When Wonder Boy and I went on one of our first dates we needed to get a bite to eat on our way to somewhere else. Time was tight so he suggested we go to Taco Bell. We went through the drive thru and he asked what I wanted. “One soft taco, one order of nachos and a water,” I said, after ample thought on the matter. He placed that order and then ordered “three cheese quesadillas with extra sauce” in such a way that I just knew he had placed this same order dozens, if not hundreds of time before. “Can you change my order?” I asked. “Two soft tacos, two orders of nachos and a medium Dr. Pepper.” My standard order.
That was perhaps the only time when I have play coy for Wonder Boy, pretending to be more dainty than I actually am. Dumb, I know. But I liked the boy and I wasn’t ready yet to share my love of liquid cheese. Only when he revealed his own passion – a passion like nothing I have ever seen before – for cheese was I ready to come clean.
My history with Taco Bell goes back a long way. In high school I went on a date with a boy. He picked me up and we drove to a nearby Taco Bell. After ordering food in the drive thru, he drove me across the street to the Kroger’s parking lot where we ate our food. Then he took me home. As dates go, it was pretty lackluster. So, despite the Chuck Taylors and longish hair, there were no more dates.
You know how people have these landmark memories like “Where I was when Kennedy was shot?” Well, I seem to be missing most of the ones that are standard for people my age but I do know where I was when I heard Princess Diana had died. I had gone to some festivity the night before and was still hung over when I got up to work at the local amusement park. Apparently in my enthusiasm to drink I had forgotten to make sure my work uniform would be clean for the next day. So when I woke up my shirt was wet in the washer.
There was no time to clean it so I had the genius idea to secure the end of the shirt in the closed sunroof of my car and drive to work with the shirt flapping the wind. As if the 10 minute ride would be enough to dry the shirt, right? So I drove just past the amusement park and drove to the Taco Bell to change. (I do not know why I didn’t just go into the locker room at work.) As I sat in the car putting on my still soggy shirt and cursing myself for wearing a flowered bra on a day when I would be wearing a wet, white shirt, I heard on the radio that Princess Diana was dead. That was my “when were you when” moment. At Taco Bell in my wet polyester shirt with a flowered bra underneath.
I went to college at Ohio University, which is where my two younger sisters (one for undergrad and grad school) and my younger brother all decided to go as well. (Actually, Jake is still there and will be there for a while longer now that he’s been accepted into the MBA program.) With so many of us there, our times in Athens overlapped quite a bit, be it for actually taking classes or just visiting friends and old stomping grounds. During one visit to Athens post-college with some fellow alum and after a hard night of drinking we went to Taco bell (the world’s largest Taco Bell I’ll have you k now) for some obligatory grub. In line for food was my sister and her friends, as drunk as my and my friends were. While trying to carry on some intelligible conversation with #3, I started laughing. I mean the kind of laughter that has no real reason but where you just can’t stop laughing. In her drunken state, #3 started laughing too. Mike, one of my friends, sat there looking at the two of us quite literally slack-jawed. “You laugh exactly the same way,” he said, or, or be accurate, slurred. I know it’s goofy to look back at this moment so fondly, especially since it was just a drunken moment in a Taco Bell in Athens, but I was happy then. Happy laughing with my sister and happy knowing that someone could look at the two of us and see our similarities.
Things have changed over the last several years. Taco Bell franchises in Ohio stopped selling Dr. Pepper. Both Jason and I have had to severely curtail our Taco Bell intake in our old age. But now, and this is just too much, the Taco Bell in Athens has closed. So this weekend when I head up to Athens with my sister, #2, and my mom to visit Jake I will have to settle for pizza to absorb the alcohol in my stomach. And it just won’t be the same.
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