Everyone has a favorite dish, the one you could eat any time of any day and instantly feel better about your life.
For me, there are few bits of culinary amazingness that can match the “dealies” at IT Express in Selinsgrove, Pa. They are actually called pepperoni roll-ups, but that takes far too long to say when you are telling your roommate what food you want delivered.
I was reunited with the dealies last weekend during a day trip to my alma mater, Susquehanna University. I met up with two close friends who were a part of a seemingly daily ritual that involved ordering something from IT. My love of the dealies got to the point that when my roommate, Shawn L., would order food, he would automatically get some for me.
When we walked into the restaurant on Saturday with our friend Mindy, the owner and his son greeted us as if it were 2003. I guess it’s good that they remember us since we got to a point that they knew Mindy’s voice when she would order over the phone and wouldn’t bother to even ask our address.
I told them I had dreams about the dealies, and that no matter how close some places here come to attempting a similar dish, it’s just not the same. I mean, who wouldn’t want to eat this:
So delicious. IT Express also has two other items near the top of my food list — Sicilian pizza and Wild Cherry Pepsi. I may need to move back to Selinsgrove just for the food.
The only problem with IT is that they are closed on Mondays. I cannot even begin to count the number of times we would walk into town, the taste of dealies tantalizingly close to our tongues, only to realize it was Monday and we were idiots. I would estimate somewhere in the 40 range during our four years, and that might be low.
Of course beyond the food it was nice to be hanging out with old friends. Mindy didn’t graduate with us, but she was with us for our first two years. She also spent our sophomore year living with my first roommate, Shawn R., and thus can appreciate the unique experience therein. I shared a little about him in a post last year.
The funny thing was as much as we were together during our two or four years, we found on Saturday that there were tons of stories that one person in the group had never heard. It’s possible we just forgot, but I guess that just goes to show how much we assume other people know.
Standing in front of Mindy’s old apartment (which after 7 years still had the same shower curtain, gross) we had one of those total flashback moments to so many days at SU:
“So, what do you want to do now?”
“I don’t know, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know, we’ll figure something out.”
The short-term answer was to walk to the river, which is just down the street from where Mindy used to live. By just down the street, I mean you can walk there in 30 seconds. In the year she lived there, she never once made the trip and it didn’t seem as if she even knew it was there. Which is a shame given her crazy roommate situation and the absolute serenity of sitting on a bench looking out onto that water.
While the three of us were sitting on the bench, Shawn L. (who is deathly afraid of spiders, not important here but I wanted to share) said he got the strongest feeling of deja vu he had ever felt. I will say it was strangely good to be around them and to see how seamlessly we slipped back into 2003.
We’ll be back next year, though maybe then Mindy can figure out how to take the date stamp off of her camera:
One other entertaining note. Shawn lives about 45 minutes north of me, conveniently right on the route that I would take to get to school. I picked him up at a mall where we met to enjoy some Starbucks action. It turned out the Starbucks there closed (along with half of the other stores), but the trip was redeemed by a sign in the bathroom:
So watch yourself or I might trespass you right out of here.
