Chipotle Fundraiser, this Tuesday, December 5
Your friendly neighborhood PTO considers The Burrito.
The Protein
If you order from the Chipotle in the Barracks Road shopping center this coming Tuesday, December 5, from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., the Johnson Elementary PTO will get a cut of the proceeds. Please refer to the flyer below for instructions. Here’s a handy link to their online ordering platform—just make sure you’re ordering from (and picking up from) the 953 Emmet Street location, and use the code 264TMN4.
Now, The Other Stuff
When I was in college, way back in [REDACTED], my favorite place to eat was a burrito quick-serve restaurant called Barberitos. (Sorry, Chipotle, but you didn’t have a location in my old college town back then. Also, the nearest Barberitos is like 200 miles away, so we’re not exactly talking about the competition, here.) Back then Barberitos only had the one location, though they’ve now franchised themselves into several southeastern states—as the seeming goal of all singular, wonderful, American things is to become somewhat less good in the hopes of achieving ubiquity. (Chipotle obviously excepted. Please eat there on Tuesday.)
Barberitos was the first place I ever had one of those giant Mission-style burritos. My best friend and I would meet there for lunch a couple of times a week, and probably once or twice more for dinner, too. I can still feel the heavy door of that first downtown location pulling on my hand—a door since replaced with glass and aluminum, no doubt, to better match the sleek and modern and gleaming appearance of every other strip-mall rectangle selling cell phone service or fast food or whatever from here to there, all personality and uniqueness market-tested into oblivion in favor of that which inoffensively moves the most product—and I can still hear the ambient rumble of the place on a quiet Wednesday afternoon between classes, my friend and I sitting there picking at the remains of our chips and salsa and fluently alternating between topics of Unimaginable Import and Utterly Inane Nonsense, equally certain of everything along the way. We were nineteen, is what I’m saying.
I took my kids there a couple of years ago on a visit to my old college town, and behind the garish new color scheme and the new cartoon mascot was the same basic food, the menu somehow both streamlined and more expansive than it had ever been back in the day. It was good. It filled our bellies. I had to finish Katie’s burrito for her, so that it wouldn’t go to waste. We still have the plastic to-go cups with the cartoon mascot printed on them. But, of course, it wasn’t the same.
Rationally, I know this is just how things are—that we get older, that you can never really go home again, that we remember things differently and more romantically through the haze of nostalgia—I know all this, but I still cannot help but suspect that the character of the thing itself has changed, right along with me. Perhaps it’s just me that’s soured, over the years, my expectations rising for some imagined past that never really existed, my own self demanding that I be disappointed in how things are now in order to preserve the beauty of before. Maybe things really are better with fifty locations and regimented consistency of product and a customer loyalty app and a corporate email address for customer feedback, rather than just talking to the person behind the counter. Or maybe something important was lost.
Or maybe not lost. Displaced, maybe. It’s somewhere. I suspect it’s just easier to find when you’re nineteen, the comfortable certainty that this place, wherever you happen to be, was made for you and your friends. I see the crowds of young college kids eating in all of the various gleaming aluminum and glass franchises around town and they seem to be having at least as good a time as I ever did, certainly.
In any event, on a cold Tuesday evening in December, I can think of no better way to feed myself and my kids than by picking up some overstuffed burritos from the local burrito purveyors over at the Chipotle on Emmet Street. We will take them home and sit at the table and have a conversation that is equal parts important and inane—strictly inane in content, of course, because they are nine and eleven and deeply silly people, but an important conversation nevertheless, for being had at all, together.
Enjoy your Chipotle! Thanks for reading.