You Can’t Go Back to Naugles

I’m in Visalia, in central California. I had a court appearance for a client. It’s done.

I thought I’d get lunch. Brother Peter used to practice law here, so I called him for a lunch-restaurant recommendation. He gave me big news: there’s a Naugles here.

My friends from Colton and Grand Terrace will remember Naugles. It was a fast-food restaurant on Valley Boulevard. I loved it as a teenager, and so did my friends. We delighted to scarf down Macho-Meat burritos and Macho-Combo burritos. Their burgers tasted better than burgers that I can remember from any other fast-food restaurant.

Naugles comes with good memories. Like going through the drive-through with a car-load of friends and ordering for everybody with a Dracula voice.

So I was excited to find out that there was a Naugles in Visalia. Well, not a Naugles. The Naugles chain was sold to Del Taco long ago. But the Naugles company kept a stand here in Visalia. It’s called BT’s Grill.

Never mind the name-change: it was a connection to my youth. I searched for it, with general directions from my brother. I almost gave up, but I spied it almost by chance.

Inside, I mentioned to the counter-woman that I was an old-time customer of Naugles, from my youth in Southern California. She confirmed that this stand was owned by Naugles. She wanted to know where I had been a customer when I was young. I swear, I had to pause as I spoke because I became choked up with the memory.

I studied the menu-sign looking for the menu-items from my memory. There was no "Macho Combo Burrito". There was no "Macho Meat Burrito". Never mind. I looked for menu items that had the ingredients that I remembered. The meat burrito looked close. I ordered it and an iced tea, paid, and waited.

I guess that a sentimental end of this story would have been that I bit into my burrito and swooned, taken back to a time before I was twenty by the taste of my present meal. Memories of Yellowjackets football games in the Yellowjackets stadium would have bubbled up. I would have remembered hanging with my friends in a shoulder-to-shoulder circle in the open space in front of the student store and next to Mr. Bridges’s classroom. Watching the drill team practice, and hearing band practice from outside the band room. Working out with the swim team. CDB.

But it wasn’t that.

The burrito tasted – different and disappointing. I looked inside of it. It looked the same. I remember onions. It didn’t have onions. And the sauce was bland compared to what I remember. Otherwise, it was pretty much the same, but somehow very different.

Sometimes, going back to a place you once knew does disappoint. Twenty-some years ago, I worked at the Pasadena branch of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. Sometimes my business would take me back to the Pasadena courthouse, and I would drop by. For a while, I was greeted like an old friend. Then less so. Finally, I realized that I was to the strangers there just an unknown person who showed up without any apparent business. So I stopped going.

I used to own a house in Pasadena. Someone else owns it now. And no doubt they are so accustomed to their own possession of it that that they can't imagine it owned by someone else. It would be strange to them to think about someone like me whom they’ve never met who once walked sleepy and barefoot from the back bedroom to the living room, as they do today.

So I know that the world changes. But so do I. I’m not the boy who ordered food for himself and for his friends with a Dracula voice. My tastes have changed; that might be one reason why the burrito did not seem the same. Are my tastebuds more sophisticated, or just different? Who knows?

But also, the world today is not the world of my 18-year-old self.

Every day we wake up in a brave new world. Hopefully, we’re brave with it.