Arriving
I have fond memories of Mineo's Pizza in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. Everyone went there. If you grew up in that neighborhood in the late sixties and early seventies, Mineo's was simply where life happened.
My father would buy it for me, though he never ate a slice himself. I never saw him eat pizza, or McDonald's, or anything like that. As the son of a kosher butcher from Poland, he liked beef. To him, a meal was not a meal without meat. The pizza was strictly for me. He bought it because I loved it.
A pretty girl at school once looked at my collar and said, "Cheap shirt — no hook." Four words. After that, all I wanted were clothes from London Dock, the high-end store on Forbes Avenue where the cool kids shopped. We couldn't really afford those clothes. He bought them anyway.
For thirty years, my father worked as the maître d' at the Concordia Club, a private Jewish club where some of the wealthiest families in the city belonged. He knew that world intimately—not as someone who belonged to it, but as someone who served it, night after night. He knew its rooms, its rhythms, how people dressed, and how they carried themselves.
At some point he arranged for me to take ballroom dancing classes there. I still don't know how he managed it. I remember feeling completely out of place—a boy in a room that wasn't built for kids like me, even with my father standing in the wings. But in that intimidating ballroom, a girl walked across the floor and asked me to dance. She never let me feel awkward. I don't remember her name—I wish I did—but I am still grateful to her, all these years later.
In 1978 he bought a Mercedes. Part of it, I think, was that he wanted the members of the Concordia Club to see him arrive in it—the man who spent his life showing them to their tables now pulling up in a car like the ones they drove. At the time, I didn't think about what it meant. I just liked riding in it.
Years later, back in Pittsburgh for a high school reunion, I stopped at Mineo's for a slice. It wasn't good—or at least, it wasn't what I remembered.
Pittsburgh doesn't feel like home anymore. I used to think that was just about the city changing, or me growing older, or the simple passage of time. Now I think it is something else. My father spent his life watching a world from the wrong side of the room, wanting desperately to belong—and wanting, even more, to see me in that world. The pizza he wouldn't touch, the clothes we couldn't afford, the dancing lessons in a room he only knew from service, the Mercedes parked out front—I see them all differently now.
He's been gone a long time. Part of me still yearns to belong. Pittsburgh and the pizza are still there. He isn't.