Pizza, Pizza

Pizza, Pizza

It’s taken us three years of living out here on this hillside, all the while under the cloud of a Global Pandemic that restricted services, restricted business operations, mandated masks, gave us CDC guidelines to live by and generally made us all wary of interfacing with anyone we absolutely did not have to interact with. Starting this summer, we seem to have finally broken through to forming some local friendships in our neighborhood. To be fair, we have been friends with Winston and Kathleen and our ex-neighbor Mary (and Mick when he was alive) for most of the ten years we’ve owned the house, but until recently, we hadn’t made any new friends since moving here full time.

That has now changed thanks mostly to Kim. She started by joining the local women’s group, inviting everyone over to the house one evening for their monthly gathering. That led to someone who noticed our gardens to tell her that she should join the local garden club. She explained that I am the gardener in the family in which case they said, “Perfect! We’ll sign you both up.” So I became a member of the Hidden Meadows Garden Club and yes, I even have the T-shirt to prove it. At the first gathering I met two people of interest. The first was a woman who was shilling for her husband. He was probably very content to be retired into a quiet and peaceful existence, but she mentioned that he owned a motorcycle and that I should get him out for a ride on it. I rarely see wives prompting their husbands to ride motorcycles and while I do not attribute any ill wishes to her thought, I do think she wanted her husband to make some local friends since they were new to the neighborhood.

That was Mike and Melissa and they live about a half dozen houses away down a cul-de-sac to the south. Directly following that comment at the Garden Club gathering, I literally drove straight to their house on my motorcycle and rang the doorbell. This guy about my age with a grey ponytail came to the door with a dubious look on his face. He had been trying to figure out a new set of CostCo. Cellphone earbuds and had that “This is hard enough to do without dealing with a door-to-door salesman look about him. I explained that this was a blind date arranged by his wife as punishment for not attending the Garden Club gathering. That got enough of a smile that I was able to conclude that there was a sense of humor under that ponytail.

The ponytail immediately made me think he might well be blue in his political leaning, so I mentioned it. His excuse was that it started as a COVID inability to get a haircut thing and just grew from there. He furthermore explained that he was a conservative who didn’t like Trump, which I took as a classic good-news/bad-news piece of information. He told me he needed to get his motorcycle fixed and that his brother-in-law, who was handy at such things, was coming by that weekend. That led to him saying the next week that his brother-in-law needed a part. And then, after that he said the bike was fixed, but his hip was broken. He was scheduled for hip replacement surgery so any riding would have to wait for him to heal. I’ve now known Mike for perhaps four months and we have yet to do that which we were cast together to do, take a motorcycle ride together.

That’s OK, Mike and I have become friends nonetheless. The axis of that friendship, in addition to a similar shared sense of humor, has become a combination of mulch and pizza. As for the pizza, Kim, Melissa, Mike and I were invited by Faraj and Yasuko to their home for a pizza-making gathering one day in the spring. We all had a great time making pizzas that Yasuko had prepared (that is, she made the dough and laid out the fixin’s) and that Faraj cooked in their outdoor pizza oven. Suddenly, the whole pizza oven thing was the topic of conversation. Melissa said that she was having one installed and that she would be personally finishing the exterior with red tiles. I have recently written about the joys of having friendly neighbors who have pools and I must say that I need to extend that concept to pizza ovens. I am neither chef enough nor BBQer enough to have ever thought about installing an outdoor pizza oven. It was a fun activity and now that we know two neighbors with pizza ovens, I think we are set in that department.

And then there is the mulch. While I don’t think Mike is all that keen on being actively part of the Garden Club, he has taken on the landscaping tasks of his relatively new property that was more or less otherwise barren except for the occasional large boulder. One day, when I stopped by on the bike, something I have taken to doing as a neighborly gesture, Mike proudly told me he was having 50 yards of mulch delivered. Mulch is a common guy bonding thing out here because we all need it. Winston is a big mulch guy and now Mike is proving to be one too. But while Winston is older, Mike is still babying his healing hip joint so I was worried about him hauling all that mulch hither and yon on his property from the two piles left him by the mulch truck. His property is far less vertically challenged than mine is, but it is still a big job to haul mulch.

I suggested Mike go to Home Depot and hire a few day laborers, who would make a quick job of getting that mulch spread. Mike is what I would call a day laborer prude. I have no compunction whatsoever in hiring a guy or two for the day and had been well trained by Handy Brad (remember him) in the fine art of picking up day laborers at Home Depot. But Mike was a bit shy about that idea, so Instead I said that at very least he needed to borrow my electric wheelbarrow, a device not everyone in the neighborhood has thought to acquire. One fine morning I drove the beast down to Mike’s house, reminding him that it would be 100% his job to drive it back uphill to me when he finished. That was before we headed East in mid-June. It is August 1 today and Mike says he’s almost done with the thing and doesn’t know how he would have managed without it. Naturally, I reminded him that those day laborers are still out there at Home Depot waiting for him to go whistle at them.

Well, yesterday Mike texted me and said that Melissa and he had cranked up the pizza oven for a pizza dinner for his daughter and her friends and did I want any of the leftovers. Melissa has been quite explicit in saying that once you crank the pizza oven up, you can use if for another two days or something before it cools down. When I got over there, Melissa made it clear that these would not be leftovers as in already cooked, but that she had extra ingredients and would be making me a pizza to my preference in the oven while I waited. It gave me the chance to kibitz with Mike and his daughter’s clan from Arizona, and since her beau is a motorcyclist, we had a few things in common to share.

When the pizza was finished, Melissa nicely wrapped it in tin foil and off I went to share the delights of freshly home made pizza pie with Kim, Gary and Oswaldo as an appetizer to our planned steak dinner. It is nice to have new friends in the neighborhood and it is especially nice to have friends with pizza ovens. Now that I’ve got swimming pools and pizza ovens covered, I am wondering what else I need to be on the look out for? I wonder if I can convince our friends Chris and Sam to put in a Pickleball court?