A couple of nights ago, my dog Wally and I drove up to my old neighborhood in South Central Pennsylvania to see dear friends left over from the days when I lived up there. We made pizza for dinner. The crust was gluten-free as both Heather and Kim have celiac disease, and the toppings were elaborate. One was Greek, with pan-roasted spinach and garlic, kalamata olives, sliced tomatoes, mozzarella and feta. There was a white pizza with Havarti, honey, and swirls of whipped, spiced ricotta, and a couple of red-sauce regulars, one with orange and yellow bell peppers and black olive, and one with just pepperoni, for Tim. They were all very delicious, though you probably would not choose gluten-free pizza crust if you didn’t have to. Kim had brought a Brussel sprout and fennel salad, which was surprisingly good considering I don’t usually think of Brussel sprouts as a salad ingredient. Live and learn.My hostess and her husband were observing Dry January but I am bucking that trend, so after several visits to their bourbon collection and a rousing game of Scrabble (I played STEAMED for the win), Wally and I conked out on the couch in front of the fireplace in their hexagonal living room. We awoke to a light dusting of snow outside the picture window, and left to drive back to Baltimore before anyone else was up. Heather had packed up several tin-foil cartons of leftover slices and put them out on her back porch. I grabbed one before I left, juggling it along with Wally’s leash, my backpack, and a fancy Christmas-themed cardboard go-cup of coffee as I made my way to the car.I was parking in front of my house on Keswick Road when I realized that I had set the pizza box on the roof of the car while I was loading Wally and fitting the coffee cup into the cup holder — and had left it there when I pulled away. Oh no! Maybe that’s what that jogger was trying to tell me. It took me three futile trips out to the empty car and several text exchanges with Heather (who did not find the thing when she walked her dogs later that morning – did it cling bravely all the way to 83 South?) to accept the harsh reality. My big plans for breakfast, i.e., reheated pizza with a fried egg on top, were foiled. Before long, memories of another lost leftover had surfaced to compound my woe. Back in November, I went down to DC to watch election returns with friends, a gloomy night indeed, but for lunch that day my friend Judy had procured the most delicious tofu banh mi sandwiches imaginable, and I had saved half of mine to take home, but left it in Judy’s fridge when I drove back to Baltimore. Curses! The only tofu banh mi I have found up our way is out in Cockeysville, and really the DC one was superior. This place had like five different vegetarian banh mi options, which is extremely rare (and totally unheard of in Vietnam itself.)Why did these losses so aggrieve me? Because leftovers are my love language. My theme song. My state flower. Sending people home with neat little packages of whatever I just served them for dinner is my favorite thing, a time-release act of care, and the ones I put in my own fridge are the self-care of single living. For a person whose main spiritual value is not wasting anything, leftovers are holy. They are an art form. They are the promise of continuity, of tomorrow. When the leftover London broil-style tofu gets sliced into the Momofuko noodles, when the extra Provencale sauce vierge joins feta cheese in the omelette, when the last two baked chicken thighs reappear diced in the matzo ball soup… what can I say? This, and a small black dog, and maybe a nice piece of leftover garlic bread, is what it takes to make me happy. My closest friends know this, and will save me a single meatball and a ladle of red gravy from a dinner I missed, tucking it into my bag when I pass through town. (Bag! Not roof of car!) And somehow this meatball became three days worth of lunch.Sometimes, scoping out the bounty of my refrigerator, or biting into some improbably luscious bite, I actually thank myself out loud.The altar of my faith.When I visited my daughter in North Carolina at the start of this holiday season, I showed up with two tupperwares of downhome black-eyed peas, then took them home refilled with excellent vegetarian chili made by Jane’s boyfriend’s culinarily gifted stepdad. I also packed up the large, half-full containers of applesauce and sour cream I bought for our latke party, fearing they would only molder if left in the kids’ refrigerator. To honor these worthy accompaniments, I made latkes again on Christmas morning in Baltimore, which was also the first day of Hanukah. I finished up the sour cream in some twice-baked potatoes, and I’m still working on the last of the applesauce. The internet will surely offer me Twenty Ways to Use Up That Jar of Applesauce, very likely — hopefully! — creating new leftovers. And the beat goes on.I know there are many people who don’t eat leftovers, who think they are gross, and some of these are the same people who don’t finish the food on their plates, and regarding these confounding characters I can only shake my head in bewilderment and sorrow. But to each his own neuroses, I guess. Can I get these three french fries wrapped to go?