Making the cook mad
In the early 1950s my parents and grandparents often vacationed in the interior of Mexico. Over time the guide they used, Rodolfo Gaitán, became a family friend as well as a guide. In the late Sixties, Rudy even came up once from his home in Monterrey to visit us in Comanche, and I first learned about eating menudo and beer for breakfast sitting at his family dinner table, the one time we all went to Monterrey when I was a kid. Many family stories of Mexico trips featured Rudy in one way or another. One that turned into a family proverb was about the day Rudy made a short-order cook mad.
They were somewhere ’way down in the interior, and stopped at a greasy-spoon cafe for breakfast. Rudy ordered huevos rancheros, but when the eggs came out the salsa ranchera wasn’t spicy enough to suit him, and he sent them back to the kitchen for a re-cook.
Shortly the waiter brought a new plate of eggs. Rudy took one bite, and began to sweat and cry at the same time. The cook had “fixed” the too-mild eggs with a big dose of pure ground chiles. In a few minutes when Rudy could talk again, he gasped, “Diós mio, I shouldn’t have made that cook so mad!”
Cuidado con el tren
In Mexico, railroad-crossing crossbucks are forthright. They don’t just tell you that you’re going to cross the tracks; instead, they read “Cuidado con el tren”—literally, “be careful with the train.”
Mother and Dad were on their way someplace and drove through a little wide-spot-in-the-road whose only excuse for being was an enormous railroad roundhouse and shop. The highway crossed the tracks right next to the roundhouse. As they came near, they saw there had been an accident a day or two before. Some engineer or hostler had let an engine get away from him and run it through the wall of the roundhouse. So here was half a steam locomotive sticking out of the roundhouse wall, and a track gang sort of standing around, leaning on their shovels and looking gloomily at the mess. And right next to the cowcatcher, just off the road, stood a crossing sign with its inevitable and obviously ignored warning, “Cuidado con el tren.”
