Dreamed Beginnings

36 weeks yesterday, and last night I dreamed about the Tex Mex place we used to go when I was a kid. It opened in the 1920s, in a faux-Spanish fort style building in a neighborhood in Houston that by the time I was born had become the center of gay nightlife. It was up the street from a leather daddy bar called "Mary's," which a painted mural on the side of men in police caps with curly hair on their chests. The man who opened the restaurant was a major figure in Houston Tejano politics, albeit a conservative, a proponent of assimilation and civic engagement. He died in the 1960s, and there were pictures of him in the front turret-shaped room of the restaurant, black and white with that perfect smooth skin of pictures taken in the 1940s. His wife continued to run it, a tiny Mexican woman, less than five feet tall, and we would sometimes see her outside under a giant umbrella, shooing people out of her parking lot who weren't customers. It never occurred to me to wonder how she could tell who were customers and who weren't. Maybe it was the leather.

The restaurant closed about a decade ago. Reportedly, is the first restaurant I ever visited in my life, placed in a baby carrier in the center of the table like a flower arrangement. We sat in the smoking section, because my father smoked and it was 1977. Another thing I accepted as fact without questioning: Anglo Texans have Tex-Mex restaurant affiliations that are non-negotiable, as engraved in stone as college football affiliations. You are either a Longhorn or an Aggie. You cannot be both. And your family either eats at Molina's or Felix's, or the Ninfa's on Navigation. You are welcome to visit these other places, of course, but you always pick one when given the option, and usually it's not up for discussion. My best friend growing up was from a Ninfa's family. My first boyfriend in seventh grade was from a Molina's family. But I am from a Felix's family. Are we still a Felix's family, now that Felix's is gone? Hard to know. Some of their recipes, and the imported Mexican chairs - bright colors, bolt upright, scratchy rattan seats, mismatched - that used to be in the dining room, pulled up to tables with white tablecloths topped with glass against the encroachment of glops of greasy queso and hot sauce, are now in a throwback restaurant up the street called El Real.

I go to El Real sometimes. But it's like a museum of Tex Mex, rather than a Tex Mex restaurant. The staff wear ironic t-shirts that refer to lard. The menu is winking, and has cute names for stuff. On top of the menu, in quotes, it says "hot plate," which is a nod to the warning usually delivered in the past by an exhausted Mexican man in a white waiter's jacket, sliding a platter of refried beans and rice and tacos with iceberg lettuce in front of you with a napkin on the edge, because the plate has been sitting under a heat lamp for who knows how long and the ceramic will burn your hands. El Real is the closest I can get to Felix's queso now. It's almost the same. Maybe it is the same, and I'm the one who has changed. The city has changed. All is as it should be. Mrs. Tirinja died years ago, around the same time as the AIDS crisis decimated Mary's and there was less jockeying for parking in the Felix Mexican Restaurant parking lot. I'd have liked to have taken Succotash there, put him on the center of the table like a flower arrangement and wafting queso under his tiny nose. But his life with be studded by other nostalgias that, in time, will rightfully pass. It will be his life, he is leading. Not mine. He won't even be Texan.

Mr. Guac and my doula have agreed that it would be pretty boss to bring me a fresh lime margarita with salt rim in the hospital after Succotash is born. I hope they do it. That would be amazing. A tiny nod to the power of memory, and of change.