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Pizza has always taken up a rather sizeable..eh hem…slice of my life. Pizza Hut was the place to go after the high school football game when I was little. It was one of the few times my mom would let me order soda. I would get a Pepsi in a translucent red plastic cup. When I was in middle school, we would save our free personal pan pizza coupons and head there as a group. The day Julie R. pulled a dine and dash was the last time I ever went there with her.

When I was in high school, by best friend got a job working at Domino’s, and when she’d meet up with us later, she always smelled like dough and cheese, in a good way. She bring us cold pizza mistakes and play one of her many CD’s she was able to buy with her impressive paycheck.

Picco’s in Old Town, Fairfax, was my first waitressing job my first summer home from college. Guess what they were known for? Pizza! I developed a crush on the dimpled, older college dropout who could flip that dough like nobody’s business. Then one day he left to follow the Grateful Dead and never came back. Somebody said he had a very bad trip and ended up in the hospital with a collapsed lung, but it turned out okay (as far as I know).

When I graduated from college with a B.A. and a major in English, I had no idea what to do next. Fortunately, neither did two of my close friends. We packed a car, a truck and two cats, and headed to Portland, Oregon. We crashed at a friend’s house for a week while we found jobs and a house to rent. The first day I hit the pavement, I wandered into what used to be a bordello back in “the day.” Rumor had it that the basement was the entrance to a series of underground tunnels where people would get “shanghaied” after being plied with opium. It was decorated with antique furniture and threadbare oriental rugs among a series of nooks on the main and second floors. Surly baristas served impeccable cappuccinos, and microbrews flowed from taps into large glass pitchers (well before you could get a decent IPA around here). Portland’s finest rolled, flipped, and baked pizza, calling out “Pie’s up!” when orders flew out of the oven. I got a job waiting tables and spent many nights running up and down stairs with pitchers of beer and hot pizzas while David Bowie blared out of the speakers on 8-tracks. I often felt as if I were on a movie set of a cross between David Lynch and John Waters. We would get the Ren Fair folks for their weekly Wednesday night meetings of “The Society for Creative Anachronism,” hipsters, punks, and a few middle-of-the-road looking folks. We fought over who would get stuck waiting the table in the converted elevator shaft. It was pretty private, and you never knew what you would find back there.

As fate would have it, I fell for another fun loving dough flipper who was going nowhere fast. After a year and a half of adventures in Portland, it was time to leave. I came, I saw, I served pizza.

The pizza in my life today is our go-to family spot, Cafe Pizzaiolo in Shirlington, where we went this evening. Our kids continue to fight over who has had more than their fair share of calamari, Edwin talks the entire time about his current interest (right now, he’s fixated on raising quails), Maxine showcases her latest TikTok moves, and Chris and I manage bits and pieces of broken conversation. I’m weary of the cliche, “a love letter to…” [insert New York, Paris, etc.], but I guess this is my love letter to pizza.

My daughter spent three hours after the early release day last month playing in a park and the surrounding woods with her friends. They had a blast playing basketball and Manhunt (according to her, it’s an extreme version of Hide and Seek). This gave me new hope that the screen has not conquered all. It got me thinking about my adventures at the Creek – with a capital C – it was so much more than a mere creek…

I grew up in Burke, just 15 miles southwest of here, in the 70’s and 80’s. My older sister and I were always looking for an adventure during the summer. My parents refused to join the neighborhood pool, which even in those days cost a whopping $500 a summer, so our adventures usually consisted of getting a group together to explore the Creek.

The Creek was strictly kid territory; we were free to roam as we pleased, as long as we didn’t go alone and returned before dark. My earliest memory had to be from when I was five years old because it was right after Elvis Presley died. Our friend, Maurice, was heartbroken. As he kindly dug footholds in the hill so I could scale “Kids’ Mountain,” tears filled his eyes as he sang sorrowful versions of the King’s greatest hits. As time passed, we spent more time deeper into the Creek, particularly near a very special island. To the untrained eye, this island seemed pretty average -you know, made of dirt and surrounded by water; however, it was a site much sought after. One week it was “Girls’ Island”; the next it was “Boys’ Island.” We would leap down from the high bank with large sticks and write “Girls Island” in the dirt. There, conquered.

As we got older and braver, we ventured farther into the netherlands of the Creek, where the stream gave way to larger pools of water and ferns blanketed the ground. The sun had a softer glow here, and when I learned the word “primordial,” this spot materialized in my mind.

For a few years (give or take – it’s been a while), we ignored the tunnel. The tunnel yawned at the far end of the Creek. It was long and dark, and water ran in a wide path down the middle into the void. One hazy summer day, we decided it was time. We mustered our courage and took a running start so we could jump from side to side as we hopped back and forth across the water. We emerged with soaked socks and sneakers (no Crocks or Tevas in these days) in the sun on the other side of the road. We looked around and saw that we were standing on the edge of Hatches Farm and that our school was just up the road. The veil had fallen, and the magic of the Creek slipped through our fingers, hopefully finding its way to the next generation.

As I drove to my PD today across town this morning, I marveled at how easy it was for me to just go to work like so many other grownups. I woke up, went for a run, showered and dressed, and chatted over coffee with my husband before we headed out the door and went our separate ways. As I waited at a stoplight, I looked at the woman in the next lane and wondered, “What did she have to do to be able to go to work on a day when school is out?” Did she have to arrange a babysitter? Fix them breakfast? Prepare lunch ahead of time and leave it in the fridge? Come up with a schedule for the day to keep them happily engaged in rewarding activities? Does she even have kids? Maybe her partner arranged it all…

Anyway, what did I have to do? Nothing. My kids would be asleep for a minimum of two more hours. They would get up, maybe half-heartedly argue about what constitutes too much time in the bathroom, and make themselves breakfast. They’d arrange their own activities for the day, and possibly contact me with requests for more screen time. I didn’t really have to do anything, yet as I settled into my seat a few minutes before the start of the presentation, I couldn’t help but send them a text: “Good morning! Please eat a healthy breakfast and take the dog for a long walk TOGETHER. Get your homework done and read a while before you get on screens.” As I hit the send arrow, I knew, as much as they would a few hours later, that this message was mostly for me.