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D. None of the above

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I wanted Dustin Fowler to succeed next year. In case you missed it, he’s the kid who came up from the New York Yankees minor league baseball system who ran into a low wall at Chicago White Sox and hurt his knee, ending his season and, as it turns out, his Yankees career before it began.

Fowler was slated to lead off the second inning of his first major league game, but, instead, was carted from the field to receive emergency medical attention.

It’s somewhere between incredibly difficult and impossible to make the major leagues and yet Fowler was good enough to be on the field.

And then, like the real person Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, who was featured in the Kevin Costner movie “Field of Dreams,” Fowler got within inches of holding a bat and facing major league pitching, when the season ended for him.

Fowler hasn’t left baseball but, as of this week, he’s no longer on the team he imagined joining. In need of starting pitching for this stretch run from now until October, the Yankees traded him as a part of a package to get Sonny Gray from the Oakland A’s.

Now, I want the Yankees to win and Fowler was a chip the team could trade to get a talent who could pitch more than five innings, and who might win important games in October.

And yet when Fowler left the Chicago field, I’m sure I wasn’t the only fan who hoped to support him a second time if and when he got another opportunity — and the Yankees needed him.

He still may get his chance with Oakland. After all, if he was good enough before his injury, he may ride the same determination and skill on the long road back to the majors.

Over before it started, Fowler’s Yankee career will feel like an unopened or undelivered present, shipped somewhere else.

Fowler was our boy. He was drafted in the 18th round in 2013 and had worked his way up to the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders. In the statistics for his career, there is a “1” next to the number of games he played in 2017 with the Yankees, along with “zeros” all the way through every other column. No doubles, triples, home runs or runs batted in for this Yankee apparition.

This is the time of year when baseball general managers have to decide between the present and the future. What are they willing to give up in an uncertain future for a present that may be less of an unknown?

Will the A’s and now Yankees pitcher Gray be worth the price of sentiment if he wins important games down the stretch and into the playoffs?

Derek Jeter used to remain unflappable as teammates wandered on and off his team, often shrugging off questions while indicating he knew it was a business.

If that business does well, do we care that some kid who may or may not have amounted to much for our team is now playing for someone else after bouncing back from adversity?

Fowler will be the one who made it to the team, only to have a freak type of baseball interference prevent him from fulfilling his rise from Yankees prospect to Yankees player.

The A’s and their fans will now pick up the Fowler narrative, making him a part of their lore and history. No matter how things pan out, Yankee fans can wish him the best even as we wonder what that might have been as a part of the New York narrative.

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We worry about infections regularly. The last thing people want is a cold right before they go on a summer vacation, before they see a newborn, or before they are about to give a presentation half way around the world to a group of people who might approve their work for the next three years.

And, yet, there are some types of infections, or infectious behavior, that have the opposite effect, making us stronger, purging our system of toxins and giving us the extra energy to work harder, to be more patient with traffic around us and to smile when someone accidentally insults us.

Laughter fits that bill. TV producers certainly understand this when they add laugh tracks to their shows. It allows people to feel as if they are not alone, as they laugh with others they can’t see, even if they are alone in front of their TV.

A late family friend used to become so caught up in funny stories that his quick breaths and high-pitched squeals kept him from speaking. The tale, however, became irrelevant as his performance more than compensated for the lack of a narrative, allowing the rest of the room, particularly those who knew him well, to share his laughter.

I can still hear the laughter from my late aunt, whose giggles would often end with joyous tears.

I recently spent a few days with my brothers to celebrate summer birthdays. We sailed, ate well and hit baseballs on a hot, airless field at Gelinas Junior High School.

I stood in right field, as one brother pitched and the other sent bombs deep into the outfield. My sister-in-law patrolled near second base, scooping up grounders and acting as a relay.

My brother crushed a hard grounder directly at his wife. I immediately shouted, “Field it to the side. Move out of the way.”

My brothers started laughing, slowly at first, at advice that was so contrary to the suggestions I had made when I coached baseball and softball over the last decade.

“Yes,” I acknowledged, “but I don’t want her to get hurt. I’d rather she missed a ball that hit a rock or took a crazy bounce than have it slam into her.”

“Sure, sure,” they teased. “You really don’t know anything about this game, do you?”

Then, it occurred to me to go with it.

“Well,” I shrugged, “I’m actually trying a new technique.”

“Oh yeah?” they asked dubiously.

“Yes, I’m going to tell the kids, ‘Take your eyes off the ball and make sure you have absolutely no idea what to do with the ball when it comes to you.’”

