Pizza Pie Perspective

You know how sometimes people claim to see the face of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich?  Well, last weekend, I saw something profound in a pizza.

The boys and I spent the weekend at a dear friend’s house.  A group of us, connected by a man who died ten years ago, gather every summer at his mother’s home in upstate New York to try to honor his life and continue some of the work he did as a teacher and an artist.  (More on that in an upcoming post.)

On Saturday, after a day of work punctuated throughout by laughter and tears, we commenced our usual routine: a trip to a sinful ice cream shoppe (believe me, this place is not just a shop; it’s a full-on shoppe) followed by sweaty and unskilled backyard volleyball.  Later that night after I had gotten the little boys off to sleep and most of the others had burned off their ice cream (and injured their 30-something bodies with a few too many sets and bumps), talk turned to the evening’s traditional activities: pizza and board games.

Now ordering pizza for a group of seven adults is a task that might be best left to a drill sergeant.  How much?  From where?  What toppings?  But never one to shy away from an organizational challenge (on the contrary, I live for organizational challenges), I took charge.  Polled the group, accepting, rejecting, and coordinating various requests (anchovies?  seriously, people?), and called to place our order.

But here my plan hit a snag: the number of the pizza place we had decided on was out of service.

In that moment I felt frustrated.  As I tend to feel in tiny moments like these when my efforts to control and organize the world around me are dashed.  Pathetically small moments that remind me once again of my lack of resilience in the face of adversity.

“No worries,” offered our host.  “Why don’t we just drive over there and order in person?  Then we can pop over and pick up the drinks while they’re making it.”

Just like that, an easy solution to our non-problem.  And one that came from a woman who knows a real problem when she sees it.

You see, our host last weekend is the strongest person I know.  The toughest.  The most resilient.  And I see that even more now that I am a wife and mother, neither of which I was when I first met her.

I first met her ten years ago in an apartment in Washington, DC.  I was there on the saddest errand of my life.  My friend Dan, her son, had been diagnosed with testicular cancer.  He was 28 and he was dying.  I was 23 and was there to visit him, to bring him whatever cheer or comfort I could, knowing that this was one situation we couldn’t laugh our way through.

We had met two summers before in Houston, where we and a few hundred others gathered for six weeks to train for our new jobs as Teach for America corpsmembers.  I want to write more about Dan, about his life and the impact he had on me in the short time I knew him, about how his network of friends and family have become part of mine.  And I will, but today I’m thinking about his mom.

Only after Dan’s death did I get to know his mom.  Only later did I learn that she had nursed her husband during his own losing battle with cancer just a few years before watching her son die from the same damned disease.  And then her daughter got sick too, less than a decade after she watched her husband die, only a few years after she watched her son die.

Her daughter is okay now.  And the amazing thing is that Barbara, the mom, is okay too.

Sure, she gets angry.  I’ve heard her rail against the CEO of BP, against the irritating protagonist of a book, and, yes, against cancer.

But this is a woman who doesn’t complain about out-of-service phone numbers.  Or a lack of compromise on pizza toppings.  Or the fact that a disease has claimed two members of her family, two pieces of her heart, and has tried to rob her of a third.

She lives.  She loves.  And she keeps going.  She’s adopted a ragtag group of her son’s friends and motivates us to help the kids he would have dedicated his life to helping.  She troubleshoots, she problem-solves, she prioritizes.

She’s a mom, a friend, and a heroine.  Just knowing her, being able to conjure her face and her voice and the feeling of her hugs, reminds me that I can do better.  That I can whine less.  That I can feel sad and mad and process and then suck it up.  That I can keep going.

That I can and should and must find a better way to deal with non-problems.

Image: Chicago Deep-Dish Pizza: Whole Pie by Jeff Cushner via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

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I’m linking up today’s post to Bigger Picture Blogs, a new blog community dedicated to celebrating life’s bigger picture moments.  Be sure to visit Hyacynth’s place to check out some other bloggers’ big picture moments.

Tagged as: Barbara, cancer, control, Dan, dealing with adversity, Kristen @ Motherese, Motherese, mothereseblog, organization, perspective, pizza, resilience, Teach for America, toughness