Eulogy for the Taco Bell Mexican Pizza
My daughter was in bed, covering her ears, hoping I would stop talking already, when I said, “Change is part of life.” The woman who had served as her caretaker for the last several years had unexpectedly gotten very sick and died. This was our children’s first exposure to death, and I was trying to explain. “But no matter what happens, no matter what happens, my love for you will always the there, always the same.”
I don’t know that she was buying what I was selling. She rolled over to go to sleep. She had had enough.
When she was a wee baby, I would read to her, “Wherever You Are, My Love Will Find You.” In the hormone haze of post pregnancy, I would hold my sweet baby and sob — because of course there would be a time when I wasn’t here for her. And how wonderful a message that no matter what happens, my love would be there for her, a happy haunting. She would lie there in my arms, blissfully ignorant of her mother’s dark thoughts. Now the poor child is old enough, and she understands all the anxious words that come out of my mouth, like “There is no Santa, I AM SANTA!”
This is one thing that has happened recently — the death of my children’s caretaker, and I have yet to fully process because the onslaught of daily life continues, a runaway train. She was such a nice lady, and I always just rang her doorbell, picked up the kids and left. There was never time for a real conversation. And I know now that’s not true; we owe it to each other to take time for real conversations.
The other thing that has happened recently is yesterday’s news that Taco Bell is pulling the Mexican Pizza from its menu. These may seem related only in the proximity of events, but the horror I felt at seeing this piece of information on my news feed caused a similar gut wrenching protest, every fiber in my being crying, no, enough, STOP.
I remember seeing a commercial for the Mexican Pizza in the 80s, when I still kind of believed in Santa, and saying to my bother — oh we’ve got to try that! I remember finally getting to try this Mexican Pizza, a food which combined two of my most favorite things: pizza and Taco Bell. It was delightful. The flaky crunch of the shell, the tang of the sauce, the creamy refried beans. Love in my tummy.
When we moved to LA from the Inland Empire for my dad’s new job, I lost a lot of the world I had known, including my next door neighbor and best friend. It was an anxious time for a nine-year-old girl, but I can remember very clearly driving past the Taco Bell on Beverly Blvd. and thinking, There is hope. In the 90s, my teen years when my body was a fast burning furnace, this was my food of choice. I would harangue my mother until she would finally relent to driving down to the Taco Bell on Beverly Blvd., down by the mall. I always ate it a little too fast to savor it.
In the time before I was ever acquainted with death, with loss, with the inevitable heartbreak that comes right alongside the good things in life, when I felt a certain invincibility and certainty about the world, before we all become conscious to the point of disordered eating of the food we put into our bodies, I ate a lot of Mexican pizza. So Mexican pizza — right along with my the stability of my parents, close friendships I had yet to lose — was always there: predicable, enjoyable, certain.
The last few years have been brutal (we’ve said this sentence aloud too many times). I’ve felt that aliens have invaded the White House, and my husband continues right along in an unshattered parallel universe, saying things along the lines of, well haven’t there always been aliens in the White House? It’s taken me awhile to understand some people are not wired to process events quite the same way I am. People will write books about this time. Lots of books. Will I be around to tell my daughter my version of this time in history when she is studying it in college, or when her children are in school? Will my daughter ever be able to attend school in person again? All those birthday parties I complained about — I take it back, I take it all back!! I’m so sorry for my previous bad attitude. Make it stop.
The last Mexican pizza I ate, I was in a different season of change — pregnant with my son. I was laid very low by morning sickness and fatigue and had hard a time keeping food down. I got a craving for my childhood comfort food and drove myself desperately to the drive thru. The experience of speaking into a squaky box to place my order was by then foreign, pulling up to receive a plastic bag of what I no longer considered to be real food, thrill inducing. Counterintuitively, Mexican Pizza stayed down. After all those years, it tasted mostly exactly the same: the crunch, the salt, the mild spicy tang. This was in the time before, late 2015, the time before.
My husband, who often does not react to any sort of news I share about what is going on with the world - well, when I told him about the Mexican Pizza being taken off the menu, he expressed an actual emotion. He, too, was horrified at what the world seems to be coming to, the incredible, ineffable loss. It might even be fair to say he was more upset than I am. He uttered whole sentences in reaction. That’s just wrong, he said. I used to eat those two at time! In my heyday, me too. Even in the news of its demise, the Mexican Pizza is finding ways to transcend, to bring me joy.
My own rather embarrassing attachment to the Mexican Pizza has me finally confronting a wall of emotion so wide and so tall. I’m going to do another tacky, thoughtless thing and mix metaphors: this wall is the elephant in the room. Change is inevitable, this change we did not see coming, did not sign up for, or invite, this change which is something that happens to us and over which we don’t really have agency, this change which has us questioning fundamentals of human existence — and our individual role in the collective experience. What exactly do we have the power to change anyway? It is always something that happens to us?
The largeness of the pandemic has had me at times feeling extra small. But isn’t it our love that makes things big and important and…. powerful? I think of my love for my daughter and son and the family my husband and I have built. Discovering that my husband, though certain things he refuses to talk about, is a better multi-tasker than I am, gladly taking on the majority of our daughter’s one million school-related questions during his workday. The love of my parents, who remain in good health and I finally get to see next week. And I think of the things that will continue to haunt me in a good way, though they have fallen prey to an ever yawning land of things past. You may be gone, Mexican pizza, but not forgotten. My love for you will always be there, bigger than life and forever true. Cheese alert. Love is: my husband getting us Mexican Pizzas for lunch today.
