Pizza Near Me & The Poet Astronomer
Episode 05:15:2023 - Prompt: Luck
Before I dive into
Where luck took me…
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Back to Luck.
I work freelance in advertising, and I’ve read over 2,000 campaign briefs of everything being sold to us in the past 15-years.
Ev-er-y-thing.
The result of this training is a healthy dose of skepticism. I always “smell the sell” behind expert claims, snappy slogans that sound like headlines, and memes.
So, if I’m out with friends, and it’s getting late, OR if my partner has just run 68km and needs to eat familiar food to keep it down,
Pizza Near Me is my go-to.
When I Google, PIZZA NEAR ME, the first listing is not where I stop my search. I know algorithms favor businesses that plant keywords in their sites, images can be manipulated, and reviews are deceptive.
Remember, I work in advertising.
I don’t consider myself lucky when I find excellent Pizza Near Me, which I always do. My relationship to high-quality pizza was established years before
The Internet, Google Maps, and their inflated rankings.
Naples, 1933.
Eleven years into il Duce’s reign of National Fascism, a baby named Alfonso was born to his parents out of wedlock. This was bad luck for the baby. Even though his parents would soon marry, he was considered a bastard and raised away from his future siblings.
Alfonso later sold instruments during WWII and at some point emigrated with his wife to the United States. He excelled in math, astronomy, and physics and became a professor at the University of Maryland. He also worked for the Navy.
Some years later, his oldest son committed suicide. His wife, who suffered from bipolar disorder, tried to blow up his car. His daughter stopped talking to him.
If Alfonso’s luck were one of Maxwell’s equations, heartbreak would be the law.
Alfonso met my mom at a New Years Eve party in Baltimore, 1987.
When the guests were invited to share their wishes for the new year, the recently divorced Alfonso said, “I’m just looking for someone to love.”
My mom said, “Why not try me.”
Alfonso was my stepfather from the time I was sixteen to when everything fell apart five years later. In those five years, however, he introduced me to a world I had no idea existed.
Aside from being a physicist, Alfonso was a published poet, cookbook author, and chef. Larousse Gastronomique, the 1,100-page encyclopedia of gastronomy, sat on a stand in our living room.
For a single mom and daughter who rarely discussed what to eat for dinner or when to eat it, we suddenly had a proper meal… an exquisite meal.
Alfonso encouraged - praised - the way I devoured his paper thin veal piccata and spaghetti carbonara.
“Misha,” he’d say in his thick accent, “You are eating so well.”
Alfonso would not eat the food he painstakingly prepared for us.
“No, it is too good for me.”
He would say, drinking his wine.
Alfonso was so accustomed to bad luck he undermined any good luck that came his way. Perhaps, it was his way to control the tragedies that often found him.
Traveling through Italy with Alfonso and my mother, I noticed he would eat if the food was prepared simply.
The chef would come to our table before we ordered to speak with Alfonso. While my mother and I ate risotto with tiny fish tongues and lightly fried zucchini flowers with ricotta, Alfonso would be served Pizza Margherita, his favorite, with the perfect amount of tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, and olive oil on a thin crust.
This was Neapolitan pizza. And Alfonso… was Neapolitan.
So is it luck when I suss out the best PIZZA NEAR ME?
YOUR TURN: Where does LUCK take you? When we take qualifying words like Bad, Good, Beginner’s, Dumb, and Blind out of the equation, we’re left with Luck on its own.
Does something need to be completed for it to count as luck? What if luck is only part of a longer process? What about odds? Does something need to be repeated to prove it’s not about luck?
There’s no wrong answer here.
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Our accident was serious. A main road blocked for most of the day. When our compact car stopped spinning, our bodies filled what little space remained. Joshua and I were accompanying mother to her dental appointment to ease her nerves. While waiting to turn into their parking lot, a white van flew up from behind and BANG! The impact pushed us in front of an oncoming dump truck. After the slow motion revolution, everyone was silent. Motionless. Mom's eyes were open and balancing tiny cubes of automotive glass. Her seat had broken and launched her halfway out the back window. Thankfully, Joshua, who had been lying down behind her, had been rearranged, landing head first on the floor behind me, legs and body extended up the back seat. A narrow escape. As a previous instructor for the National Safety Council, I knew to talk to them calmly and check for breathing and bleeding. There is a lot to tell about that day, but for our purposes here, it's the pivotal event that forever changed my outlook on luck. The catastrophic incident left my mother with restricted breathing and severely painful nerve damage. My son has since suffered almost unsurmountable anxiety, depression, and difficulties learning (higher math) in line with brain trauma. It was all caused by a stranger's carelessness in a moment of bad luck, yet in all the many times I have told the story, I express only how fortunate we were to have survived as we did, and always consider myself incredibly lucky.
Last year, after Keith took me out to lunch for Mother’s Day, we stopped to pick up groceries. While piling our purchases into the back of our car, we saw a female mallard with a dozen ducklings, crossing the parking lot. The mama duck seemed purposeful and distracted, her chicks wandering and scurrying after her. I prayed she was a lucky duck, as I was the evening my grade-school-age son went missing. The sun was setting when I stepped into our backyard and called into the woods behind our house, “David, time to come home.” No answer. “Da….vid!” No answer. I walked across the street and knocked on the neighbor's door. “Have you seen David?” “Last we saw he was down in the woods,” the brothers said. I ran along the edge of the woods and raced up and down our street calling, “Da…vid, Da…vid.” No answer. I grabbed the phone and called every friend of his I could imagine. No David. I paced the kitchen floor and looked out the front and back windows while praying 'beggy' prayers. "Please, God, please. I’ll do anything if you bring him home safe." Visions of headlines: "Boy Found Dead, Mother was Distracted." I was ready to call the police when I heard the door to the garage open. David strolled into the kitchen. “Hey, Mom, what’s for dinner?” “Where in the world were you? It’s been dark for over an hour.” “I was playing at Sarah’s house.” “Sarah? You never play with Sarah. I’ve been calling you. Didn’t you hear me? I almost called the police.” “Oh, Mom. There wasn’t anything to worry about. I knew where I was.” His luck looks don't kill. David turns forty this year. Yesterday, he texted me, "Happy Mother's Day." For all his wandering, I know I am a lucky duck.