Returning to my hometown, I found myself at Cafe Valdez on Main Street, a one-room restaurant run by the Valdez family for over sixty years. The cafe was a converted small wood house, painted white, with a pitched tin roof, typical of New Mexico of the 1930s and 40s, before the ranch style subdivisions and everyone moving to the Sun Belt. My son, Charles, and I were hanging out, having lunch on my trip back to the southwest. He had come over from Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he was teaching.

There were ten small tables scattered around. The hostess, waiters and cooks were speaking Spanish to each other, preparing for the lunch hour crowd. One of the waitresses, a teen age girl, probably a Valdez, handed us menus. She brought plastic glasses and pewter carafe, which she poured water from. A middle aged Hispanic man came over and put a plastic wicker basket of tortilla chips and a small bowl of salsa on the table.

“Do you know what you would want, or you need time to look at the menu?”, she asked.

“I think we know,” I said. “I’ll have huevos rancheros and iced tea.”

“How do you like your eggs?”

“Over easy.”

“Red or Green sauce?”

“Red.” At least we didn’t have to go through the litany, like in Santa Fe, of what kind of tortillas, “flour or corn,” went beneath the eggs, or whether we wanted “hash browns or beans.” Iced tea was also almost understood for the drinks.

“I’ll have the same,” said Charles. Charles and I always ordered the same thing, having the same tastes, even though he had grown up with his mother after the divorce when he was three. But, we had remained close, spending vacations and part of the summers together, my flying back from overseas and Washington and calling him regularly. It had paid off.

The waitress took the menu and folded it under her arm as she walked away cheerfully, saying something across the room in rapid-fire Spanish to a middle aged man arriving for lunch through the screen door. She went behind the counter, and handed our order to the cook through a window.

Charles and I munched on the tortilla chips from the basket, dipping them into the saucer of pureed salsa from Hatch, in the Rio Grande Valley. I knew they were Hatch chilis since the salsa was dark red, almost rust colored, with just a tinge of chili powder in the taste, and very spicy hot as New Mexicans like it. My dad had always said you could tell a good Mexican restaurant right off the bat, from the salsa and chips they served.

Charles and I had a table by the window looking out on Main Street, the primary thoroughfare running through town, two lanes each direction, leading to the abandoned Walker Air Force base to the south of town and the New Mexico Military Institute to the north. In high school, I had spent my nights on this street, “dragging Main,” with my friends, checking out the girls in cars and drag racing other cars from stoplight to stoplight. We would drive from “Grannies” Drive-In on the north edge of town, and turn around at “Wylies” Drive-In on the south end, repeating this over and over.

Inside the cafe, the lunch crowd was starting to arrive. They looked like regulars, businessmen from the nearby Petroleum Building, and groups of Hispanic men and women. Outside, the sun was high in the sky and there were no shadows. It was going to be in the mid-nineties, but I didn’t recall it being that hot forty years ago. Across the street were some Mexican bars, including the tough “Bonita Bar,’ a western wear store, and a livestock and feed store that looked closed. This part of south Main street had not fared well.

I had spent lots of time in Valdez cafe growing up. My dad, a salesman, had been friends of Mr. and Mrs. Valdez, who were in their late seventies at the time, running the cafe with nieces, nephews, and grandchildren helping out. Mrs. Valdez was the cook and ran the cafe from the kitchen. Her husband, Raymond, was the host, a large man but slow with age. He always wore dress slacks, and open collar white shirt with suspenders. Our family ordered cheese enchiladas, the choice of “natives,” which we considered ourselves, or occasionally the large bean burritos, with their dark spots on the white tortilla surface and a slightly burnt smell from the grill. Mr. Valdez would always come over to our table to visit, and was very gracious and formal.

When I would come back from college for the weekends, Dad would bring me here for late night coffee, since the cafe was open until 2:00 a.m. He seemed most interested in talking about family history or my courses. He had a great thirst for knowledge even though he had only completed tenth grade in Des Moines during the Depression. I was still getting over his loss.

“You okay?” I had missed what Charles had just said.

“Yes, I was just thinking of your grandfather.”

Charles had not had a lot of time with my parents as a result of my divorce, a fact my Dad regretted. When he was in the hospital toward the end, my Dad and I talked about making a trip to Las Cruces to see Charles. Finally, one day when I was describing this vision, he waived his hand at me and said “don’t talk about it.” I realized it was too painful for him to face the fact that he would never get to make that trip. That was the day before he died. He lay there in his hospital bed, with his head turned, looking out the window of his hospital room towards the sunset for the longest time, as if studying or admiring it one last time, perhaps trying to get answers about what would come next. He knew it was coming.

The waitress finally brought our huevos rancheros, perfect, with everything mixed together in a kind of reddish yellow palette, the eggs swimming in the dark red sauce on top and around the beans at the edge, with shredded lettuce near the beans, and corn tortillas underneath. Warm flour tortillas were on the side, to use as dippers. Charles and I tore the tortillas in half and began to eat. My family used to agree that this was the best part of the Southwest, the Mexican food. The other best part was the luminous evenings.

The waitress brought us refills on our iced teas.

Looking out the window while Charles was talking, I could see a golden retriever tied to the railing at the cafe entrance, lying on the sidewalk, waiting for its owners. My childhood Collie and companion, “Prince,” came to mind. I had an image of Prince, who used to wait for me at the corner, a block from our house, meeting the school bus. I could see him as we approached, pacing nervously, his tail wagging, and Collie mouth open, smiling.

Our lunch over, it was time for me to get back on the road. I had actually come to New Mexico to see how Charles was doing. I paid the bill and we walked to the parking lot. He was going back to Las Cruces, and I back to Montana. We hugged.

“I will be back down if you need me,” I said. “Any excuse to get back to New Mexico. And, you always have a place in Helena.”

“Bye, Dad. It’s great to hang together.”

“Hey, lets do Santa Barbara again soon.” I said as I opened my car door.

“All right” he said enthusiastically, stretching out each word as he got into his Jetta. “You still got your guardian angels?” he asked with a grin.

“Poor you,” I said. “Who else would have a Dad with photos of his cats above the visor.”

I was thinking of the two-day drive home.

“What’s your first stop?” Charles asked.

“Memory Lawn,” I said smiling, thinking of Mom and Dad’s graves at Dad’s cemetery outside of town. I hoped someday he would visit them with me.