fashion clothes

I'm not high.

Promise.

I've still never used marijuana. AND I LIVE IN COLORADO, YOU GUYS.

You know what though???

I love Taco Bell.

Love it.

I'm not in college anymore, though I have fond memories of being crammed with far too many people into far too small of a car to make late night runs...only to have us all wake up the following morning telling crazy ass stories about the dreams we had with bellies full of tacos.

I don't love it because the food is good, and certainly not because it's anything close to the authentic Mexican food that I grew up loving in Southern California - you know, the kind where you walk roll out of the restaurant having gained ten pounds. Ahhhh.

Let me just have this moment, you guys.  (I've been trapped in the land of green chile sauce for 9 years)

One of the great downsides to moving away from SoCal is that I moved away from places like that. It took us eight years to find a decent Mexican restaurant here and the honest truth is that my cooking is damn close to even that one decent restaurant.

Y'all haven't lived until you've had my beans. For serious.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about Taco Bell, and it will be. I just needed to have my moment of culinary reflection.

The Bell.

Aside from being hella cheap, I love it. I especially love the Doritos Locos tacos with Fire sauce. Nom.

Most recently I found a reason to adore the Bell because my teeny tiny son, the one who has fallen off the growth chart on for weight a few times, discovered the crunchy Taco Bell taco. He loves the crunchy Taco Bell taco. I feel less guilty about letting him eat them as a parent since they have to put actual meat in there now instead of whatever the hell it was before.

Please don't tell me. I'd really rather not know.

My love of the Bell is longer standing than this recent adoration of the crunchy taco though. It goes back over fourteen years now.

You see, Taco Bell did something no other place could do.

It made my husband eat. It kept him from dropping too much weight too fast.

When he was diagnosed with cancer and learned that he would have to go through fairly intense radiation to his abdominal cavity, we knew right away that it was going to mess with his entire digestive system. He'd already started dropping weight, weight that he didn't really have to drop back then, and it was going to get worse in a hurry. The nurses gave me all kinds of weight boosting ideas, gave me coupons for nutritional drinks, I tried everything I could think of and he wouldn't touch any of it.

A few days in (radiation was daily), we adjusted to the fact that he'd have a one hour window every afternoon, right after his treatments. That was the only hour of the 24 that he'd be even close to hungry. And he wanted Taco Bell.

Specifically, he wanted bean burritos.

He ate one a day for the rest of the time he was in radiation, and most of those days it was the only thing he kept down. I didn't argue with him too much because I figured there were worse things in the world he could eat. It had protein and carbs and cheese, and most importantly, it sounded good to him and he kept it down.

It became so routine that the car just drove itself there every day and the employees started to anticipate when we'd be by.

Ten years later, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. The chemo was hell, the radiation on top of it made everything worse, but that glorious neon bell in the sky came to the rescue again.


He didn't want to eat much, but he craved Taco Bell.

We'd learned not to ask questions long before then.

When we were there to visit, every time we went out, I just brought some home. When I left to take care of him at the end, any trip I made out included a loop of the drive-through. I tend to support the theory that he had digestive fondness for it because when he first started his business and was broke as hell, the lab was right behind a Taco Bell.

Like the muscle memory of a well trained athlete, his body craved what it knew.

Or something like that.

I know it's fast food. I know that calling it food probably isn't entirely accurate. I know it's terrible. I know that the meat wasn't entirely meat for like ever. I know that the shells have GMO corn. I know all that.

I know. So please don't preach at me. I know.

And you know what?

I still freaking adore the place.

Always will.

I'm pretty sure that the food is laced with magic fairy dust....but I'm still not asking any questions.

A while back now, a friend of mine sent me a message on Facebook about Comic Con. A fellow nerd (he even has the tattoos to prove his adoration of the comics), he was passing along information about volunteering at the Con.

A signed copy of this has been displayed in my living room ever since. Well played, Sheldon.

Who else needs to watch this movie right now?

Oh, that movie.

Infinite Wheaton. Husband may need this shirt too. I think this was taken at a Con.

All his shirts are dork shirts.

Not actually, of course.

Before this gets weird, I must remind everyone that the man I am married to bears absolutely no relation to anyone in my family except by marriage, and that my father died two years ago.

And yet, a few nights ago, when my husband took the kids upstairs at bedtime to help brush teeth and tuck them in, I heard my Dad.

Someone had left a window open for the sole purpose of air conditioning the outside.

Someone else had left all the lights on just to run up the electricity bill.

I laughed, because I grew up hearing the same things from someone else a long time ago. Posted a status to that effect on my Facebook page, which elicited many comments from people experiencing a similar phenomenon.

My 24th birthday - 2001 My Dad on the left, husband on the right.

At some point yesterday, my husband said something about how my comment upset him.

A bit confused, I asked why.

He assumed that any comparison between him and my father was bad.

I shook my head. Quite the contrary.

Then I looked him in the eyes and asked him a few simple questions, ones that he should be well equipped to answer having known me over twenty years, most of that time having my father as a presence in my life.

Have I ever acted like anything my father did was wrong? Have I ever talked about things he did in a negative way? Have I complained about him?

He replied that I hadn't.

Then I asked him another question. Then why would you assume it's a bad thing that you're like him?

