“You know how you dream about chicken pot pie?” Ronnie asks. “I don’t dream about chicken pot pie.” “But if you did, I know of a place that sells the chicken pot pie you dream of.”
According to my archives, it’s been nine years since Ronnie asked me that in the parking lot of Demon Dogs. Demon Dogs has long since been demolished and the perfect chicken pot pie at Jack’s has long since fallen from the pedestal of being food worth dreaming about, but our friendship has long since… survived.
I think my cousin’s boyfriend’s roommate’s sister might have been in his class at Second City, but I don’t remember meeting Ronnie or exactly how I fell into his comedy social group. I just remember that he became a friend soon after I moved to Chicago.
The short story is that we have found a new place to have Chicken Pot Pies and that place is Pleasant House Bakery in Bridgeport. I requested them for special pie night (Thursdays) and Art said, “Hell yeah!” and put them on the menu. So Thursday night we had amazing chicken pot pie for the first time in years.
Yankee Chicken… the kind of chicken pot pie you dream about.
The long story is that as soon as I start thinking about our friendship, endless vignettes begin to pop up in my memory.
The one time we same side sat at Jack’s, so he could help me with my Hebrew homework. The time he called when I was transferring from the Brown line to the Blue line, catching me 50 feet from a cell phone dead zone and I was able to reroute to hang out over Mexican food. That time our trips to Israel overlapped and we had salads on Emek Rafaim in the German Colony. Drinking champagne in my condo the night closed and the day before I moved in. Sitting in his office the day I got my offer letter for my current job, passing him the phone and making him tell me what the offer was.
That time when… that time when… that time when…
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