| Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts
by Mark Halliday
The connection between divorced fathers and pizza crusts
is understandable. The divorced father does not cook
confidently. He wants his kid to enjoy dinner.
The entire weekend is supposed to be fun. Kids love
pizza. For some reason involving soft warmth and malleability
kids approve of melted cheese on pizza
years before they will tolerate cheese in other situations.
So the divorced father takes the kid and the kid's friend
out for pizza. The kids eat much faster than the dad.
Before the dad has finished his second slice,
the kids are playing a video game or being Ace Ventura
or blowing spitballs through straws, making this hail
that can't quite be cleaned up. There are four slices left
and the divorced father doesn't want them wasted,
there has been enough waste already; he sits there
in his windbreaker finishing the pizza. It's good
except the crust is actually not so great—
after the second slice the crust is basically a chore—
so you leave it. You move on the next loaded slice.
Finally there you are amid rims of crust.
All this is understandable. There's no dark conspiracy.
Meanwhile the kids are having a pretty good time
which is the whole point. So the entire evening makes
clear sense. Now the divorced father gathers
the sauce-stained napkins for the trash and dumps them
and dumps the rims of crust which are not
corpses on a battlefield. Understandability
fills the pizza shop so thoroughly there's no room
for anything else. Now he's at the door summoning the kids
and they follow, of course they do, he's a dad.
Mark Halliday, "Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts" from Jab. ©2002 University of Chicago. (buy now) It was on this day in 1910 that the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated as a youth organization in the United States. The idea for the Boy Scouts came from a British Army Officer named Robert Baden-Powell who returned from a war in South Africa to find that the young people in his country had grown soft and undisciplined in his absence. He said, "[Young people today are] without individuality or strength of character, utterly without resourcefulness, initiative or guts for adventure." He created the Boy Scouts as an organization and wrote a book called Scouting for Boys that became the Boy Scout manual. An American man named William Boyce was visiting London, England, when he got lost in a heavy fog. A young Boy Scout offered to help him, and the experience inspired him to bring Boy Scouting to America. The Boy Scout program had been popular in England, but it became a sensation in the United States after it was incorporated here. Within four years, there were more than 100,000 American Boy Scouts, and by the outbreak of World War II, there were more than a million. Among the many Americans who joined the Boy Scouts were Gerald Ford, Neil Armstrong, Alfred Kinsey, John F. Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Moore. The Boy Scout Handbook says, "A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent." In 2019 the Boy Scouts of America begain admitting girls as members, and rebranded as Scouts BSA. It's the birthday of the man known as the father of science fiction, Jules Verne (books by this author), born in Nantes, France (1828). In his adventure novels, Paris in the 20th Century (written 1863, not published until 1994), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), Verne described inventions that were similar to modern airplanes and automobiles, and tall skyscrapers where people use electricity to listen to the radio and send faxes, and yet he wrote his stories by candlelight. It's the birthday of poet Elizabeth Bishop (books by this author), born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1911). Her father died when she was a little girl. Her mother had an emotional breakdown from grief and spent the rest of her life in various mental institutions. Elizabeth spent most of her childhood moving back and forth between her grandparents in Nova Scotia and her father's family in Massachusetts. She was painfully shy and quiet in college, but during her senior year, she mustered up all her courage and introduced herself to her idol, the elder poet Marianne Moore. The meeting was awkward at first, but then Bishop offered to take Moore to the circus. It turned out they both loved going to the circus and they both also loved snakes, tattoos, exotic flowers, birds, dressmaking, and recipes. Moore became Bishop's mentor and friend. She was an extremely slow writer and published only 101 poems in her lifetime. She worked on her poem "The Moose" for more than 25 years, keeping it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines again and again until she got it right. But she was an obsessive letter writer. She once wrote 40 letters in a single day. She said, "I sometimes wish that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here." A collection of her letters, One Art: The Letters of Elizabeth Bishop, was published in 1994. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 