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Dear Jake,
I look at this picture from the summer of 2019 and see an absolutely stupid picture. Why? It’s not the pizza’s fault — the pizza was actually very good. It’s my fault for focusing on the wrong thing.
It was late June 2019, and your mom wanted to go camping with some friends at River Park Campground in Grayling, Michigan. We had borrowed a pop-up camper, towed it to Grayling, got it placed in the camping spot, and through much trial-and-error mixed with some luck and laughter and help from other campers, we got the pop-up camper successfully and securely set up.
It had been one of those scorching hot days with incredibly high humidity, so by the time we finished setting up, I simply wanted to be someplace that had air conditioning, plenty of water to drink, and hopefully some good food.
We ended up at Bear’s Den Pizzeria, which I highly recommend. They had friendly people who kept refilling our pitcher of water, and they have excellent pizza (even if some people won’t like my combination of toppings).
So what’s the matter with this photo? It’s the only photo I have from that meal. I don’t have a photo of you and your mom. There are so many details I’d like to remember from that meal now, if only I’d focused as much on the people as I did on the pizza.
I’ve learned a lesson: Go ahead and take food photos, but don’t let the food distract you from the main attraction of the meal, which is the people you share the meal with.
