Peproni Rolls

I drove to Lubbock to attend a lecture by my intellectual property attorney who, as special guest star, flew in from Washington D.C. for the big event. The Prius was getting a decent 54 miles a gallon until the wind started kicking in and I started getting buffeted and knocked around on the freeway overpasses. I had no idea you could have white knuckle driving on a tornado-less flat stretch of road in the Texas Panhandle.

For dinner I thought I’d sneak out and head to Double Dave's, where you can find the most delicious pizza rolls - Double Dave's calls them peproni rolls. (I lived on these in grad school - ah, the days of backpacks lined with aluminum foil and the all-you-can-eat pizza roll buffet!)

I followed my phone’s Google maps directions carefully and finally found myself in the parking lot that was home to Double Dave's, a grocery store, and several other various shops and whatnots. But as I drove past the Double Dave’s window, I saw it was packed with college kids watching a handful of different sports channels on the TVs scattered around the dining room. Then I realized, even though my love of pizza rolls was strong and fierce, Double Dave's that night wasn’t my scene.

I am old now.

So I ended up at Souper Salad, which has a large buffet of all sorts of interesting things, including olives, cottage cheese, and chicken soup. I ate my old person food and read The New Yorker and enjoyed the quiet.

As I was leaving I saw one of the cooks run through the dining room followed by three large dogs. She stopped me and asked if they were my dogs, and I just shook my head, finding the question odd. She said the dogs had come in through the kitchen’s back door, and she wondered who they belonged to.

So they ushered them outside, and the entire staff stood by the front doors, arms crossed, murmuring to themselves about the weird dogs from the alley.

And I left, driving away and wondering if that was really chicken in the soup after all.