A Time for Pizza

I treated myself to more lunches out this summer than I have in the past number of summers combined, and you know what?  I was worth it!  One of my favorites, only available on Fridays, was take-out pizza from Bakery Delite in Plains, PA.  I savored every morsel knowing that once vacation was over I'd likely not be back there for another Friday lunch until next June rolls around.

I wrote those words on the 19th of August, last year - the last Monday before my return to school.  Another year of academia has passed and, praise God, June has finally rolled around again, and today was my first Friday opportunity to get some pizza at Bakery Delite.  I am nearly high as it digests, not from the pizza itself, but with the realization that I'm another year wiser than I was back then.  Okay, I lie.  It's the realization that another something to which I'd looked forward is here and now.

I live my life in various series of moments to look forward to, and nobody does it quite like me to my knowledge.  In any moment there is something in my brain and my heart to which I'm looking forward, but I do it like a little kid on Christmas Eve awaiting the sounds of prancing reindeer overhead.  There's a surrealistic excitement that I feel, and I wouldn't trade it for anything else in the world.

I guess that's why closing down another year at school is always such a big deal to me.  With the summer come many, many things that have me eagerly waiting for their arrivals, sometimes within days of each other and often with numbers of good things and events overlapping.

For example with a planned trip there usually comes visiting friends I haven't seen in a while, picture taking opportunities, decent restaurant meals, craft beer samplings, shopping excursions, and just gobbling up the scenery that passes by outside the car windows.  I don't know that I'll ever take a long scooter trip.  I'm a man who loves his comforts and air conditioning in the Impala on a brutally hot day beats being saddle sore and half baked on the scooter.

Today was the time for pizza on a Friday again.  I rode a few miles after picking it up to the county park where the gates close in November and my soul sighs as their closing heralds for me the coming of another dreary, dark, and cold winter.  But, because of that annual closing and its import for me there is likewise much joy as I approach the park and see the yellow gates flung wide open.  Every time, all summer long, I get to that entrance and my spirit sings and dances inside me.

The pizza was very good.  The company was rather quiet, but I like it that way for a summer lunch on the scooter.  I'm not the sort, if someone were to come around and strike up a conversation, who'd be delighted to be talking to some stranger about nothing much, or, heaven forbid, his aches and pains and woes.  So many acquaintances think that I'm an extrovert, but the truth is that I'm quite introverted and would much prefer to munch a humble lunch alone than to yak with somebody I just met.

I got to try out the bright green plastic spidery phone holder I picked up a few weeks ago at a cheapo goods store.  It holds one's phone as a tripod would hold a substantial camera.  It did a decent enough job.  The picture immediately below this text is the actual one from the phone.

I was feeling gleeful when I tossed the empty pizza box into a nearby trash can, gathered up my stuff, and hopped back onto the scooter.  Though it had been a simple lunch, it was one of the best I'd had in a while because it was one of those things I'd looked forward to a lot.

I love seeing a lot of sky and the view of it from the park is one of the best in the valley.  I suppose that's why they put the small airport next door.  Some days a scooter ride gives me that same exhilarating feeling I always imagined that being able to fly like Superman would provide.

I take lots of selfies as I make my way through life because when I'm revisiting pictures I like seeing on my own face the joyful emotions I was experiencing in the moments when I snapped them.  Most scooter rides give me this look which is why I know that having a scooter is something I'll always want.  That, and a little pizza on Fridays in the summers.