PMCW (Positive Milton Comment of the Week): The Milton Zachary's, and their red circles on the wall, will always hit the nostalgia button for me.

My first job, when I was 16, was at the Zachary's Pizza in South Burlington. At the time, the South Burlington location made the dough and other toppings for the smaller stores. If you were lucky that day, you'd get to drive the big box truck & deliver dough, pepperoni and cheese to some of the smaller stores, sometimes including Milton.

Zachary's taught me a math-based life lesson: don't ask how many slices, ask the diameter! When we took a phone order for a pizza, and someone asked you “how many slices are in a large,” you were supposed to answer “a large is 17 inches.” If you forgot the diameter of each, there were cardboard circles on the wall.

The wisdom of that answer hit me once I did the math: their large, 17” pizza is almost twice as big as a medium 14” pizza. As a life lesson, non-Zachary's restaurants can call whatever size they want a large or a medium.

So you have to ask. The diameter, not the number slices, is the right way to figure out which size pizza you need to feed your family.

The lesson I took from this: make sure you ask the right question; and pay attention to the answer you're given. And don't be afraid of doing the math! I've been asking that Zachary's question “how big is this pizza? In inches?” to waiters and waitresses my whole adult life.

Sometimes in politics, we are forced to strip an issue of nuance. Sometimes, you only get say 280 characters. Sometimes you only get 30 seconds at a door or on a phone call.

I hate that. I'm happy to get into the weeds and explain the nuance of a policy I support. And if I don't understand a nuance, please feel free to point it out to me.

See? Just some circles on a wall got me to talk about math, the area of a circles, and how Vermont pizza changed my life. 🙂