he said as I grabbed him and kissed him.

So there I was, my mister gone for a few days but not before making sure that his family was provided for.  He just barely remembered to take the apron off before we went out the door.  I thought about how much I love that man, and how well he cares for us.  Usually the pizza is crispy if the dough is thin, and like a hearty dinner roll if the dough is thick.  That night though it turned out rather floppy, probably from all my greasy meat, and as I looked at my droopy slice of pizza, the memories began to come.

A long time ago, a lifetime ago, I sat in a little corner pizza place in a tiny tourist town, on an island in Maine.  I sat at a table surrounded by some of my very best friends and a group of boys we had recently met and began spending time with.  We called them the Blue Hill Boys, and while some of the details have faded from memory, the image of a droopy slice of pizza comes clearly back.  The pizza was greasy and gooey and could be molded any which way.  I remember as I sat there trying to eat, one of the Blue Hill Boys began to teach us the "proper" way to eat our pizza.  Somehow along the way it became clear that "pizza" was in his lesson a metaphor for "kissing".

Everyone laughed, and everyone stared at me, because everyone knew what he was referring to.  I am sure it had only been a few nights before that I had asked him to kiss me.  In a few days.  Before midnight on the Fourth of July, was my precise request.

That kiss a week or so later would be my very first kiss, ever.

It made me smile, the memory of that gooey pizza, and the awkward (for me) lesson on eating pizza, kissing, and the whole scenario of how I came upon my first kiss.  I sat there with my four girls eating pizza my husband had made for us, and I wouldn't trade my beautiful life for anything.  But memories are fun too, aren't they?