One of the best meals I've ever had in my life wasn't at a fancy "eatery" (please excuse the hipster term) in a trendy New York neighborhood full of outsiders looking to make it big in my hometown. It was at a modest cabin nestled quaintly in the gorgeous Sangre de Cristo valley of New Mexico. I'm not an avid skier, coming from a childhood home of much humbler and inexpensive past times, but during my active teenage years, me and my brothers (with a cousin or boyfriend/girlfriend or two, thrown into the mix) would fly out to spend our college breaks with my father and his wife at a lovely small-town resort they found in New Mexico that's within driving distance of their West Texas home.
Since it wasn't some pricey tourist dive*, our trips meant (as they always did growing up) that we had to socialize with the local provincials, with their very limited experiences that they had no trouble abusing children over, so that we could have maybe a day's worth of fun during our grueling college years to satisfy our parents arrangements. It was also weather and/or our pocketbook(s) permitting, or my father pulled his purse-strings to call the shots that favored him best. We were lucky to have a good time at all, is what I'm saying to you, and as my faithful working class readers, I know you understand the drill.
It's like a Florida vacation washed out by monsoon season with your ADD grand kid who freaks out during horrible airplane turbulence that lasts for hours and you spent $8000 for it (and you couldn't even afford that), which is why credit cards were invented: so you could try and escape the soul-crushing reality of your 9-5 office hell with the promise of a heavenly vacation that was never real like they are on t.v., except now you're in debt, in addition to having a really bad time. Oh, and there's all those work emails in varying tones of recrimination and panic to go through before Monday morning, too. You lucky asshole. Isn't it grand? Our family trips were like also that: a terrible guessing game of who will get drunk and be a complete piece of shit first, because every family vacation is like that. Every. Single. One.
The revelation of an uncomplicated good time at a family restaurant that served us at a long table with mismatched bowls we simply passed around to each other, without worry of this one's Epi-pen peanut-dust allergy or her Celiac Disease that's easily manageable with basic human speech skills that are devoid of the typical (and repetitive!) brain-dysfunctional Off-Broadway show, was utterly miraculous. A husband and wife team cooked the food they served to us in the cabin they lived in, as their only guests in attendance, away from the maddening tourist crowds. They served the best mashed potatoes I've ever had in my life, followed by the best peach cobbler I've ever had for dessert, too.
As we stood on their wood-plank porch watching the Milky Way stars emerge above the rural New Mexican mountains, free of sky-obscuring light pollution, after a spectacular pink and purple sunset we knew was divinely inspired, not even my dad's annoying toothpick habit that included repeatedly sucking his teeth loudly could spoil our mood. For an evening, just one evening, we'd been in heaven, and it was worth the price of the ticket. Believe you me. And you should. Some memories are so good, they withstand the test of time, like a love that's everlasting. Amen to you, on this holy All Saints Day in 2016.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Fire_Resort
