Writing Archive

The THANKSGIVING BURRITO

Right now, my neighbors from Belize are cooking something on the back porch that smells so much more spicy and delicate than turkey, their Soca beats and breaks bleeding through the floorboards like elaborately simmered aromas. Greeks and cops at A&T Grill across the street dig into holiday omelets, potato pancakes, irresistible sausage ’n’ egg combos. I plan my own special festivus-flavored tradition of the Great Thanksgiving Burrito.

Many thanks to the fates for delivering Mexicans in particular unto the shores and kitchens of this land of plenty, so that they could in turn pepper expatriates and taco-dinners across the City in a Garden to make me feel a part of life’s grandest of dispensations.

Still thankful in some other time and place, my grandmother prepares frozen-processed biscuits and canned jellied hams, as my sister and I sit sprawled and goggle-eyed with Macy’s-parade floats; rose-bowl-colored cranberries and fiesta confetti; pumpkins, poinsettias, and Plymouth Rock; cornucopias spewing the contentment of all tomorrow’s tamales.

Many thanks to the tidal whims and spinning fortune-wheels of blind, dumb luck for granting me the chance and realization of a job-for-life teaching, reading, writing, thinking, and sharing with some of the greatest students in this will-o’-the-wisp Windy City.

I share a sense of displacement, memories of a world lost and family left behind, a timeworn homeland that exists in my mind like Narnia or Oz, and the American hopes and dreams embodied in my grandmother’s Thanksgivings, communicated in the words without true translation by which she named our holiday: el día de dar gracias…

Thanks for who I am, delivered whole with half-and-half hybrid cultures of Texas, Spanglish as my grand-mother tongue, off-color-pastel taste of home-spun worth, Carmen-Lomas-Garza hue and deep-brown shade, knit into a fabric of pure providence to find myself a product of trans-border experience and blood, the off-colorings of duty-free bootleg cultura from this side as much as that, both familiar and familial, welcome to me in my most private mental drawing rooms off elongated hallways of reminiscence.

I revel in the promises, the hopes of the Thanksgiving Burrito. I sing its praises and flaunt its flour in the face of adversity. I lift hands to the heavens in thanks for this wondrous symbol of adaptation and multi-culinary/cultural transubstantiation. I whisper in eerie, hushed Latin at its mysteries.

Many thanks spread from the foothills of Palo Alto to the Loyola lakeshore for my education and its fanciful excesses, its realization of dreams — the delicacies of Dostoevsky and Derrida as rare treats denied those before me, the thrilling solitude of reciting Byron out loud and traveling “in the realms of gold … many goodly states and kingdoms seen” upon first reading Keats, now “silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

And to return home, if for a meal, with the Great Thanksgiving Burrito.

Many and more thanks for family, faith, and breath.