In search of Anita, and also myself

It was 4:15pm on Friday — time to go pick up food for my now-8-year-old’s birthday dinner.

By his request, it would come from Anita’s, the Mexican food truck at 103rd and Aurora. It would be an easy pickup; almost everybody wanted arroz con pollo, and there was adequate time to get there and back by the target dinner time of 5pm. The one wrinkle was that the birthday boy was currently playing a game on my phone. Should I chance a trip without it?

Well, I thought, I’m a functional adult, aren’t I? I can navigate familiar streets using my brain, can’t I?

Off I went, phone-less.

Traffic on Aurora was heavy, but I only had to go a couple of miles. Or did I? As I approached 103rd, it seemed that Anita’s had vanished. I had been without my phone for less than ten minutes, and panic was already setting in.

I parked and went into a Mexican grocery store right next to where Anita’s was supposed to be. I bought a Diet Coke (the part of the order that could easily be obtained elsewhere) and asked the cashier about Anita’s. She came outside with me and pointed down the sidewalk at a sandwich-board sign. I thanked her, walked down the block, and found that the sign was for a Mexican restaurant (not a food truck, not named Anita’s).

My desperation rising, I didn’t purchase anything there but cut to the chase: do YOU know where Anita’s food truck is? Their English was limited, but a guy walked me back out to the sidewalk and conveyed that there was one food truck 7 blocks south of us and another 9 blocks north of us.

I got back in the car and drove further south on Aurora, checking half-heartedly to see if Anita’s new location was 7 blocks away. It wasn’t, though there was a food truck there. My thinking and my driving were getting less decisive. What now? I supposed I should head to El Camion, the food truck next to Home Deport that we had previously used when Anita’s was closed. Ben would be disappointed, though; he never raved about the El Camion rice…

I resignedly turned around and headed north again on Aurora. In approaching 109th I noticed another food truck on the west side. The other promised food truck — and this one WAS Anita’s. I awkwardly moved into the left lane and, amidst some honking, pulled into the lot.

It was 5 o’clock when I placed my order. It was another 15  minutes before the food was ready, and 5:25 before I made it home to my starting-to-worry family.

All in all, I had spent just over one hour away from my phone. I had noticed and interacted with local businesses and people of which I was not previously aware, learned something about the layout of food trucks along Aurora, and experienced the elation of discovering a missing object with my own eyes.

All in all, it was awful. I can’t imagine making the same choice again.

Of course, the choices aren’t always mine to make as an individual. The next afternoon, the family headed out of town for a weekend of camping in the woods.