Monday, August 23. Two Pizzas. Missing Miss. Mary Ann is acting warmer to me than she usually does. I know why. First, the empty spot in the household. Mary Leigh was her girlfriend as well as her daughter. Second, MA is leaving town for two months on Thursday. In the days right before any such separation (but only when she's the one departing town), she decides she loves me, despite all that stuff she said yesterday. This turns into missing me the first few days she's away. It's all downhill after that.
But maybe this time it'll be different, and she'll decide she really does like me after all.
These forces sent us out to lunch together at Ristorante Carmelo. I don't know why Carmelo Chirico opens for lunch on Monday. Although most other times of the week he's respectably busy, there's never anything going on when we show up on Monday.
He had an interesting special. If you buy a pizza for lunch, they give you a cheese pizza to go for free. This was too good to resist. I am in the habit of staving off my hunger in the early afternoon with a slice of leftover pizza from the freezer. The Marys always seemed to have a few in there, but they never eat them.
All kinds of frozen pizza are below my standards. But we're not talking about real eating here. The only way I keep my weight stable (at too high a number, but at least not rising) is by eating one meal a day, with very small snacks for breakfast and lunch. The breakfast is easy: a slice of fifteen-grain bread and my homemade huckleberry jam. (And juice and cafe au lait, of course.) The lunch has been harder. I was making miniature ham sandwiches for awhile, but that gets old.
Pizza, however, never gets old. (It only dies. But I throw those away.) And now that we have a new toaster oven--one with a lot of moxie--I can resuscitate frozen slices of initially well-made pizza in just a few minutes.
I don't believe I've properly introduced my new toaster oven. The old one died after a mere twenty-seven years of service. I sent Mary Leigh to wherever she wanted to go to buy a new one, whichever one she liked. (ML is more skillful a shopper than I wish she were.) She came back with a beauty by Oster for fifty bucks. It heats up alarmingly fast, and even has a convection feature. In four minutes, it takes biscuits or pizza slices from just under frozen (thirty seconds in the microwave oven gets the process going in the center) to about eighty percent of what they would be like when they first popped out of the original oven. Just what I wanted!
The unit does have a design flaw, though. A wide strip of metal runs along the top of the door, behind the handle. If you open the door all the way, it's slightly more natural when closing it to put your fingers on that metal strip instead of the handle. But the metal is so hot that even a half-second of contact gave me a minor burn. I hope my overstuffed brain remembers that in the future.
Getting back to Carmelo: MA and I shared a spinach salad and then the first pizza, with Carmelo's house-made Italian sausage. (Mary Ann insists that all pizzas in her presence include sausage.) Carmelo joined us to relate a few stores about his trip to Italy, from which he just returned. Chapter One was about an airline schedule foulup. Nothing we haven't all heard before. Someday, the flying part of travel will become pleasant again, but I'm not holding my breath.
Carmelo was traveling with other gourmets and wine lovers, and they ate and drank so much in the morning and afternoon that he rarely made it to dinner. I know how that can go, especially when bistecca fiorentina is involved. That's the two-and-a-half-pound double porterhouse steak that is the specialty of Florence and Tuscany. Carmelo said he had a few of those. "Just grilled," he said. "No sauce, not a lot of seasoning. They say that's the way it must be."
I felt bad about running up such a small check in this lonely dining room, but Carmelo seemed to be in good spirits, so I got over it.
Back at home, Mary Ann is working on refinancing our mortgage, for what seems like the seventh or eighth time. After twenty years, the principal is finally less than we paid for the house and the later renovations. We have only seven years left. But with rates so low, an expanded new mortgage seems to be the best way for us to get the money for Jude's and Mary Leigh's massive tuitions. That will double what we owe on the house, stretch the payments to ten years, and raise the note by a few hundred dollars. I hate this idea, but it's either that or. . . well, I don't know what.
I am comforted by remembering what one of the guys I used to sing with told me. "The good thing about college tuitions is that they do come to an end. Don't worry about borrowing everything you can to pay for it." He told me he ran up every credit card they had to the max to that end. I hope it doesn't go that way for us.
Ristorante Carmelo. Mandeville: 1901 US Hwy 190. 985-624-4844. Northern Italian.
