Wheels within Wheels

There was still a little snow in my back yard this morning. I expect it to be gone by the time I get home tonight, which will mean it’s the first time since December 22nd that there’s been no snow on the ground.

My spring crocuses in front have started to blossom, and the remainder of the bulbs are showing. I think I’ll like spring this year.

I’ve been home sick for a few days. Cough (a bad one), congestion, and my voice sounds like the rusty hinges of the gates of Hell. Got in to see the doctor today, and was told it was bronchitis. Apparently, it’s running around the area right now.

My case is severe enough that the doctor prescribed a double run of antibiotics, in addition to cough suppressant, decongestant, and expectorant. The cough suppressant is the most immediately important to me, because I’ve got a racking cough that’s coming close to cracking my ribs.

Anyway, I caught part of a show about “Pizza Palaces” on the Travel channel this morning, and they made a point of the people in line waiting to get into one of the places. That brought back some pleasant memories.

Back in the mid-70s, I was stationed at the submarine base in New London, Connecticut. The local pizza place I usually patronized, Great Oak Pizza, was up a little north of the base in a strip mall on highway 12. It was owned and run by a guy who’d been a Greek submariner during WWII, Spiro Vitouladitis, and his brother George.

Now, they’d get lines. Some weekend nights, the line outside waiting to get in would run all the way to the end of the strip mall. When the lines got long enough, Spiro would hand a pitcher of beer and a stack of plastic cups to the first person in line, which would be passed back through the line to keep everyone happy. If there were enough kids in line, he’d provide a pitcher of soda for them.

Their “kitchen sink” pizza was called a Spiro’s Special. After diligent training, I got to where I could finish about 3/4 of a small and about 1/2 a pitcher of root beer by myself.

The last time I went back to Connecticut (1985, I believe), they’d moved into larger quarters further up the highway. Just wasn’t the same, though.

and former coworker the other day (actually, when Marion and I were leaving the restaurant where we had our Valentine’s Day dinner). He has a new business that I’ll have to check out.

Which reminds me of one night during senior year in high school, when I was sitting around at a friend’s house with a couple other guys, eating baklava his mother had made and playing a Japanese drinking game comprised of six small cups in different sizes, each with a different flower or other pattern, and a die with corresponding patterns on the faces. You’d roll the die, then drink the cup that matched the up face.

We might have been playing cards, with the loser of the hand having to roll the die, but it’s too long ago for me to really remember. I also don’t remember what we were drinking. Probably sake; maybe ouzo. It’s not as though we were discriminating drinkers, anyway. Jax and Pearl were more commonly available to teenagers in our area. (Which, in turn, reminds me that I once got to see the two-headed calf and the diving horse act at the Pearl Brewery.)

I don’t remember, but I probably walked or rode my bicycle to my friend’s house; my family only had one car, and I was rarely able to drive it on my own.

Society was more relaxed about drinking in general back then. My parents’ generation held cocktail parties (I can remember lurking on the stairs as a young boy, watching when the neighbors came over and I was supposed to be in bed). Underage drinking seemed to cause fewer problems, also, although I’m sure that varied by community. You couldn’t buy anything until you were 18 (which was also draft age, although voting age was 21), but there were no legal restraints back then preventing an adult from giving you something to drink, and there was normally a “it’s just kids blowing off steam” reaction to it, as long as nobody was hurt. I had an English teacher in high school who provided drinks on occasion (not in school – you had to go over to her place). I also remember various “fermentation experiments” being run in the back of one of the physics classrooms.

Funny what memories a chance encounter can bring back.