Tacos on Thursday

And the quest for tradition.

Thursdays represent a welcome weekly milestone in the Caribbean dispatch of the Stormon household. We lean into the end of the week a little earlier than most and venture down to a rundown Mexican joint for cheap tacos and cheaper booze. 

The scene is the same, or close enough every week. 

The kitchen staff and servers play dominoes when there’s no one to cook for. The owner, Louis, reads the paper at the bar and shares photos of when his kids were the same age as Maala (they now have kids of their own). 

Maala plays with her trucks or teaches other kids how to sing The Wheels on the Bus if they’re willing. Meanwhile, her mother and I gingerly sip tart margaritas that are strong enough to jumpstart a mini-van and wait for our order of Chimichanga and two-for-one double-decker tacos. 

We sit, we eat, we sip, we toast the spiritual end of the week. 

We still churn through our work on Friday but said work is conducted with about as much hustle as pair of sepia-toned sunglasses. We set our to-do lists knowing full well that if they make it to the end of the day complete, it’s a bonus, and that the bottom third will likely be waiting for us come Monday morning. 

Such is the nature of work. There’s always more to do.

There are other, arguably better Mexican restaurants we could frequent on Thursday, all not far from our house on the hill. Perhaps at those jaunts, the tacos are more traditional, the seating is a little more open, and the vibe a little more energetic. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never been. 

There’s no need. 

Our Thursday spot does the trick. 

That’s the thing about traditions. They only become so when you do something over and over again. 

I’ve been thinking a lot more about traditions and how they form memories to look back on and spawn stories to tell. In a way, it’s all we’re really here to do: have fun, enjoy the good times, ride out the bad, make some memories, share them with others. 

Amid the riff-raff of life—with all the things to see, places to go, food to eat, errands to run, to-do lists to do, work to work, and experiences to have—the only way to slow down the swirling blur of life is to focus on making memories from time to time. 

It’s not all that hard. Pay attention to the good times and the bad, the nostalgic and the joyful, carve out space in your head and tuck them away.

The memories of adventure and wild times, of unique places and far-out experiences are easy to remember. They forever hold a tight grip on the nooks and crannies of one’s mind, ready to emerge at the faintest prompt, be it a smell, taste, the color of sunset, or the feeling of a particular type of beer in your hand.

Those memories are as easy as they are welcome. 

But the other memories—those of no-consequence, of long nights and easy days where nothing extraordinary happened but the ordinary is extraordinary anyway—are the memories I’m interested in. 

Capturing the little nuances of what our life is like, so we can revisit it one day when we’re up late sipping on whiskey and thinking about how we got wherever we’ll be. 

This mundaneness of life makes up the story I’ll tell Maala about one day. When she’s older and she wants to know what life was like ‘back then.’ 

There’ll be photos, sure. Videos, too. But while they share a glimpse of what everything looked like, the memory comes with what it all felt like. 

And so we make those memories every week, every chance we get. Around the grill, the dinner table, at the beach, on walks to the post office, somewhere else neither here nor there. 

And on Thursdays at the taco shop.