A couple years ago, once a week, usually Sundays but sometimes more frequent, I started to eat pizza small.
Sunday nights were forever bummers. For years, I’d think ill of the coming week, find it hard to sleep. Then at some point during the pandemic, though perhaps it was earlier, I decided Sunday evenings should mean something else, become something to look forward to, a way to end the weekend nice.
And what’s nice and simple but pizza and red wine.
The terms often change. Sometimes there’s no wine. Sometimes I make dough from scratch, sometimes I order delivery. Often the pizza is frozen and reheated on a very hot steel. What doesn’t seem to change is my slicing method: I cut the pizza into small slices. Really small. From a nine-inch pizza, I get about twenty pieces, each the width of my finger.
Maybe it’s because I love hors d’oeuvres, or a meal of appetizers. When I turned thirty, we rented an Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan for a party mainly because the catering menu featured individual forkfuls of carbonara. But the deeper, the true reason, I just want the experience to last longer. I like a hanging moment. I like a sustained chord; keep alive the pleasure and sink into time. It’s why typically I avoid dessert at restaurants. Sugar wants the check. Savory says the evening’s still beating.
Play Otis Redding and nothing else ever.
I told a somewhat related story in Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down, my nonfiction book about working for an ad agency in France. (Forgive me here if you’ve read it.) It was about the surprise and pleasure of learning that my coworkers loved McDonald’s. Our office was on the Champs-Elysées. A big McDonald’s sat next door. It wasn’t that people loved McDonald’s that surprised me, but how they loved it. People would grab takeout – maybe four people, sometimes eight – and bring it back to the office. Someone would turn on music, maybe a soccer match on TV. The meal then lasted about 45 minutes: first a starter of chicken nuggets, then an entrée of a sandwich of some kind, maybe two, plus fries. There’d be wine and beer, sparkling water. All of it followed by a salad course and finally an apple pie, or an ice cream sundae that had melted to vanilla soup. The food was McDonald’s, but the meal was French.
Small pizza is kinda my version of that. If the weekend doesn’t end, the week doesn’t start.
Incidentally, and this is unrelated though it preoccupied me today while I was eating a sandwich for lunch: If there are eight billion people on the planet, what are the odds that at least one person somewhere, any time of day, is singing the chorus to The Beatles’ “Hey Jude?” And if the odds are good, how long do they last?
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters:
The best frozen pizza from Italy I’ve ever tasted
New films and television worth watching
By popular request, return of the anonymous teenage DJ with her recommendations on new music. And more…
What the what
Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from author Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Supporters receive a Sunday supplement with three-plus things to love, along with a longer piece once a month sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust. ⛰️
Books mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored in a Bookshop list.