A Fair Wind From Italy

I've written before about pleasant smells coming from afar, and all the frustration which lies therein. Then it was about presumably homemade food whose odor drifted into the window of my home like the pies cooling on window sills in every Yogi Bear cartoon. This time there's a professional whose work invades my senses. I live a couple of streets down from a rather major intersection, and I spend some time each week either at shops right there or passing through to places that are near. Doing either is tough sometimes, and I have to blame the pit fire pizza place.

It all depends on the wind. When it's blowing north to northwest, there's no problem. I'm content with what I'm eating, and if I'm hungry, there's nothing to remind me of it or what I'd like to be eating. Ignorance is bliss, as they say, and this is good because I'm just not often at liberty to spend what it takes to eat as well as one does at a place such as I'm describing (at least it's not some four star steakhouse, because there might as well be a Bugatti dealership nearby as one of those).

Oh, but when the wind blows south to southeast, there is a day of exquisitely blended olfactory pleasure and pain. I may never eat there, but I can say that it smells like the best pizza I ever have eaten to date. I gather that's what you get when you cook them in a wood stove, which a recent hot tip from actress (and more popular online writer than I) Gwyneth Paltrow advises is just indispensable There's some more knowledge that probably does me more harm than good from inability to act on it.

I may be at the coffee shop on an opposite corner, or walking past to the library, and it will hit me like the smell of hamburgers so comically does to Wimpy in a Popeye cartoon. It just about does physically lift me off the air and pummel me like it has fists, that smell does. As unlikely as it is that I will get the opportunity to actually enjoy the food anytime soon, I'm sometimes of a mind to eliminate the source of the smell if I can't have it. I suppose that must be the source of much violence in the world, and for once I don't mind admitting that they may have something there.