After a few snickers, the four of us shared the kinds of things you’d never tell kids on a baseball field, which ramped up the laughter. Things such as “Yes, it is all your fault” and “No, you’re not that good at this sport.”

The laughter somehow  made the heat of the afternoon more bearable.

Later, my younger brother was in the middle of a salad when he offered something so uproariously funny that his lips could barely contain the food, even as he couldn’t possibly swallow. With great effort, he slowed his laughter and swallowed.

I’m not sure what was so funny, but I know the value of laughter. Yes, of course, one movie after another tells us about the power of love, which drives people to incredible achievements and affirms the value of our connections.

Along the way, however, laughter helps fill our tank, soothes the frustrations of the day and puts a broad infectious smile on our faces that can spread, like a beneficial virus, delivering feelings of goodwill that can cascade through a crowd.

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Before we race through August and land on September, I’d like to suggest that we stop and smell the roses, among many other scents of summer.

At the top of the list of smells, on an island where marine life is never far away, is the smell of the ocean. As we lounge on our soft towels, caressed by a gentle breeze, we can breathe in the reviving, sweet smell of salty seawater.

Go to any beach during a summer day and you’ll also find the odor of sunscreen filling the air, courtesy of those spray-on bottles that seem to miss their target and head for the nostrils of the nearest sunbather as often as they reach exposed skin. While you may not want to eat sunscreen in getting away from your office, the smell can help you appreciate your favorite season, as is the case for my wife.

When you’re driving around town, you might reach a stop light or stop sign adjacent to a freshly cut lawn. I’ve always connected that smell with baseball fields, primarily because people started trimming their lawns around the same time as I played my abbreviated baseball season. When I was younger, I had as many games on my schedule in a year as this next generation seems to play in a month.

The atmospheric conditions in this light-intensive time collaborate to liberate the smell of mouthwatering food. At night or on weekends, the smell of a cookout can often encourage us to make a U-turn back to the supermarket to pick up some burgers, hot dogs and chicken.

I can’t drive anywhere near The Good Steer in Lake Grove without my nose acting like a sensory GPS, taking me back to my childhood and the spectacular onion rings that filled my plate.

Stand near just about any bakery in town and you’ll often have the opportunity to enjoy the best form of marketing, as the scent of freshly baked breads and cakes drifts down the street, leading us by our noses to their glass-enclosed treats.

When we were younger, my mother used to get on a sailboat, unpack our pretzels, turkey sandwiches and cold waters, pick up her head as if an old friend had called to her from the middle of the Long Island Sound and proclaim, “Oh, smell.”

Now, I recognize that the world is filled with the kind of foul odors that can turn a subway ride into a trip to “Dante’s Inferno” and that a visit to a friend’s house can also bring the pungency of wet dog to our nostrils.

The heat and the humidity, after all, is an equal-opportunity odor elevator, bringing everything to our attention including an awareness that the guy in the car next to us had garlic at lunch or the woman in line at the deli fell into the marsh in the morning.

Still, I prefer to focus on the proverbial odor glass as being half-full, as did some of my friends, who shared their favorite summer scents.

One person’s favorite smell is that of rain after the first drops fall, while another enjoys honeysuckle and the smell of jasmine from her native Beirut. A third enjoys the scent of coconut with lime or pineapple, and a fourth sings the praises of pine trees, mushrooms and wildflowers that remind him of his youth.

When we breathe in deeply enough these moments of summer rain, honeysuckle, coconuts and wildflowers, we can slow down the treadmill of time.

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What would happen if it rained on our intransigent politicians in Washington?

Well, for starters, the Democrats would all vote “no.” They’re voting “no” on everything anyway, so the rain probably wouldn’t affect them.

While some Republicans like Sen. John McCain would immediately acknowledge the rain, others would call it a nonstory. When the GOP couldn’t discount the reality that people were getting wet, they would decide it was President Obama’s fault because he didn’t stop the rains when he had a chance. The Republicans would find some regulation, which they suggested Obama enacted, that allowed or encouraged the rain, and would immediately set about doing the important work of undoing that regulation.

Sure, Obama knew about rain in Washington when he was president, but he didn’t enact a single policy or procedure that could have prevented the wet stuff from ruining barbecues and costing people money. He ignored an important proposal many years ago to put a retractable dome over Washington that would have created jobs and saved people from getting wet.

The New York Times would blame President Trump, his administration, his family and the Russians, especially President Putin, because all are at fault for everything. They probably planned during their meetings last year to distract everyone from their collusion to cause it to rain just when everyone was getting ready for a picnic. The Times would find some damning email in which someone joked about the rain, or in which the word “rain” might have been a code word, and would remind everyone that rain is synonymous with “pain,” which the paper is feeling from this new administration.

Competing polls would begin as soon as the first drops fell. One poll, which the current administration and Republicans would ignore and discredit, would suggest that even Trump voters are frustrated by the rain and feel that Trump promised them it would never rain again, except at night when they were sleeping. They would be upset that the billionaire Man of the People didn’t protect them when they wanted to attend their daughter’s softball game or when they wanted to go on a company picnic to a site that had previously been off-limits during the Obama administration because it was a protected area where young birds and fish were breeding.

At the same time, another poll that the Democrats would ignore would indicate that Trump voters were thrilled that they didn’t have to spend money watering lawns that, thanks to the new and limited Environmental Protection Agency, they could spray with a wide range of cheaper, job-creating pesticides that may or may not harm some people and a few turtles. This poll would suggest that these voters would be thrilled if the rain continued strategically through 2020, when they would be even happier to vote again for Trump.

Trump might tweet about how sad the rain was for Democrats and might suggest that it would be raining even harder if Hillary Clinton was president. Trump might engage in a twitter war with Chelsea Clinton or Rosie O’Donnell.

CNN would cover the twitter war extensively and would then claim that the entire discussion was a distraction from the real issues, which they would cover in a small box in the corner of their webpage.

Stocks would continue to rise as investors bet that people would need to spend more money on umbrellas in the short term, and on new food for other picnics some time in the near future when the rain stopped.

When the skies cleared, everyone would take credit before heading to the beach, unless they lived in New Jersey and were thwarted by an
unpopular governor.

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Tom and Tim grew up great friends. Soon after they learned how to spell, they figured out “i” and “o” were the only difference in their names.

They liked their parents, teachers and country. The United States, as they were told, was the greatest country in the world. Their grandparents, as they’d find out on a rainy Sunday when they watched a TV show about a country in Europe that didn’t exist anymore, came from the same place.

“We could be related,” Tim said.

Tom thought Tim would be a much better relative than his Uncle Oswald, who wreaked of cologne and was always trying to give him great advice about his life. Tom wanted to become a baseball player and he wanted to marry a woman some day who could make apple pies because he loved apple pies.

Tim also wanted to become a baseball player, but his mother wanted him to play the trumpet.

Tom also wanted to play an instrument, so he started playing the trumpet, too.

Competition got the better of Tim and Tom. They stopped hanging out because they wanted to practice separately, so they could win the solo in the concert and so Heather, the best trombone player in the band, would notice them.

When the music teacher, Mr. Holden, chose Tom to play the solo, Tim stopped talking to Tom, Heather and Mr. Holden.

Tim’s mother didn’t understand why he was quiet and angry. She read books on how to let go while lending a hand. One day, Tim told her about the solo, so she hired the best music teacher in the area.

Soon enough, Tim was better than Tom on the trumpet. Everyone, including Mr. Holden, could tell, so the teacher gave the solo to Tim.

Tom found out about the new trumpet teacher and he, too, became a student. Tim and Tom filled their block, night and day, with the sound of blaring trumpets.

As the concert approached, Mr. Holden became dismayed at how the two trumpet players were trying to drown each other out. He sent Tom out of a rehearsal, which caused the lower brass and flutes to stop playing because they supported Tom. When Tom returned, however, the bickering continued, so Mr. Holden sent Tim out of the room, at which point the clarinets and percussion stopped playing.

Mr. Holden removed the song with the trumpet solo from the concert. The boys blamed each other and, soon enough, an all-out war on social media broke out between Tim, Tom and the parts of the band that backed each of them.

Mr. Holden threatened to cancel the concert, but the town wouldn’t allow it, especially because the concert was the highlight of the July Fourth celebration.

One day, when Tom was too tired to play the trumpet and he wanted to get away from his annoying uncle, he collapsed on the couch and turned on the TV. He watched a black-and-white film about people coming from the country where his grandparents were born.

When the show ended, Tom got on his bike and rode to Mr. Holden’s house. He rang the bell.

“Mr. Holden, can you please put the original song back in the program? I’d like Tim to play the solo,” Tom said.

Mr. Holden smiled.

“He just asked me if you could play the solo,” Mr. Holden said, opening the door to reveal Tim standing in the kitchen.

When the concert ended, Tim and Tom were sure of one thing: They had to be related.

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By Daniel Dunaief

Hurry, hurry, hurry! You’ve got five minutes to get to the high school before your daughter’s graduation. It usually takes six. You might have to go faster than the speed limit, but you’ve done it before.

Your daughter looks great and she’s so calm. You push on the accelerator on the straight road ahead. Your daughter takes a deep breath.

OK, just a little faster and you’ll make it. Oh, no, no, no, a small car pulls in front of you. It’s being driven at 25 mph in a 35 mph zone. Why do cars pull in front of you and then go slowly? “Come on!” you implore, flicking your fingers forward as if you were trying to scratch a chalkboard from the bottom up.

“Dad, it’s OK,” your daughter insists. “I don’t want you to be late,” you say.

You drive carefully around a curve and head for another straight part of the road. You reach a stop sign, where a BMW misses an opening to go. It was a small one, but you’ve got to make your own openings in this town. That’s what you’d tell everyone today if you were giving the speech your daughter won the right to deliver.

Your daughter did better in school than you did. That makes you proud, but you don’t have time to be proud. All these people are slowing you down. You just have a few more turns.

A Girl Scout troop crosses the road in front of you. Your daughter was in Girl Scouts years ago, but you don’t like them now. They’re making you late for such an important day for the family.

Then the Girl Scouts, whose uniforms make you think of those mint cookies, cross the street. You’re a block from the school and a sedan takes forever to park.

You grind your teeth and lift your hand to touch the horn. Your daughter puts her hand firmly on yours and shakes her head slowly.

The woman with streaks of gray in her hair and a green suit looks vaguely familiar as she gets out of a car.

Finally, you park, get in the school and, shockingly, your daughter’s friends have reserved you great seats.

You pick up your phone to start recording your daughter’s speech. The camera’s out of memory. You grind your teeth as you try to delete enough old pictures to record this magic moment.

“Good morning,” your daughter’s voice offers the room. Your wife tells you to stop fiddling with your phone and look up. After your daughter shares memories of high school, she wants to offer advice to her class.

“I want you to remember to leave some margin for error,” she urges. Right, you smile. Your daughter, who made so many fewer errors than you did, is talking to the other people about their mistakes. You nod to the other people.

“If we need to do something, to be somewhere or to accomplish anything, we need to accept that the route might include detours or unexpected obstacles,” she offers, sharing that crooked smile she developed in middle school. “It’s not anyone else’s fault. If it’s important, don’t blame the obstacles. Be prepared for them. Planning means understanding them and giving yourself some extra time to reach your goals.”

You take a deep breath, the way she did so many times while she waited for you at the entrance to the house. You look around the room to see if anyone else knows she’s talking to you. You now recognize the woman on stage with streaks of gray in her hair and a green suit; she’s the superintendent of schools.

You realize how much smarter your daughter is than you.

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Waves of nostalgia can hit at any time. They tend to wash ashore more frequently in between graduations with their “look back, look forward” speeches and weddings. During these transition phases, we recall the days gone by, whether we’re suddenly comparing a memory from a few years to a decade or more earlier.

We watch our children stretch out surprisingly long arms to take a diploma and shake the hand of a school official, recalling how those hands used to reach up high to grab ours as we crossed the street.

We listen to their confident voices as they share detailed, measured and elaborate opinions about politics, sports, social issues or music. At the same time, we replay the high voices in our heads when they shared thoughts that weren’t so complex, as in “Jimmy Neutron is the best.”

When my wife and I walk around town, we frequently stop outside T-ball baseball games, where we soak in the figurative nostalgia bathtub. Johnny swings at seven pitches before he finally dribbles a ball foul. The exhausted coach encourages Johnny to “run, run, run!” Once the boy reaches first base, a small smile fills a round face that will get longer and leaner in the days ahead, until he reaches the stage where he rolls his eyes when people around him speak of sports because he and his razor stubble have tuned into the world of guitars and rock bands.

For some high school graduates, home has become a launchpad, where the NASA countdown to lift off for college will thrust them to a new location.

And then there are the brides and grooms, whose parents may recall their own weddings even as they smile at the way their children are planning to have people on stilts passing out hors d’oeuvres. The reason no one else thought of it, we think, is because it seems impractical, even though we don’t say that because we don’t want to rain on our children’s parade.

The parents of the bride and groom may remember the people who surrounded them at their wedding, from family members to important friends. Parents may have spent extra time searching through alumni directories or online listings to find the addresses of some of those important friends they haven’t seen in decades to invite them to another can’t-miss wedding.

Parents may stare at their children and recall the long journey from the cooties and a fear fascination with love and romance, to this moment when their child plans to travel the rest of his or her life with this marital partner.

What good does nostalgia do? It offers an opportunity to reflect on the past, while overlaying memories with current experiences. While we’re dancing to music we heard years ago, maybe at our own weddings or on an early date with a future spouse, we may close our eyes and reconnect with the younger version of ourselves. We remember who we were and who we wanted to be. We may laugh, realizing how far we have to go, or boost our resolve as we observe the changes in ourselves and others around us that encourage us to believe that anything, improbable or difficult though it may seem, is still possible.

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If you’re reading this on a cellphone somewhere, please stop. No, seriously. You can read it on your computer or in an actual copy of the paper but, please, stop reading this and look around you.

OK, are you back in your office or at your home?

It’s disturbing how often our cellphones become an escape from the here and now. I get it: We’re waiting in line to order a hamburger and we want to do something, so we plan our vacations or send text messages to our friends.

In the process, we’ve lost sight of what’s around us. It’s as if we’ve covered our eyes with electronic blinders and we can’t be bothered to pay attention to our surroundings.

I was recently driving through town and noticed a woman walking a large, chocolate Labrador along the sidewalk. His rear legs were pointed out as he walked. As I drove by, I noticed that the woman held the leash on her wrist as she was completely absorbed in her cellphone. Seconds later, the dog relieved himself on the sidewalk while trying to keep up with his oblivious owner. The dog looked uncomfortable as he tried to multitask.

I realize dogs are an enormous responsibility and that every time someone walks a dog, that person may not feel the urge to dedicate his or her complete attention to a conversation with the family pet.

“Hey, Tigger, look at that squirrel over there. Oh, wow, there’s a bunny. Do you see the bunny? Oh, wait, there are two bunnies.”

“What do you smell, Fifi? Was there another dog here a few hours ago and did he leave you a little scent present?”

We don’t have to connect with our pets every moment of every day. But wouldn’t it be nice if we were able to pay them some attention while we were out walking them? After all, how often do they come over to us when we’ve had a tough day, or give us their paw—or offer us companionship?

Everywhere we go, we have the opportunity to tune out the world around us and surf our way to somewhere else.

It’s thrilling to travel halfway around the world and send pictures instantly of a magnificent sunset, or the Eiffel Tower or a three-toed sloth. We can be connected to almost anyone almost anytime.

That shouldn’t give us license to disconnect from the people and the pets around us. It’s the economic concept of opportunity cost applied to our attention. The opportunity cost of paying attention to what’s on our phone is that we ignore our surroundings.

Remember those public service announcements which said, “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?” Maybe we should have messages that pop up on our phone suggesting that “It’s 6 o’clock, do you know where you are,” or maybe, “It’s 6 o’clock, pick up your head and check out the here and now (or H&N).”

Maybe we should also develop an H&N logo we can put on clothing or notebooks. It can even become a verbal reminder to our companions.

“Class,” a teacher might say as she noticed her students taking furtive glances at their phones, “H&N, right? Let’s learn the material now, while you’re here.”

H&N may be a way of encouraging us to be where our bodies are at the moment, and not where the internet has taken us.

Dogs, meanwhile, shouldn’t have to multitask while they’re relieving themselves. If Fluffy could talk, she might say, “For goodness’ sake, H&N, I need a moment here.”

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I have hundreds of new friends I’ve never met, and a profound appreciation for the people who created them or shared their lives.

I recently attended my first BookExpo at the Javits Center in New York City, where I was surrounded by booksellers, librarians, agents, book publishers and authors including Stephen King, James Patterson and John Grisham, with numerous budding luminaries in the mix.

A highlight for me was a panel of children’s book authors, which included actress Isla Fisher, who has starred in movies including “Wedding Crashers” and “Definitely, Maybe.” While I was intrigued to see Ms. Fisher in person, the other authors owned the stage, as Fisher readily admitted that she wasn’t a writing peer to her fellow panelists.

Jason Reynolds, an African-American writer for middle-grade and young adult novels, electrified the audience.

He talked about how he used to visit his great Aunt Blanche in South Carolina, where the sun was so scorching it burned his neck. His aunt, who was 85, sat on her hot porch, smoking cigarettes and watching the children.

Aunt Blanche planted a pecan tree — as he said, a “pea can” — when she was 4. The tree had become enormous by the time Reynolds was a child, providing shade for the younger crowd.

Reynolds, a 2016 National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature with “Ghost,” suggested that books offered the kind of shade he desperately needed, providing relief from the heat.

Reynolds asked himself, “What if I get to be the pecan tree?”

Jennifer Weiner, meanwhile, has ventured from the world of adult fiction and “Good in Bed” to writing for a younger audience, which includes her recent book, “The Littlest Bigfoot.”

Weiner said she does much of her writing in the equivalent of a large closet in her home, although she completed “half of a book waiting in a carpool line.”

Dutch author Marieke Nijkamp shared some insights into her latest book “Before I Let Go,” which is about a girl named Corey who loses her best friend Kyra.

Nijkamp, with fans waiting in a long line for the blue-haired author’s signature, said she “definitely goes for a walk right after I kill a character.”

While circling the Javits Center exhibits, I bumped into Owen King. He is the son of acclaimed author Stephen King, and is promoting a book he wrote with his father called “Sleeping Beauties,” in which all the women but one in a small Appalachian town become wrapped in a cocoon when they go to sleep. If someone awakens them, they become violent. That leaves the men without the civilizing and calming influence of women. It sounded to me like an adult version of William Golding’s classic “Lord of the Flies.”

In describing the novel, Owen King said he enjoyed the time writing and editing the book with his father. He described how a King dinner time activity includes coming up with story ideas, many of which never see the light of day.

I asked Owen, who was clad in an untucked plaid shirt and looks remarkably like his father, what caught his eye at the Expo. He highlighted a book by Steve Steinberg about a Yankees pitcher named Urban Shocker. King said he loved the name and found the story compelling, about a pitcher who went 18-6 in the Yankees’ famous 1927 season despite battling heart disease. I picked up a copy, which was autographed for my son, and I look forward to learning about Shocker’s world.

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We all have our routines. We go to certain restaurants, drive certain routes to work and support certain gas stations, where we know we’ll get a competitive price, a friendly response from the attendant and rapid service.

When we travel, everything changes. We sleep in unfamiliar beds, flick the channels on television stations where the stations aren’t the same numbers as they are on Long Island, and navigate along routes that aren’t our familiar pattern.

Breaking the routine offers us a chance to step away from our lives and to experience something new. Maybe we’ll go to a museum in a new city or visit a place we’ve seen in a movie, which blends both the familiar and the unknown.

Our level of adventure and appetite for risk — as in, what happens if I don’t like the experience — can rise or fall depending on our travel companions.

Recently, I visited another city for a weekend with my daughter, who was traveling with a group of her teenage contemporaries and their parents. We all managed to get to our designated stops in our cars and to return to a hotel chain so ubiquitous that, with the blinds closed and without access to the local weather on TV, we could have been in Anywhere, USA.

We each had a GPS and an address for our activities which reduced both the stress and the adventure that came from the unknown.

While we could have gotten lost, the probability of that seemed slim. Getting lost, nerve-racking as it might have been 20 years ago, is almost an impossibility with navigation systems built into cars, phones and watches.

Following an afternoon activity, several of the girls decided they were hungry. One of the members of the group suggested a national pizza chain, to which the others readily agreed.

I wrinkled my brow at the suggestion and wondered, as a cellphone order was quickly placed, whether we might want to try a local pizza restaurant instead.

“No, that’s OK,” I was assured. “This will be better.”

I waited in a packed car until the order was placed, at which point the girl in the back transferred the address to her mother, who was riding shotgun during my weekend away with my daughter.

“Honey,” the mom said, “are you sure you dialed the closest restaurant?”

“Yes,” the daughter grumbled, shaking her head at her mother.

“I just checked the address for this restaurant and it’s two hours from here. You sure you want a pizza that far away?”

“Wait, what?” the daughter said, double-checking the address and the phone. Sure enough, the restaurant was on the other side of the state.

“Wait, before you order from a closer one,” I said, as she was already searching her phone for a nearby restaurant, “we’re sitting right outside a pizza restaurant. Don’t you want to try this one?”

“No, thanks,” she said, trying to be polite to someone else’s parent. “We want this one.”

When we got to the closer restaurant, we ran into another parent who was picking up pizza for his family. With so many other local choices, how did both families make the identical choice?

I suppose they might have discussed their food preference during the day. That was unlikely, given the social split in the group.

Alternatively, they have become so accustomed to the familiar that they prefer it, even when traveling.

I suppose when the opportunity for something new and different knocks, people don’t always feel the urge to answer the door.

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