My tombstone will say "Rest In Pizza"

I would generally describe pizza as "salty," "savory," or "greasy." But there's a kind of pizza that's bittersweet, at least now. At the risk of revealing the location of my Batcave Of Solitude, up the street from my wife's old high school in our hometown is a branch of Cam's Pizza. I went to a different high school, but many afternoons, I would take the bus out to hers while we were dating in our late teens. I love pizza, and she thought it was adorable how much I love pizza, so of those many afternoons, often we walked up to Cam's.

So many formative memories happened while dining or loitering in that NY-style pizzeria. They had huge windows for watching the rain. One inside joke that caused us much mirth was that we would be staring at each other, slack-faced, and one or the other would let our jaw drop open and say "muh." That's all. We took turns doing it. We thought it was absolutely hysterical. And that was us stone cold sober. The college-age girls behind the counter surely thought we were bonkers.

You could also say Cam's was where we got started with our larcenous ways. I never drank coffee back then, but pilfered their little cups of hazelnut creamer. I can still remember Mia's order, if she had money and an appetite: fried mushrooms. Some days we didn't get anything but a soda to split, happy to have a place to sit in a satisfactory amount of shared solitude. I'm sure I'll never stop eating pizza. But now there's one pizza joint that, like Diet Mt. Dew, has an inescapable aftertaste.