Cereal Time.jpg

Okay, this takes the cake. . . (or the pizza in this case). What happens on pizza night when a writer’s head if full of all the things going on in her life:

1: researching and writing a novel that takes place in the 16th century
2: moving house (almost everything is in boxes in the living room)
3: choosing paint colors/tile/stone for the new house
4: preparing the old house for renters to move in (gardening/painting/deep cleaning)
5: selling or donating half the family’s possessions because she doesn’t want to move them
6: continuing to raise her three sons (a teenager and two pre-teens) which is no laughing matter
7: preparing for a reading of her Catholic memoir at Revolution Books—a pro-communist bookstore where she will presumably meet lots of communist revolutionaries—and wondering what that’ll be like
8: worrying about the flat tire on the mini-van and how she will get Kyle to his Jazz class and Cameron to karate
9: trying to ignore the post-surgery pain in her leg (minor surgery)
10: imagining the first sentence of her second memoir and wondering what the second sentence will be.

This is what happens.

She prepares the dough for two pizzas. Flour, salt, sugar, yeast, olive oil, water. Kneads it. Sets it in warm place to rise. Prepares the sauce, steaming fresh tomatoes, peeling them, chopping them, and reducing them in a sauce pan with garlic, salt, pepper, and oregano. Prepares the toppings. Pepperoni, black olives, and mozzarella for the kids’ pizza, red onions, green peppers, kalamata olives, tomatoes, mozzarella, and a few anchovies for the adults. When the dough is ready, she dusts the pizza stones with cornmeal, shapes the pizzas, and assembles them. The kitchen counters are so full there is barely room to do the work, but she gets it all done. All together it’s taken her three hours.

And then what does she do?

She’s made pizza dozens of times, and each time she’s set the oven to 550 degrees and cooked it for ten minutes, or until bubbly and golden brown. This time, however, she’s thinking of items 1 through 10 all at the same time and her brain shorts out on 10, and instead of putting the oven to bake she puts it to broil (having recently broiled a bunch of pablano peppers to make chili rellenos), inserts the two pizzas under the hot broiler and leaves the kitchen to go write that first sentence of her new memoir and see how it looks on the page, and to possibly attempt a second sentence. Ten minutes (and ten sentences) later all the fire alarms in the house are screaming in chorus and black smoke is billowing out of the oven.

The pizzas are on fire!

Racing through the house, she switches off the oven, throws open the doors and windows, fans out the smoke, and pulls the family's evening sustenance out of the oven with heavy duty oven mitts. No, no, no, no, no, she says. How can this have happened? She stands back from the smoking disks and looks at them in despair and slowly realizes what happened. It wasn’t 1 through 10 that ruined dinner. It was number 10 alone that ruined dinner. If she’d stayed with her pizzas for just a few minutes she would have noticed they were being volcanized, caught her mistake, and turned the oven to Bake instead of Broil. But no. She’d left, thinking that she could multi-task. In general, she’s an expert multi-tasker. Most mothers are. But it’s different when you combine the practical with the inspirational, ie. Life and Art. It backfires on you every time. Once you exit the practical task at hand and enter the creative world, you’re gone. You might as well go up in a hot air balloon and be swept over the bay as to expect to get back into the kitchen before hell breaks loose.

Needless to say, the pizzas went into the compost bin, and the family ate cereal that night. Next time, she tells herself. Next time I’ll bring the laptop into the kitchen. . .