A Serious Appreciation

It's tempting to write that I love breakfast tacos, but it's hard to ignore the chorus of well, why don't you marry breakfast tacos! already in my head. Also, starting in like that, so forcefully, with I love breakfast tacos! is cheesy and highlights a serious shortcoming in the English language with describing those things that give us some amount of joy, large or small.

It's more accurate, I believe, to say that I have a serious appreciation for breakfast tacos, bordering on downright affection.

I ate six of them today.

When I told my girlfriend that this evening her response was, "You're gross," which is clearly a matter of opinion. But this is not a popularity contest, or an eating contest, or even really about eating, though a fair amount of that will be discussed. This is about voice and finding culture, finding something that is at least in part yours because it gives you real pleasure.

I grew up in a home (with a lovely family, I should point out) where this is breakfast:



And this is a taco:



We called tortillas roll-ups and then eventually graduated to tort-tillahs. I ate my fair share of Hamburger Helper and the panoply of desserts that come recommended on the back of instant Jello products: red Jello with bananas, instant vanilla pudding with Vanilla Wafers and... bananas.

When you grow up on a steady diet of manufactured normalcy, I think it's natural to long for something different, something that seems more exotic. Besides, a north-Texas childhood meant my love of tacos was in my DNA. By the time I was ten, I knew I didn't want to spend my life in the instant pudding section of my neighborhood Kroger. I wanted to eat delicious things on crowded street corners with salsa dripping between my fingers and the radio tuned to a Ranchero station. That inclination seems perfectly natural, also.