What is it about sharing a slice on the streets of New York City?

For all the art, culture and customs oozing out from this great melting pot, pizza stands above all. And the quest for the best slice is not one to be taken lightly.

When I was a kid visiting with my cousins in the city, the slice smorgasbord was a sight to behold. Sitting at the kids table, with more slices than there were children, each gooey triangle the size of our torsos, we'd engage in a round robin, each trying bites of the others' pizza — even if we all had cheese pizza, as was usually the case. Years from now, they will discover it was not rats but rather the kids table at a small, shabby pizza joint that was ground zero for the bubonic plague.

The mission of the round robin was clear: 1) Determine who had the best slice. 2) Determine whether the slice gave you superpowers. This was spawned not from our imaginations but from an episode of the cartoon "Jem" in which Jem's football-playing boyfriend lost his quarterback skills when his favorite pizza place closed. Pizza was behind his super pigskin powers. We would run around the pizza joint, jumping from chairs, testing to see whether the pizza had made cellular-level changes in our bodies. It never did. We were warm, our stomachs full and pained from laughing, but alas, we were never supersonic. And no amount of adding extra Parmesan cheese and oregano made us take flight, go invisible or, for me, successfully throw a football.

Despite the inherent swapping of familial germs that would occur at the kids table in these small, crowded pizza joints, there was something apropos about our superpower-seeking round-robin tradition. After all, nearly everything about eating a slice of New York pizza seems baked in a clay oven of tradition. The huge size of the slice. The paper plate it comes on. The clumped or empty seasoning shakers. And, of course, the age-old act of folding over your pizza. I still remember my dad giving me a lesson on how to fold a slice, thumb and ring finger positioned to push up the outer edges of the crust, creating a gully of gooey deliciousness in the center. I couldn't have been older than 5. It's not surprising that pizza has so much tradition when its history runs so deep. I'm pretty sure the first wheel was discovered from a hardened pie. And let's not forget that the face that launched a thousand ships was that of Helen of Totino Pizza Rolls.

Years after our superpower-seeking slice smorgasbord began, an in-depth analysis of the "Jem" episode from my eldest cousin resulted in our realizing the error of our pizza-eating ways. Jem's boyfriend's pizza had a secret: chocolate sauce instead of tomato. We needed to find the secret ingredient that worked for us. The round robin changed to include macaroni-and-cheese pizza, chicken Caesar salad pizza, bacon-and-eggs pizza and s'mores pizza. We shared stories as seamlessly as we shared slices, our hearts as full as our bellies.

We never found our unique secret ingredients, and as we aged, we forgot about the "Jem" episode and stopped looking for extra meaning in our extra cheese. We never found our pizza-induced superhero powers, but then again, looking back, maybe we had. Maybe the pizza power was there all along.

This past week, I went up to the Big Apple and walked around the city with my cousin, two days before he began treatment for cancer. We stopped by Vinny's. We each got a slice. Sitting on the bench on the New York City sidewalk, we connected in a way we couldn't over text or phone or even in the apartment. We talked fears and life and death and made jokes and took a bite of the other's pizza. For all the art, culture and customs oozing out from this great melting pot, pizza with my cousin stands above all.

What is it about sharing a slice on the streets of NYC?

It oozes with the superpower of connection — folding into each other like a perfectly folded slice. As we got up to leave and head back to the apartment, I shared my "pizza power" revelation with my cousin. He calls me sappy.

I prefer the term extra-cheesy.

Katiedid Langrock is author of the book "Stop Farting in the Pyramids," available at http://www.creators.com/books/stop-farting-in-the-pyramids. Like Katiedid Langrock on Facebook, at http://www.facebook.com/katiedidhumor. To find out more about her and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.