Catholic Guilt
For reasons left unsaid, 2am on a Friday night appears to be a particularly good time to recount yet another family story.
The problem with me is that, while holding onto only a tiny modicum of morality, I was raised with a goodly amount of cultural Catholic guilt. Not the kind of guilt that comes from god, but the kind of guilt that comes from a uniquely Roman Catholics milieu.
To the story - it involves Manuel, the server for years untold at Abril, my family’s Mexican restaurant of choice since I was small. (Abril has since closed and remained, as far as I am able to tell from afar, a blank pariah on the corner of Kedzie and Logan.)
When I say since I was small, I mean biweekly visits since the age of four. The staff knew my gringa tinyness and then not so tinyness. And I always ordered strawberry milkshakes - because Abril made the best milkshakes ever to grace the face of the Earth.
Anyway, in the years of my not-so-tinyness, say about 16, Manuel made up my shake as usual. He placed on the top a maraschino cherry, an extra bonus to the strawberryey-milky wonderness.
Unfortunately, I’ve never been a fan of maraschino cherries.
I turned to my mother and asked, “Do you want this?” I perhaps, in my ignorance and youthful intolerance, made a face.
My mother looked up and indicated that Manuel - the lovely man who had taken me to the pinata when I was four - had seen my distaste for his cherry.
I nearly died.
I have had a similar feeling every time I think of the horrible moment in which I realized he’d seen my lack of appreciation. And disdain.
I’m not kidding. Perhaps a decade hence and the restaurant gone, I routinely think of Manuel’s face in the moment that I utterly ruined the nice thing he tried to do for me.
This caliber of small stuff ups still affect my psyche in a way that completely overstates their probable importance to those afflicted.
Let’s just say I haven’t changed.
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