ArcaMax

I counted 26 varieties of frozen pizza for sale in my local grocery store last Tuesday.

Can you tell I'm semiretired?

But first, let's explain my methodology.

I wasn't in the biggest grocery store in this area. I was in a midsize grocery store.

I didn't count pizza rolls, pizza bagels or anything similar. To be counted, a pizza didn't have to be round, but it couldn't be folded over, either.

Within the same brand, I counted different toppings as separate pizzas. Chicago and Detroit style were counted. Thick and thin crust made the count, too. I even counted those broccoli crust veggie pizzas my wife eats.

I did the count to calm myself.

If you own a pair of gold Trump sneakers, you may be unconcerned about gasoline prices, but some of us aren't convinced that $5-a-gallon gas is just the price we pay for "By god kicking some by god butt over there."

And it's not that I don't treasure the big aspects of butt-kickin' American freedom. I do.

The First Amendment is how I've earned my living for over 40 years. I used to hunt. With a gun. I say vile things about the government. I vote.

But those are dry legalities, and they become most important when you're afraid you're going to go to jail for doing one of those things, which I am.

Thank God all those things are getting less important. The First Amendment has vanished under a wave of YouTubers and tacky TikTokkers. Everything is news now, even the stuff that isn't. Gun ownership remains a healthy right, even though the gun is now more associated with killing school kids than it is with dropping a mallard. Voting is for maniacs, the politically crazy being nearly the only voters who never miss an election. The city next to my peaceful suburb chose Donald Trump in the last election, principally because the 12% turnout meant that only maniacs and the elderly voted.

For me, the shining promise of America always meant not just the dry dust of the Constitution, but the increase in the varieties of frozen pizza during my lifetime.

Born in 1957, I may indeed be older than frozen pizza, but it seems like it's been here all my life. At first, frozen pizza was dry discs that my mother invariably overcooked, but even that early frozen pizza spoke to me of empire.

How else could I feel about the food of another nation carried triumphantly to the IGA in my working-class neighborhood, where my mother and father brought home a combined wage of maybe $140 a week?

My father, a victorious warrior of the Second World War, and my mother, whose family nearly starved to death in the 1930s, still ate the boiled potatoes and pork chops on which they'd been raised, but Friday grocery shopping night soared above the fat pork and floury potatoes, and we ate like Roman emperors.

America got better in my lifetime. There were rockets to the moon and filtered cigarettes, birth control and color television, which I first saw in the place where my father tended bar.

Frozen pizza got better all the time. More toppings. Different toppings, and then a blizzard of styles and crusts.

This beautiful America could throw the internet at me and texting and Spotify, but the place that always made me feel better about the future of the nation was the pizza section of the market because I remember when it wasn't a section, just three or four varieties of frozen pizza on one shelf, not that far from the Salisbury steak TV dinners that tasted like the cover of the three-ring binder I had for school.

The goods and food of the world came to Rome in the great days of empire, back when the emperor was noble and sane. It must have been a bad year, that first year when the good Spanish wine stopped coming, just before runners stopped bringing snow down from the mountains to cool the drinks, and no one could be bothered to stuff a roasted peacock with oysters anymore.

I calmed myself in the frozen pizza aisle last Tuesday, but I saw the gas price signs on my way home.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www. creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.