SoMa Literary Review - Taqueria Tranquilo

Taqueria Tranquilo

By Julie Dearborn

San Francisco is a place where everything except traffic during rush hour moves rapidly. We live our lives in a hurry here, rushing from appointment to appointment, walking fast, heels pounding on the pavement like hammers. There are lines for everything: purchases of laundry soap, bathrooms in movie theaters, morning cups of coffee. Customers and servers become partners in a kind of relay race; the order or purchase a baton passed from customer to server and then back to customer. When we participate in one of these races we strive to achieve our personal best. To be efficient. To get the job done. To help each other move on to the next thing. There is an unwritten rule that forbids any but the most perfunctory verbal exchange.

“May I help you?”

“A double, on-fat latte to go with no foam and chocolate on top”

“Two dollars please.”

“Thank you.”

I pay and within minutes my morning beverage appears on the counter. I grab it and run out the door.

Though I often complain about the rushed quality of my life and allegedly yearn for a slower rhythm, with more time for human contact, if I do not get my morning coffee within five minutes of ordering it, and if the barista should stop to chat with me, or God forbid, with the customer in front of me, I do not feel grateful for the reprieve from my frantic pace. I do not think, “Oh how delightful; I feel like I’m on vacation in a slower more gracious culture. I am really going to stop and savor this moment.”

No, I do not think this. I think, “Give me my coffee now or I am going to hurt you. Don’t you know I am in a hurry you incompetent idiot.” I do not speak these words but I roll my eyes and try to communicate them through body language.

This is a fact to my life; it is the way things are. My personality has been honed by speed. Impatience has become a virtue.

But one recent Saturday morning, I found myself in a neighborhood far from my own. One that required me to take two busses from my apartment in the Richmond District, with its foggy beauty, its Chinese restaurants, its Russian Delicatessens. I spent almost an hour traveling before I arrived in Bernal Heights , where it is sunny and warm and there is a small taqueria. I decided, when it was lunchtime, to go to this taqueria and order a chicken taco. Of course I have eaten in taquerias in the Mission District, where the food may be authentically Mexican, but the pace is decidedly American. Where the burritos and tacos are assembled with the speed and precision of a German car.

This place is different. The women behind the counter smiled genuinely and I smiled back. They spoke English to the customers but Spanish to each other. The shorter of the two took my order. Her voice was low, her movements graceful. She did not race. Something in the way she said “one moment please” was calming.

I walked outside carrying a coke in a bottle and I sat on a wooden bench with a view of the church across the street. The sun was very hot and it got hotter as I waited … one, two, three, four... I stopped counting after five minutes and imagined that I was in Mexico . This was made easy by the store next door selling Mexican crafts and pottery and by the Spanish speaking people who strolled by at regular intervals.

It did not really take that long to get my taco. Maybe ten minutes. Fifteen at the most. But it felt longer, because of the heat, the relaxed pace of the people on the sidewalk, the muffled sound of something being pounded inside the taqueria mixing with the sound of a song sung in Spanish on someone’s radio. The coke tasted delicious, as only coke in a bottle sipped in the hot sun can taste, with beads of water rolling smoothly, sensuously down curves of glass.

When my taco came, the corn tortilla was homemade and dense, the tomatoes bright red and dripping juice, the cilantro fresh, the chicken savory. By this time, the sun was burning through my black jeans and I had lost most of my hunger. It was okay, though, because I realized I had not once felt like strangling the women who had made me wait.

Julie Dearborn has an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her essays have appeared in the online journals, Narrative Magazine and Summerset Review. Her prose poetry has appeared in The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry.