In that same worship space, alone, I kneel and pray. In the silence I hear a whisper become a shout: my growling stomach. Coffee alone is not a breakfast! So I take a cab to Caffe Espresso Italia, a decades-old mother-and-son Italian operation, to order its famous balsamic mozzarella dish, a bowl of peppers and mozzarella soaked in balsamic vinaigrette. God’s will be done.

“What do you make?” owner Maria Pugliese asks me, as she fields a request for her sauce recipe from a fellow patron. “I’m a writer,” I say. “So I guess I make words.” She tosses me a look only mothers give. “Everyone makes words,” she says. “Me? I make food. I make sauce. Not everyone can do this. What can you make?”

My make-or-break move is GlassRoots, where I join a small class—me and a father and son—as our instructor, Alix Davis, walks us through creating our own paperweights over the course of a few hours. First we sign waivers. Waivers? We’re making paperweights!

The introductory lesson involves spooling 2000°F molten glass onto a white-hot metal rod. “That’s it?” I ask Davis. “Oh, I got this. I used to spool cotton candy at a cart at the state fair.” Two minutes in I realize I most definitely do not have this. “Oh no!” I shriek. “I got too much on the stick!”

Davis is a paragon of calm: “It’s OK. Just pull it out of the furnace and we’ll see what we can do.” I rally. “OK, I’m taking it out now and … Oh no! I made it worse!” My molten globule hits the wall of the furnace hellmouth, sticks to it like gum on a shoe, and then stretches and splashes and lashes everywhere in molten ribbons and blobs and puddles (oh, hi waiver!). Imagine making a smoothie without the blender’s lid—and the blender is full of radioactive lava taffy. After I somehow manage to sculpt my molten glob into a sphere, sparks shooting all the while (“Am I doing it? I can’t tell because I’m blinded by fear!”), I turn to the son—a high school junior who is next up to make a paperweight—and put a swaggering hand on his shoulder. “Heads up,” I tell him. “It’s a lot harder than I made it look.”

As we’re wrapping up, Davis says something thrilling: The best way to recover from sweaty glassmaking is a salty meal, preferably something like… But I’m already out the door. I know the spot.