Pizza Fix!

Thursday, February 23, 2012

I've been wanting pizza for more than a year now; 'wanting' in the way that a drug addict 'wants' another fix. When I think of what I miss from back home, my thoughts focus on my mother, brothers and sisters and a few friends.Those thoughts of loved ones last only a few seconds, before an extra-large pizza appears on the screen of my mind, blotting out all other thoughts and visions. Sometimes the pie has pepperoni; sometimes it's a Hawaiian, and often it's a pizza with white sauce, chicken and three kinds of cheese. I can see those cheeses clearly. The ricotta is pure white. It's creamy and light with a hint of curdle to it. The taste? Mild and delicious. And then there's mozzarella, the mainstay of pizza and there is no acceptable substitute for good quality when it comes to mozzarella. The creamy white is..... Oh my gosh! I'm not writing a food review here! Ha! I was taken off course by my vision. Never mind.

I hail from Massillon, Ohio, which has enough pizza places and beer joints to service the entire state. Massillon's claim to fame is its football team. But its players are big and beefy because of pizza, washed down with a cold brew - usually Budweiser, but I don't hold that against them.Teenage boys think it rounds them out as potentials for professional sports stardom.

Pizza is a complete food. I read that once. Maybe I was the one who wrote it. I can't remember, but it doesn't matter. Its good enough for me  The mere fact that it's in print makes it believable, which is a strong persuasion for it's truthfulness.  Fact is, there's never been a clinical study to refute the nutritional value of pizza. If you don't believe me, look up 'pizza' under "Clinicaltrials.gov." And there's evidence that any kind of pizza, sprinkled with powdered aspirin, helps alleviate a head ache. (It's a recipe I got from a beer-guzzling halfback, as a sure cure for the 'day after'.)

All bullshit aside, (don't believe it!) I am completely and wonderfully satisfied, more so than I've been for a long time. Don't tell my wife, though. Filipinas are known for their jealous natures and my wife is pure Filipina, to the bone. Sounds kind of silly, I suppose, to suggest that her jealous nature might be roused into a pique over a pizza. But I'm not taking a chance. Someday, maybe just one particularly wonderful day, I can be eating pizza in bed with my wife, Emelie, while we are... Oh, don't get your minds all wrapped up in a pornographic, sauce-licking vision of melted cheese on a hard salami pizza! (Is there such a thing? Should be.)

I can't think of anything else to write, so I'll just kick back and digest what I ate. I hope you can do the same with what you just read.

Shake, Rattle and Roll

Tuesday, January  7, 2012

There has never been a tremor, let alone an earthquake, of this magnitude, in this area of the Philippines. Yesterday, I was driving my tricycle home from town when the first tremor shook the earth and the nerves of the people. As I was soon to discover, Emelie and her sister, Jane had run out of the house into the yard. On the way out, Jane grabbed her granddaughter (our little two year-old) Shane, and her 9 month-old, Meagan, off the porch and whisked them out to the yard with her.

But I wasn't aware of any of this. The center of the quake was about 40 miles from us, on the neighboring island of Negros. Many of our area's residents told me later, just how traumatic it was. The quake hit 6.9 on the Richter Scale. However, my tricycle - a motor scooter with a side car - rattles its way to the equivalent of about 8.0 on that same scale. So, my shake-rattle-and-roll machine kept me from feeling the quivering earth.

I had just sold a bicycle to a woman named Jam and I was taking her and her daughter and the bike, to her home in Guiwanon, a few miles further up the national highway than our rental house. Along both sides of the street, people had gathered to share their personal experiences of the tremors, and to discuss what might yet come. Since this was a first for Cebu, no one knew what to expect. I wondered why they had gathered as I still had no knowledge of the quake.

After pulling up in front of Jam's house, in the midst of a group of residents, Jam's husband, Romel, told us what happened. Other people there were either chattering or making cell phone calls to family and friends.

When I got home, Emelie told me how scared she and Jane were. She said the house was making strange noises as the moving ground put a serious strain on the steel and the cement blocks. A few minutes later, the Ginatilan fire truck passed, blaring an excited warning for residents living by the sea to move to higher ground, in case a tsunami, an enormous wall of water, is formed from the earthquake if it is under the sea.

Well, the tsunami never came, but a false alarm in Cebu City panicked crowds of people and sent them running in all directions to escape the rumored tsunami.

There were about 8 or 9 separate tremors over the course of the day and the night that followed. I had never experienced anything like it. The earth is a solid sphere, isn't it? It can't break apart, right? We depend on its stability without question or even thought. It's taken for granted that the earth does not move under our feet and fall apart in random places. Under every thought and thing we do lies an assumption that the earth is there to support us. We walk, over the earth. We drive a car, on solid ground. Instability is the stuff of water and air - where airplanes and boats waft and wobble - not the ground where our houses sit, where we sit comfortably in the evening watching the tube, relaxed as if the world is a safe place to be.