He understood. Or at least I think so.

My father was a good man. He was far from perfect, this much is true. There were rough times in my childhood and adolescence with him. Sometimes he drank too much, sometimes he yelled too much, sometimes he wanted me to stay young and naive so badly that he tried to control me too much.

Looking back on it all now, with the knowledge and perspective I have now, not just as a parent myself, but with a fuller picture of how his life actually was, I understand. Considering all the things he had to deal with, not just in an episodic way, but on a daily basis, I understand.

He was actually quite remarkable once you put the pieces together, once you see everything he had to do, everything he had to live with from his past. The fact that he was able to keep it together almost all the time says something profound about who he was.

We never fought for long, him and I, not even when I was a teenager. We both had tempers, we both argued, we both fought, but we both would wake up the next morning knowing that it was a new start and that at the end of the day we struggled so much because we were so alike.

My father had a much greater sense of family,of duty, of obligation than I ever appreciated when he was still here. I see it now because of how much things have changed in this world without him.

I've had more than a few moments since he left us that I realized just how amazing he really was.

All the same could be said about the man I built my family with.

And so, I hope that when I say something about how my husband reminds me of my father, he understands that it comes from a place of love and respect. It comes from a girl who misses her dad, and smiles when she hears something her father used to say to her come from a different voice. That the comparison can never, and will never be anything but a compliment.

It seems at times that I'm officially married to my father, and that's not a bad thing.

Not at all.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that somewhere out there, because of this, my Dad smiling right now.

When we first got married, we had plans. Good plans.

I was going to go to law school, he was going to pass the CPA exam. I'd graduate and work in some ridiculously high paying job long enough to repay my loans. We would travel the world. We'd buy some amazing little house near the beach somewhere, then, only after all that, we would have kids.Two of them. One boy, one girl.

Everything would be fabulous and we wouldn't have anything to worry about.

We had great plans.

Not even halfway through law school, and a couple days before my husband's 23rd birthday, we sat in uncomfortable chairs in a doctor's office and heard the word no one wants to hear.

Cancer.

Life got complicated, in a hurry.

All those plans got tossed aside, life decided we were walking a different path than we ever intended. Given two weeks to try and get pregnant before he underwent radiation treatments, it worked.

I went from an ambitious law school student to a scared wife who clung to the hope of an uncertain future.

Until I lost the baby.

We were left with no child, with the very real possibility of never having them without help, and still with an uncertain future.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have dropped out of school that day.

We tried for almost a year to get pregnant until we sat in another set of chairs in another office and received confirmation that we would not be able to get pregnant without IVF. The radiation had done too much damage.

At that exact moment, I was already pregnant, we just didn't know it yet.

My son was born, premature, three days after I walked across the stage and received my diploma from law school.

Life threw us another curveball.

I kept pressing forward with school, enrolling in an MPH program part time. Still thinking I was destined for greatness in some career someday.

Baby number two came, then number three. We realized in a hurry that we'd outgrown the tiny house we could barely afford that was nowhere near the ocean. We moved to the middle of the country, even though I was one class from finishing the MPH and already enrolled in a teaching credential program.

I left all of it behind.

I'd gone from the ambitious career woman to the one who let it all go, and left it over a thousand miles away, for my kids.

Since moving here, we've had a bonus baby, the one that surprised us all. Even though I didn't think he'd ever be here, I can't imagine my life without him.

I never became that high powered attorney. We never bought that cottage by the beach. We never traveled the world.

Last weekend, though, my husband took me on a trip. One he'd been planning for months. One that lasted just over 24 hours, but that took us to so many of the places we haven't yet been.

He presented me with a passport. Not a real one, but one that held previews of the places we would go, both someday and this weekend. The he gave me tulips, his favorite flower and one of the symbols to the world of his family's native land, The Netherlands.


The first place we went was The Botanical Gardens in Denver, where we sat beside the Monet pond and ate fancy cheese and drank French wine and took pictures of water lilies.






From there, we went to the English style Queen Anne Bed & Breakfast in a historical area of Denver, a home that housed illegal alcohol production during Prohibition and belonged to a woman who was friends with the unsinkable Molly Brown.


After checking in, we left for another unidentified destination, but we got there this way. He rides these bikes all the time for work, and thought it would be fun to travel around town the way so many do over on the other side of the pond.


We rode to an Irish pub where we drank whiskey and listened to music and eavesdropped on old Irish men with old Irish accents.


Then we rode to the 16th Street mall, where we had dinner at Maggiano's. He'd made reservations and told them it was our anniversary, so we got the best booth in the place and free champagne. He ate everything. (I think he's really part Italian).


He timed everything so we would get back to the room just before sunset, which we watched from the hottub on the roof.


The next morning, we ate breakfast on the patio with the squirrels and the birds, then headed out again. He took me back to the central area of Denver, and before I knew it we were here.






This was all part of a traveling exhibit of the reproductions of the works of Michaelangelo and Da Vinci. It was amazing.

We finished up the day with fish and chips at the Tilted Kilt, then returned home to the land of broken dishwashers and constantly hungry children.

Someday we'll get to Europe for real, but for now, this will do.

Life has changed our plans, but I wouldn't trade this for the world.