When One Paw Paw Dies, Dommie Just Orders Up Another One!
By Dommie 

I woke up this morning with a triple-cheese thin-crust pizza pie covering my face and upper-neck area. I guess I fell asleep reading it earlier in the night. I don’t really remember. That’s what happens to me when I consume heavy amounts of garlic sauce.

But you people wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Pizza isn’t your life, it’s just your pastime. Well, I guess that’s how it should be. I’ve always been one to say: There’s two types of people in this world - those who eat pizza, and those who are pizza.

You have to be one or the other, and you can’t dabble in both because bad dabbling makes bad dough and bad dough can stink up a pizza joint so bad you’d think you were in a Nazi prison camp at supper when all the Nazis were eating the Jews.

I had a Paw Paw who used to tell me about that. He said he ate so many Jewish people that nowadays he couldn’t tell the difference between them and a tater fry. I don’t blame him.

After he first told me that story I started mailing him pizza pies five times a week, and each time there’d be a new twist on the variation of pizza pie toppings. He died shortly after and Gram Grammy has hated me ever since, saying that I stuffed Paw Paw’s innards with so much pizza that his old heart just couldn’t take the clogulation.

Well, good job, Gram Grammy! If you ever decide to order a pizza at that mental health facility you’re living at, you can bet I’ll refuse to deliver it.

I’ve made a new Paw Paw for myself, anyway. His name is Mr. Sammy and he works in the kitchen and I swear to everything on the land and in the ocean when I say that there’s not a man alive who can toss up a glob of dough better than ol’ Sammy can.

Give him three tosses. Three tosses! That’s it. And when that third toss settles back into his old, withered, dough-powdered hands, I promise you it’ll be the roundest, flattest, whitest pre-pizza you’ve ever laid your eyes on.

Mr. Sammy sometimes winks at me when he catches me watching him and then he says, “Dommie, gooooo getcha!”

I love my Paw Paw. When I hug him, he leaves two ugly white handprints on my back, but I never wash them off. They mean too much to me.

One time I tripped on a child’s toy (we call it KP in the business – Kid Paraphernalia) and I tumbled seven feet into this grassless dusty yard. When I got up, I was covered in dirt and ground debris, and to my horror, the two hand prints had been smudged off.

When I tell you that I went into such a Cannibalistic Dommie Rage like nothing else that exists, you’d better believe it. I stripped the clothes from my body, and after beating the child’s toy into thousands of pieces, I wrapped them all up in my discarded clothes, set the whole mess on fire, and threw the flaming heap through the window of the nearest house. I ran like a three legged fox after that and didn’t stop until my lungs were spent and I was coughing up onions.

Luckily, where I happened to stop was at the back door of the pizza joint I had only left mere minutes ago. I blew through the threshold and ran straight to Mr. Sammy, where I fell into his arms and slept for days.

He soothed me with graphic songs he had learned in Ireland as a little boy, and all I know is that during that snid-bit of time, my new Paw Paw brought me to Heaven, where I could see my old Paw Paw. Then both Paw Paws looked at me and said, “Dommie, gooooo getcha,” and I knew that I had to come back to the Land of Life and Pies.

My place was still here. My job was left undone. And when I say that nobody can finish a job better than I can finish a job, you probably have no other choice but to believe me. You just have to. And Paw Paw, old and new, this tale has been shorn from my bony body for both of you.