Here I go. Please keep in mind that I am free-associating and writing for the sake of writing. Feel free to give this project a miss this week. BUT THANK YOU FOR YOUR NOUNS. I love your nouns, you guys. So much. It's just Big Noun Love 24/7 with me right now.
So. Tortilla. When I hear the word tortilla I immediately think back to my family's favorite restaurant when I was growing up in Provo when Provo was still a town of genteel poverty because everyone worked either at BYU or at Geneva Steel. Anyway. The restaurant was El Azteca. It was located in the upstairs of a lopsided, somewhat ramshackle structure there on 8th North, just south of the campus. It was owned by a family from Mexico and it was decorated with enormous paintings on velvet of various spectacular and colorful scenes of Mayans? Aztecs? Pre-Colombians frolicking on the edges of a jungle and (if I'm remembering correctly) volcanoes?
Anyway. The owner, who was an enormous man of impressive girth, always materialized at our table like Robin Williams' genie with (I could be making this part up) a white tea towel draped elegantly over his forearm. He wanted to make sure we were pleased with the service and the food, and I always was. I ordered flautas. And they were good. They were good flautas. Strong flautas. Honorable flautas. Manly flautas that Ernest Hemingway would have respected. Even though they were made in the mountains in Utah where we do not fight the bulls.
Okay. I think I'm done.
3 comments:
And thus was born a taste for Mexican food.
El Azteca--my goodness, that takes me back. Enchiladas Suizas were my order, and I loved them. Along with those flautas, which were, in fact strong and honorable. Like the tortilla itself. Thank you for this window into the past!
The bulls... They are not so much for the fighting in Utah, are they? ;)
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