It's all my mother's fault...

You know how certain smells or foods or sounds can bring you back to a whole other place? Like for some, when they hear Aaron Neville, they get all emotional just thinking about their first school dance and all the boys on one side of the room and the girls on the other and the sad disco ball hanging from the middle of the ceiling, seeing no action? Or for others, when they smell mildew mixed with decaying wood, they think of the basement in their childhood home and all of the "science experiments" that went on there, including, but not limited to, the incident where their brother almost spontaneously combusted? Yeah, you know what I mean.

For me, it's those little pizza roll-ups that bring everything back.

I was 19 years old and had just left the wrong college in the midst of a probable nervous breakdown. I had been imaging nuns stalking me and had university security guards attempting to climb in my dorm windows in an effort to declare their undying love. It was not a good time. And so I had made the life-changing (courageous) decision to leave that school. My parents, amazingly, supported me and only wanted me to be well. (I will always, always be thankful to them for this.) I also made the decision that I would Greyhound it to Washington state where I had a hippie cousin who would take me in and "show me the ropes." I just needed a change of pace. I needed something to take my mind off things.

First I went back home; it was that time after Christmas when everything feels really cold and bare and picked-over. My mother, knowing the insurance-related implications of me leaving college, insisted that I should have my wisdom teeth removed. I remember counting to eight and then waking up, feeling very groggy. The rest of the time, I just remember extreme pain and misery, accompanied by a constant, continuous bloody taste in my mouth. Everything was wrong. But for some reason, my mother decided to make those pizza roll-ups. We never had these sorts of things so there was much commotion about the treat. I remember trying to eat one and immediately spitting it out. It was too hot and tasted of blood and cotton balls. I would be forever destined to think of pizza roll-ups in a new way. I now thought of them much in the way my mother thought of Chow Mein; immediately after eating Chow Mein with those weird little fake noodle-y things on top, she was rushed to the hospital in order to have her appendix removed. Chow Mein would become a symbol of emergency and illness...and so would those pizza roll-ups.

In many ways, my life can be viewed as "pre-pizza roll-ups" and "post-pizza roll-ups". It was post-pizza roll-ups that everything changed. My mouth healed from the trauma of surgery and I began my Greyhound trip out west. There are many stories from that trip that are better saved for another day. I spent a lot of time staring out windows and sitting in dirty bus aisles and writing terrible, terrible poetry. But the fact is - that is when change was truly prompted; when my LIVING really began. I took a risk, accepted a challenge and was forced to be alone with myself. It's not that everything was wonderful and beautiful then -- it's that everything was dirty and grubby and unkempt -- great conditions for becoming.

And so, when I think of those pizza roll-ups (and I really do think of them from time to time), I tend to think of them as a milestone. They mark an end and a beginning.

Wow! Little did Totino's know when they packaged them!