I recently reconnected with one of my oldest friends in this life. I started writing about this lady introducing me to my first ever taco, but it turned into so much more. I had to do a rewrite.
The Bridgers lived across the street from my grandparents, and our two families have known each other for generations. The only child of Barney and Vivian was a girl named Yeakel, and that girl of theirs has put a mark on my life and the lives of so many others. Yeakel is about 10 years younger than my dad and not quite 15 years older than me.
As the story goes, she used to bug my dad in the way a little sister might. If you know Yeakel, that isn’t a tough scenario to imagine. I, as a little guy, had the biggest crush on Yeakel.
She always took time to talk to me, and she showed an interest in what I was up to. It was this kind of relationship that led to my first ever taco. I was probably 6 or 7 years old the day Yeakel saw me playing in the front yard and asked if I wanted to go have a taco.
I readily accepted the invitation, even though I had zero idea what a taco was. If Yeakel was asking, I was going. The first time a taco hit my taste buds was in a restaurant called “El Burrito” on Broad Street in downtown Gadsden, Alabama.
“A taco is like a Mexican hamburger,” Yeakel explained as we made our way into the open front of the first of many Mexican restaurants I would enter. Terracotta tiles adorned the floor, rising to a beautiful painting of a man in a sombrero leading a.