Food, drink, memory

Food, drink, memory

We stopped in for a quick dinner before our long drive back into the Hill Country. 

The waitress was young and friendly and we liked being back where we had enjoyed many lunches and dinners in the past, when the place had another owner and name. The new menu was ambitious, less regional. As we ate our dinner, we were grateful for such good food and service.

As I lurched toward the ladies' room (the building slants several discernible degrees as it has done for the past 70 plus years) past the bar where a few couples sat eating, I suddenly realized I was older than any of the customers or waitstaff, and had known the building before anyone else in the whole restaurant had been born. My memories of the place stretched back to the trio of fellows who moved here from California to open the restaurant in the early 1980's and who set the bar (no pun intended) so high for the present owner. 

I marveled that I had been a witness to a history of a sort, and that so many memories of the place still lingered and meant so much. I thought of the San Antonio celebrities I had run across there in years past: Susie and my brother Israel and I had had the interesting aural surprise one warm Sunday afternoon to hear the voice of the actor Tommy Lee Jones booming from behind us while entertaining his friends over lunch.  I had watched the El Paso writer Dagoberto Gilb duck paying his dinner tab late on a Saturday night while there with writers from Macondo Workshop with Sandra Cisneros. The last time I had walked past the bar there was three years ago when I spotted a handsome and gifted photographer looking much older catching me staring and and probably thinking the same thing about me.

What is great about a place to eat and drink and be with friends is the odd and out-of-focus movie that whirls like a Fellini film. There is a drunkenness that comes from the alcoholic spirits, but also from the people's spirits rising in conversation, storytelling and laughter.  The door opens to new arrivals and waiters in white shirts escort them to tables, all new players on the tilting floorboards of the restaurant turned into impromptu theater. Friends amble by, stop and say hello, and the rooms are charged with smoke and sounds, aromas and energy-- gossip and news, discussion and persuasion. Squeeze past two overcrowded tables, chortles, hey waiter, can I have a slice of Virginia Green's chocolate cake, please?

I sat in the glow of the neon rimmed window where I had sat for many dinners over the decades and remembered the times when for a few minutes the old orb we lived and loved and labored on was transformed to a planet friendlier than before, and even how it traversed the sky changed from straight across to samba shuffle.  I could almost hear the little slanted restaurant's chatter, chairs shuffling and riffs of laughter. Good luck to Minnie's Tavern. You have big shoes to fill at the old Liberty Bar.