Many years ago, when I was in fifth grade, I'd never eaten Mexican food. There were not Mexican restaurants all over the place, like there are now, and fast food places were really just starting to get off the ground.
Anyway, I read an article at school about enchiladas and tacos and various other staples of Mexican cuisine, and I wanted to try it. But no one in my family had ever really eaten Mexican food before either. So my mother bought me a Swanson Mexican TV dinner, just one, just for me, so I could try it, and so everyone else could watch.
And it was good. It was delicious, in fact. There were two tamales, one enchilada, refried beans, nice Mexican rice, and just enough hot sauce to cover the tamales. I ate. And I smiled. And my dad, my mother, my brother, my sister, everyone...they all saw me smile. So my mom, bless her heart, began to buy them for me fairly often, and eventually our whole family began eating Mexican food, going out to Mexican restaurants, and making tacos, taco salad, burritos, chicken enchildas, et al, at home.
I never cared much for TV dinners, but you know, I always had a soft spot in my heart for Swanson Mexican dinners. Over the years, I would occasionally buy myself one just to bask once again in that warm little comfortable glow of happy bygone days. But you don't see them everywhere, and you don't see them very often.
Well, anyway, a few months back, while grocery shopping at a store I don't normally frequent, I happened to find some. So with a little smile on my face, I picked one up and took it home. An evening or two later, I pulled it out of the freezer, turned on the oven, popped open the box, and....
And...
And imagine my disappointment to see that after all these years, Swanson had downsized their product. There was no longer any hot sauce. The rice and beans were no longer two separate portions, but one...one single homogenous side, all mixed together, with half as much of each. The tamales, instead of being four good-sized bites apiece, were now only two. Everything was smaller and less. The whole meal, I now read on the package label, was about 3.5 to 5 ounces lighter than it used to be.
I'm normally a fairly resilient person, but I was filled with sadness to see this. Something that was once, admittedly, a minor pleasure, but perfect in its own way, now degraded and lessened, now made meager and small, with the implicit understanding that it would never ever again return to its former glory, to its prime, to its previous height of pleasurable perfection.
This hollow sensation, this sensation of something once good that has suddenly become something less, this nostalgic regret, this taste of faintly bitter ashes at something once so full of comfortable, familiar flavors, this sense of "the sweet spot" now passing away and lost forever...this is the same sensation I feel when I see your name beside the header of so many messages on this board. |
