I Remember Pappy's

I remember Pappy's Pizza. We used to go there every year for our Birthday. I remember climbing up into the booth and plopping down onto the big, red vinyl bench seats, sitting at the table with the red and white checkerboard tablecloth. The booths around the perimeter of the restaurant were elevated off of the floor just a little bit, and it always made me feel just a tad older than my young years sitting at those seemingly slightly taller tables looking down over the rest of the restaurant sitting at their smaller tables.

At Pappy's, the Birthday Boy would always get free pizza and plenty of the famous, super cool Pappy's balloons. The balloons which came in all sorts of different colors were about 12" tall when inflated, and they were peanut shaped. They were imprinted with the cartoon face and body of Pappy the pizza man. After blowing up each balloon, I had to attach them to their shoe-shaped cardboard feet and stand them up on my table. Eventually, there would be a whole army of Pappy's Pizza balloons in front of me. Sooner or later, the waitress would bring out cake and everyone including my little plastic, elastic Pappy's army would sing Happy Birthday to me.

Of course, mom and dad would always give me plenty of dimes so that I could go and drop them into the coin-operated player piano with the rainbow colored piano keys that you couldn't actually touch because they were safely resting under a clear plastic cover. That always made me so mad that I couldn't touch those piano keys and play that piano by all by myself. I am sure that I could have made some great music on those crazy, colorful keys, but I guess I liked the automatic selections okay too.

I do not remember why we stopped going to Pappy's. Maybe it was because you had be to be under the age of 13 to qualify for the free Birthday pizza and balloons and we all just grew up. However, I for one would like to think that I would never be too grown up for pizza, player pianos and peanut-shaped balloons with cardboard feet. More realistically, I guess we stopped going to Pappy's because the place burned down and they never rebuilt it. Just another beautiful memory turned to ashes, but still smoldering there, somewhere in the pizza oven back behind my eyes.