Vitamin Convention

I dislike pizza.

Yes, it's true. Crazy as I am about many of our edible American traditions (donuts, cheese, and apple pie, for example), the beauty of this one has eluded me. No, I don'd mind the occasional pizza experience. But, for the same reason I rarely gawk at sunsets, I seldom go out of my way to enjoy pizza. Pizza, in a word, has always been too conventional for my independent tastes.

Oh, I can't deny its appeal: The warm, tangy sauce. The colorful toppings. The melty goodness that heated mozerella creates. But even these charms can't resign me to give pizza a place on my "cool" roster. In fact, if the truth must be told, I typically enjoy pizza the most when it ist he furthest from its original (read: Conventional) state.

Thus, this Christmas season, I went out of my way to order pizza for our Christmas dinne that only slightly resembled this great American staple. At the take-out counter, my husband raised his eyebrows when I selected not one, but two oddly-concocted varieties of pizza. One contained sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts, and the other boasted a white sauce in place of standard red.

What possessed me? The same thing that possesses me each time I think my preferences are bordering on the 'typical' for people in my culture - my peers. There's some wild hair within me that just wont' let me accept 'normal' as somehow all right.

Oh yes. I ordered one token standard pizza for those not enlightened enough to enjoy my higher tastes. But I ordered it grudgingly, without joy. We brought the bright boxes home, stored them in our refrigerator-temperature sunroom (winter in New Mexico has its chilly moments), and forgot about them until the great baking moment on Christmas Day.

The trouble is, we really shouldn't have done that. Apparently, these pizzas contained a mysterious substance that bonded them like hardening concrete to the cardboard in which tehy were packaged. Despite the "they'll be fine!" promises of the establishment from whence they were purchased, these pizzas had become one with their boxes. And now Christmas dinner loomed, a mearer 12-18 minutes away; what were we to do with the pizzas?

Well ... bake them. We reasoned that they might loosen themselves as they baked, and that the problem really wasn't as serious as it appeared - and we reasoned wrong. When the timer gave its cheerful chime and we removed our three small disasters from the oven, they had become large disasters instead.

We poked and we pried. We pushed and we prodded. We eased and we coaxed. And in some cases, we resorted to physical violence to extract our pizzas from their offensive white packaging.

Eventually, we succeeded well enough to salvage three lukewarm piles of crust, sauce, and cheese, and begin our Christmas feast. We enjoyed the meal far more than I might have expected, given the circumstances - but as we ate, I noticed a curious thing: The two pizzas I had bought in my effort to expand our tastes had turned to be the biggest failures. They stood as messy piles of rubble, eaten only out of necessity.

But the one pizza - the boring pizza - had survived its ordeal nearly intact! In fact, I found myself actually enjoying the consumption of something I had hitherto viewed with disdain. Could it be? Was this thing, so mundane, actually better equipped to handle a crisis? I submit that it was! And I believe that not only pizza, but sunsets, certain models of cars, long walks in the park, and all the other things that 'normal' folks tout as the best, deserve my respect as well.

You see, I begin to suspect that conventions don't happen by accident after all. They have been tested in multiple circumstances. They have been held to the fire, and not withered. True, some conventions (leg warmers, anyone?) may be fickle, but many will outlast their first fans. And rightly so! There is a steady assurance in espousing a convention for which one knows there is much evidence of goodness. Like standard pizza, for example. Or chocolate shakes. Perhaps its time that I not only coddle my preference for the unusual, but enjoy the beauty of the usual as well. Who knows? I might even find myself gushing over a sunset sometime soon. After this Christmas, I can't rule out anything - not even a boring old root beer float. Can you?