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Today's special

Served fresh on October 7, 2026

Ahhh, Mitchell F. Chan. The Boys of Summer. Come here, sit down. No, not there. That chair is broken. Sit by me. I’m making the gravy.Now you tell me this is art.Baseball men.Statistics.Computers.Numbers.Madonna mia.In my day, art was Jesus, the Virgin Mary, maybe a bowl of fruit if somebody was feeling adventurous. Now I gotta look at a baseball player and think about the meaning of existence while I fry the meatballs.Fine.I look.And you know what?This Mitchell, he’s onto something.At first, the boys, they got baseball statistics. How fast they run. How good they hit. How strong they throw.This I understand.My husband used to sit there every Sunday with the newspaper like he was running the Yankees himself.“DiMaggio this. Mantle that.”Meanwhile the sink is leaking for six months.I say, “Frank, maybe instead of the batting average, you fix the faucet?”Nothing.But Mitchell, he doesn’t stop with baseball.No, no.Now the boys got numbers for everything.Money.Sleep.Success.Popularity.The body.The love life.Everything is a statistic.Madonn’!What are we, people or cans of tomatoes?This is the whole problem with life.Everybody wants to keep score.My house is bigger.My car is nicer.My son is a doctor.My daughter married a dentist.My tomatoes are better than Maria’s tomatoes.Okay, that last one is true. Maria grows garbage.But still.Everybody wants to know who is winning.Winning what?Life?You cannot win life.Life is not-a bingo.Nobody gets five in a row and the angels come down with a ham.You wake up.You work.You worry.You eat.You love somebody.You fight with them.You forgive them.You get older.Your knees go.Your back goes.One day you bend down to pick up a sock and you need a priest to get back up.That’s life.And baseball knows this better than anything.A boy comes up young and strong.Everybody loves him.He hits the ball, the crowd goes crazy.Then twenty years go by.Boom.Now he’s selling insurance in New Jersey.Summer is over.This is what makes Chan’s project so good.All these numbers look important while the game is happening.Then the game ends.Nobody cares.Same with life.You spend forty years saying, “More money, more success, more this, more that.”Then you die and your children are in the basement arguing over who has to take the exercise bike.That’s your legacy.The NordicTrack.So maybe the futility is the point.We measure because we are scared.If we put a number on everything, maybe we think we can control it.But you cannot control life.Life comes into your kitchen without knocking.Life spills wine on the tablecloth.Life burns the garlic because you went to answer the telephone.Life gives you beautiful grandchildren and then they put their sticky hands all over the good furniture.Whatta you gonna do?You love them anyway.And this is why I don’t think The Boys of Summer is only sad.It is also telling you something.Stop counting so much.Stop checking who is ahead.Stop making your life into a box score.Sit down.Eat.Call your sister even though she talks too much.Kiss your husband.Forgive your cousin.Have another meatball.Because the money goes.The muscles go.The trophies collect dust.The boys get old.The summer ends.Everything ends.That is terrible.That is beautiful.That is life.Now enough philosophy.Pass me the pecorino before I smack you with this spoon.

Ahhh, Mitchell F. Chan. The Boys of Summer. Come here, sit down. No, not there. That chair is broken. Sit by me. I’m making the gravy.Now you tell me this is art.Baseball men.Statistics.Computers.Numbers.Madonna mia.In my day, art was Jesus, the Virgin Mary, maybe a bowl of fruit if somebody was feeling adventurous. Now I gotta look at a baseball player and think about the meaning of existence while I fry the meatballs.Fine.I look.And you know what?This Mitchell, he’s onto something.At first, the boys, they got baseball statistics. How fast they run. How good they hit. How strong they throw.This I understand.My husband used to sit there every Sunday with the newspaper like he was running the Yankees himself.“DiMaggio this. Mantle that.”Meanwhile the sink is leaking for six months.I say, “Frank, maybe instead of the batting average, you fix the faucet?”Nothing.But Mitchell, he doesn’t stop with baseball.No, no.Now the boys got numbers for everything.Money.Sleep.Success.Popularity.The body.The love life.Everything is a statistic.Madonn’!What are we, people or cans of tomatoes?This is the whole problem with life.Everybody wants to keep score.My house is bigger.My car is nicer.My son is a doctor.My daughter married a dentist.My tomatoes are better than Maria’s tomatoes.Okay, that last one is true. Maria grows garbage.But still.Everybody wants to know who is winning.Winning what?Life?You cannot win life.Life is not-a bingo.Nobody gets five in a row and the angels come down with a ham.You wake up.You work.You worry.You eat.You love somebody.You fight with them.You forgive them.You get older.Your knees go.Your back goes.One day you bend down to pick up a sock and you need a priest to get back up.That’s life.And baseball knows this better than anything.A boy comes up young and strong.Everybody loves him.He hits the ball, the crowd goes crazy.Then twenty years go by.Boom.Now he’s selling insurance in New Jersey.Summer is over.This is what makes Chan’s project so good.All these numbers look important while the game is happening.Then the game ends.Nobody cares.Same with life.You spend forty years saying, “More money, more success, more this, more that.”Then you die and your children are in the basement arguing over who has to take the exercise bike.That’s your legacy.The NordicTrack.So maybe the futility is the point.We measure because we are scared.If we put a number on everything, maybe we think we can control it.But you cannot control life.Life comes into your kitchen without knocking.Life spills wine on the tablecloth.Life burns the garlic because you went to answer the telephone.Life gives you beautiful grandchildren and then they put their sticky hands all over the good furniture.Whatta you gonna do?You love them anyway.And this is why I don’t think The Boys of Summer is only sad.It is also telling you something.Stop counting so much.Stop checking who is ahead.Stop making your life into a box score.Sit down.Eat.Call your sister even though she talks too much.Kiss your husband.Forgive your cousin.Have another meatball.Because the money goes.The muscles go.The trophies collect dust.The boys get old.The summer ends.Everything ends.That is terrible.That is beautiful.That is life.Now enough philosophy.Pass me the pecorino before I smack you with this spoon.