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Thanks! – Katie

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J on her church group mission trip this week. (She got home last night and BOY was I glad to see her.)

E, with cousin M at Edisto Island, which is where the kids received the news that Henry had left us, Their father and stepmother (compliments of a dear, dear friend who has a company plane and is generous beyond words) flew them down to tell the children (I am too pregnant to fly) and then they all stayed together in the house my family had rented for vacation before all of this happened, letting the kids play with cousins and be loved on by various aunts and uncles before flying back together the day before Henry’s memorial service. Edisto has always been a special place to me, my kids and my family. Now it will be even more special. I hope to scatter some of Henry’s ashes there later this year or next summer. He loved it there very much.

Here are E and cousin M playing in the fountains in downtown Knoxville yesterday. The fountain drenching was part of a guys’ day that Jon had with them which if I understood correctly included Laser Tag, hot wings, fountains, Chucky Cheese and going to see the new Karate Kid movie. Basically my idea of a day from hell.

E fell alseep as soon as he got home. He was tiiiired. Today he leaves for sleepaway camp – the same camp Henry attended and loved (as well as lots of other family members).

Can you tell that their father and I, and stepparents (and aunts and uncles and dear friends) are trying to keep the kids busy, active and yet surrounded by a lot of support and love at the same time? It’s hard to know how we are doing in helping them through these early stages of their grief. Hell, it’s hard to know how I am getting through these early stages of my grief. (Is there sleepaway camp for hugely pregnant women who can’t stop weeping or writing?)

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(Photos by Caroline)

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E and cousins Mac and El with a tenacious NC clinging to her big sister’s leg. Look how tall El is getting! She’s 9 months YOUNGER than E is and she’s already 5’6″!

(FYI, my favorite NC quote recently is when I heard her tell C, “I am the princess ballerina and you are my VERY BAD SLAVE!”)

E and I caught some of the Dogwood Arts Parade on Friday night before we saw the movie “How to Train Your Dragon” at the theater on Gay Street. The movie was fantastic. Highly recommended. We had to park several blocks away because of parade traffic and I am so large now that poor E had to get behind me and sort of push me up one of the steeper streets in order to get us to the movie on time.

A skeptical looking J hanging out on the front porch last weekend.

J had a great week because she got to go to Sundown in the City (a really popular local outdoor concert series) with friends and NO adults for the first time ever. The girls had a great time.  Here they are right before I dropped them off downtown for the show.

C (who almost never gets sick) has been really under the weather the past few days with a nasty tummy virus. You can see her general mood in this photo. That’s pretty much been the look on her face for the past four days.

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When we moved to rural middle Tennessee in 1977, no Mexican food was to be found – anywhere. My mother couldn’t even prepare her own Mexican food very easily because the ingredients for even the simplest Mexican dishes just weren’t available at the Shelbyville, TN Kroger store circa late 70s/early 80s. She was able to find some salsa and tortillas, and she was able to make her own refried beans from pintos. While other families had sandwich fixins in the fridge, we always had the makings of a tasty, Bell Buckle-style burrito. And we consumed many of them.

Eventually there were Mexican restaurants in Nashville, an hour’s drive from our house. But it would be years before there was a real Mexican restaurant anywhere close to where we actually lived.

Enter Taco Bell.

Taco Bell came to a town closer than Nashville sometime in the first years after we moved to Bell Buckle. It was the closest thing my parents had seen to the fast food-style Mexican they had loved back in L.A. Not great, but close enough. So sometimes on the weekends, when my mother got a hankering for something other than our homemade burritos, we would all pile in the Datsun station wagon and head 20 miles up the road to the nearest Taco Bell, where I would gorge myself on a variety of tasty items, smothered in Taco Bell’s no-longer-available (damn you Taco Bell!) green sauce. As family finances and logistics made eating out at all a huge and rare treat for me as a child, these trips to Taco Bell were – dare I characterize a trip to a fast food restaurant in a strip mall this way? – quite special. In any event, they were memorable and pleasant times spent with the fam. So I became a Taco Bell fan early on.

