"Pizza! Pizza! Pizza!"
My brother and I pumped our arms up in a victory dance.
"We are having pizza tonight!"
"Get the plates! Paper Towels, we need paper towels. Don't forget the Coke!"
Dad would walk in the back door of our house with the world's best pizza, grease soaking through the white paper tented cover.
"Dad, where's the pizza from?"
Like we had to ask. Dad only went to one place, but we liked to hear him say the name.
"I-tal-yen Village."
"Dad, it is Italian, not I-tal-yen."
"I don't care. Yew want to eat?"
And of course we did. The pizza was just the best thing in the world to our mouths. It wasn't one of those deep dish Chicago pizzas that tasted more like a lasagna forced into a pie crust. This pizza was from Italian Village. It had a paper thin, crispy crust, with a charcoal tasting burn or two on the bottom. The tomato sauce was sweet, the mozzarella lightly browned, and the Italian sausage filled with wonderfully exotic spices like caraway seeds. We always got Italian sausage, not the perfectly round kind that looked like pepperoni, or the thick slabs that looked like a Jimmy Dean breakfast speciality. These were oddly shaped that appeared homemade. The pizza was cut into squares, not like a pie. I preferred the ends. The smell of sweet tomato sauce, toasted cheese, and lightly fried Italian sausage would fill the entire house, lingering until the morning. A surprise pizza was always the next best thing to a trip to Disney World.
If we were lucky, it would just be my immediate family. But a lot of time we would have our piggy cousins over. Little Jimmy, who wasn't so little, would take a piece, lick it, then take another piece until an adult noticed and made him stop.
"Little Jimmy, what the HELL are ya doin'? You act like you don't have the sense the good Lord gave a turnip."
Little Jimmy would smile, knowing that he at least got enough pizza to satisfy his hunger even if the rest of us would do without. There was no getting another pizza once this one was gone. Italian Village didn't deliver, and the adults were already too busy eating and drinking their Miller Lite to care.
Pizza night always had two accompaniments, Coke and salt. We'd drink the Coke, with the ice cubes put in first, so that the liquid would just ease on up around the cubes instead of making them float. We would cover the pizza with salt to the point of making it burn the roof our mouths. We used plain old Morton's Salt, with the blue label picturing the little girl in the yellow dress, carrying her umbrella pouring out the salt as the rain poured.
Salt was a big deal in our diet. Mom used it in everything she cooked, and we all added it to everything we ate. We put salt not only on pizza, but also on on apples, watermelons, beans -- everything. Dad wasn't much into sweets. I can hardly remember him eating a dessert, but no one ever tried to take away his salt.
All my relatives were this way about salt. I only realized when I had friends over that something wasn't right.
"Ick! My tongue is burning!" my friends would say as they gulped red Kool-Aid to get rid of the taste.
"I know, my mom is a terrible cook."
"It just taste like salt."
I knew mother couldn't cook, but I didn't think it was a salt issue. It thought it was more of a "I hate this damn cooking, and I never want to do it again" issue. I heard these words every day as mom destroyed another meal. Mom could eat anything that wasn't nailed down, but Lord help us if she actually had to do more than open a can of Campbell's Soup.
My father said that if food was salty, you knew it was good. Not good, in the fancy restaurant kind of way, but good as in not sour, spoiled, rotten, or carrying some disease that could give you the runs that could lead to dehydration that could lead to death. Salty equalled safe. If only that were true, they could have salted the water so that his sister Imogene, and many of his cousins, wouldn't have had to die of typhoid.
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