I am informed by some spammy email in my Outlook that today is “National Taco Day,” which I have confirmed by checking in with Google.

Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Four_tacos_from_Santa_Rosa_Taqueria.jpg

In honor of the occasion, I want to share a quick memory. I don’t know why—because, really, who cares what “National Taco Day” makes me remember? But that’s the great thing about having a blog, you know? Having the ability to inflict my musings on the world at large anytime I feel like it, lol.

But FYI, and for whatever it’s worth: I happen to know that the first Taco Bell restaurant ever to open up east of the Mississippi River was located at 2100 E. Main Street in Springfield, Ohio, and began operating in 1968. How do I know this (and now you do, too!)?

My grandmother, who spent much of her childhood in New Mexico, lived in Springfield for much of her adult life and ate at that Taco Bell every day for lunch. Sometimes if she had us kids with her, for whatever reason, she would treat us to lunch at Taco Bell, too.

I loved going there. Grandma was friends with the owner, Jim Lopez, and he seemed to be working in the restaurant himself every time we went. That’s kind of amazing when you think about it from today’s perspective: The owner worked in his restaurant, side by side with his employees—making the food, greeting the customers, and keeping the place clean (tables, seats, floors wiped down).

And the food was AMAZING! I don’t think that’s just the fondness of nostalgia speaking.

My favorite item on the menu was the “enchirito,” which as the name implies was a cross between an enchilada and a burrito. My second favorite (and my grandmother’s favorite) was the “spicy burrito,” which was wrapped in a flour tortilla and contained beans, cheese, possibly onions, and a green sauce. It was fabulous, and apparently it may be available right now (at least at one Chicago-area Taco Bell) as some kind of retro/throwback (see the Taco Bell website HERE).

In the process of just now discovering that Taco Bell has reintroduced the green burrito as part of its “Decades” promotion, at least for a limited time, I also found that the enchirito was similarly reintroduced briefly a couple years ago, but is no longer available (tragic, and the story of my life: finding things out TOO LATE!).

So back to that first Taco Bell in Springfield, Ohio. I’m sure it didn’t take long for other Taco Bells to open up east of the Mississippi after the success of that first restaurant. But for a while, it was the only Mexican restaurant around. Most people had never even heard of tacos. My junior high social studies teacher, during our study of Mexico, called frijoles “FRIJ-i-joles.” Not sure I conveyed his pronunciation well enough. He said the word “fridge,” followed by the short “i” sound, followed by “joles” (rhymes with moles). So almost zero familiarity with Mexican food at that time in the Midwest.

Yet, thanks to Grandma and that first-east-of-the-Mississippi Taco Bell, we knew all about burritos and frijoles and tostadas.

So what?

Well, life experiences are funny that way. Do you remember the movie Slumdog Millionaire? The plot centers around a young man who is advancing to increasingly higher levels on the quiz show and is accused of cheating because he knows the answers to questions that someone of his background would not be expected to know. Most of the film comprises scenes from his background that not only explain how he acquired his knowledge of each item but also tell the story of his life through each of these hard-acquired “lessons.”

I’ve come by a lot of my knowledge of the world in odd ways from strange sources, as well. Part of the fun in noting trivial things like “National Taco Day,” for me, is the associations they trigger. Part of who I am was formed at that Taco Bell.

It made an impression on me that when Grandma walked into that restaurant, the owner greeted her by name. It made a similar impression that I knew the correct pronunciation of words that my social studies teacher mangled in front of the class.

I wrote about a scene in the movie Working Girl several weeks ago in a post about connection-making and a new engineering/science fabrication technique (“Bloom Patterns“) inspired by a student’s love for origami. The particular scene I described was the one in which Tess thwarts her boss’s attempt to steal credit for her business idea by explaining how she conceived of it in the first place by putting together elements from wildly different sources. With her night school college education and her job as a secretary, Tess has been condescended to by bosses and managers throughout the film.

But Tess is smart. When she suggests serving dim sum dumplings at a work function and mentions that she’s been reading about them in W (a fashion magazine), a snooty colleague of her boss sneers, “You read W?”—the implication being that Tess, a Staten Island girl with the accent to prove it and a wardrobe to match, couldn’t possibly be reading an “in”-crowd publication like W.

Tess keeps her cool, though. Her response (and the setup for her later moment of triumph at the film’s climax) is blunt and simple:

I read a lot of things. I mean, you never know where the big ideas could come from. You know?

This is the way things work in my life—and probably yours, too. You never know where the big ideas could come from. Nothing is truly trivial. Every little factoid is a piece of the bigger puzzle. As Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford University commencement address in 2005:

[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.  So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.  You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.  This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

So, happy National Taco Day to you! Today happens to be Taco Tuesday, as well. Let’s all go out there and engage with the important things in life. No one knows what they are yet, so just be open to everything 🙂

Sources for the Springfield Taco Bell info:

Article from the Springfield News-Sun, dated August 9, 2023: https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/first-taco-bell-east-of-the-mississippi-springfielders-remember-citys-original-run-for-the-border/AKH23VXSA5GM3PB3WSOLHOLBH4/

Wikipedia article on Taco Bell, with AI-assisted close-up emphasis on the specific Springfield, Ohio, Taco Bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taco_Bell#:~:text=The%20first%20Taco%20Bell%20restaurant,located%20in%20California%20and%20Colorado.