Fast forward to college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where I spent the next five years with no car and no money. The Taco Bell within walking distance of campus, with its extensive menu of 99 cent items, became a staple, sometimes THE staple of my diet (the exception was during one period when my boyfriend worked at a nearby pizza restaurant called Stefano’s, during which I was able to consume massive quantities of free or discounted pizza and beer…). My love for Taco Bell only grew during the college years.

In other words, I have a long and storied history with The Bell. I have already run for the border approximately 65,998 times in my life span. So I was pleased to find when we bought our current house, in 2006, that a Taco Bell was located just two blocks away, in the parking lot of the infamous Fellini Kroger. Unfortunately, over the past several years, I have determined that just as there are “Bad Times” Locations for grocery stores, convenience marts and drug store chains, there are also Bad Times Locations for Taco Bell franchises. And our Taco Bell is clearly one of them.

For starters, the store is often less than clean. I usually use the drive thru, but on the rare occasions I go inside the place, I always have a sort of, “My eyes! They burn!” reaction, and I promise myself that I will never again risk my ability to eat the drive thru food by grossing myself out with a peek behind the curtain. When I use the drive thru, I can pretend the place is clean…enough. So that’s what I do. But even the exterior periphery of our Taco Bell is sketchy. I frequently encounter people in front of my in what is supposed to be the car line trying to walk thru, or even trying to beg the window cashiers for change. One time, as I was busy ordering at the drive thru window, my 11 year old daughter asked plaintively, “Mama, is that man dead?” and she pointed out to me that there was a man who did indeed appear to be deceased sprawled in the “decorative” landscaping that rings this Taco Bell’s exterior. I turned to the window cashier and pointed the man out to her, asking of she could please dial 911. She just shrugged and told me that “he sleeps there all the time.” I did end up calling 911 myself, and the responders came quickly, but they seemed familiar enough with the guy that all they did was poke him with some sort of long pole, at which point he got up, shook himself off and staggered away.

But the real problem with my neighborhood Taco Bell is with the food. They almost always get my order wrong to greater or lesser degree and/or the food just isn’t very good. How an individual Taco Bell can manage to ruin their formulaic menu items, I have no idea. But they do. I have recently calculated that it is only approximately one in every five to seven visits that my order is both A.) correct and B.)prepared in a way consistent with other Taco Bells I have visited. And those times when the food is correctly prepared and my order is accurate aren’t necessarily the same times. I’ve learned with this Taco Bell to just eat whatever happens to turn up in my bag once I get it home. If I ordered three crunchy tacos, but instead find myself in possession of a crunch wrap supreme and an apple caramel empenada, I just eat what they gave me. It’s less trouble than returning and trying to correct the order (an ordeal that’s worthy of its own blog post altogether). As far as the food quality, it’s rarely inedible, but it’s often close.

So why in the world do I keep going back to this Taco Bell at least once a week? Well, I’ve been asking myself this as well. I’ve decided that it’s a combination of laziness (it’s nearby and thus, convenient), warm childhood memories, and a type of Pavlovian response. What I mean with that last reason is that it is five to seven times more likely that my order will be wrong/bad than it will be right/good, I am clearly motivated psychologically – even conditioned – to continue buying food from this Diane Arbus Taco Bell in front of the Fellini Kroger by those rare and completely random occasions when the food is tasty and my order is correct.

In other words, I am like one of those piano playing chickens in a box at the state fair. I keep pecking the keys because I know that eventually I will be rewarded with what I really want. I may get the electric shock five times in a row, but I keep going back for more in hopes that the next time will be the time that I get the tasty treat instead. It’s kind of pathetic, actually.

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Snapshot #2 – Me, checking out at the Fellini Kroger, two or three blocks from our house. As the check out guy bags up my purchases, he complains vociferously about the raw chicken juice that apparently dripped all over his hands from the last customer’s leaky meat purchase. As he complains, he alternately wipes his greasy hands on his shirt and then runs them through his hair.

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