A young man, who left his studies at a Trappist Monastery in Kentucky, came to live in Las Vegas around the time I entered Immaculate Conception High School.<\/p>\n
Frank Reesor, who died in his 40s, became my next-door neighbor, and more importantly, an older brother who spent time with me discussing religion, morality and maturity. We hit it off well when we discussed the deity, but on another subject: chile, we differed.<\/p>\n
I tried. My way of welcoming Frank to Las Vegas was to immerse him (not literally) in our favorite cuisine, and to use him as a resource, for any questions I had about religion.<\/p>\n
A matter about which there was divergence was what Frank called my morality. Because he had spent years in a monastery \u00e2\u20ac\u201d not to become a priest, but to live out his life as a Trappist Monk \u00e2\u20ac\u201d he urged (I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153encouraged\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) me to look into a religious vocation.<\/p>\n
To my recollection, no one had ever called me a heretic until Frank gave me that title after a discussion in which I questioned too many things. Once he even used \u00e2\u20ac\u0153heretic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as my name, as in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hi there, Heretic.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I must have deserved that title, as I did in fact pepper my side of the discussion with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153why?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Frank\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s urging that I consider a vocation made me fantasize about that calling. I liked the idea of having the authority of a priest, to deliver a powerful sermon that would be parsed at dinner tables after mass.<\/p>\n
And I thought about being the one whom people would call in a family emergency, arriving before the ambulance. I even spent a few days with relatives in Santa Fe to be closer to the seminary there. I went with my cousin Cristobal to the seminary offices to pick up an application.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d used a number of phrases, in Latin, from the traditional Catholic services and sprinkled them in conversations with Frank and others. Did I understand what I uttered? Not likely, except for simple words like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ave Maria\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153et cum spiri 2-2-oh.<\/p>\n
We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have Latin instruction at Immaculate Conception, and I suspect generations of churchgoers uttered Latin prayers without really knowing their context.<\/p>\n
One of my Sanchez cousins had a strong influence on me, saying the young seminarians she knew \u00e2\u20ac\u0153are so poor and they spend all their time watching others in pool halls because they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford to go to movies or restaurants.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Well, my cousin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s anti-pep talk, and the fact that I was becoming an adolescent, hastened my return to Las Vegas and to abandon thoughts of becoming a man of the cloth, and besides, by that time, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d discovered girls. That seminary application I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d picked up I never filled out.<\/p>\n
As to the other point of departure \u00e2\u20ac\u201d hot chile (always spelled with an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153e\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and never used as a plural, as in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153chiles\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), Frank had the temerity to say our Southwestern craving \u00e2\u20ac\u0153is all heat.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He argued that once you take the heat away, the whole concoction is flavorless.<\/p>\n
In an I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll-show-you moment, I invited him for Rio Grande-style food and mentioned that Mom made the chile extra hot. I soon realized I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d committed a faux pas. Frank retorted with, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153All chile offers is heat, no flavor.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really argue the point: Give me heat and lots of it. And Mom, whose red chile ranked second on this planet, behind only neighbor Mrs. Tranquilino Vigil, was glad to keep our bowls brimming.<\/p>\n
Flatland touristers (to use a term from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Snuffy Smith\u00e2\u20ac\u009d comic strips) apparently never got to savor real New Mexico chile. Because of their many complaints that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too hot,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d restaurateurs have milded-down the food to the point of turning it into a pudding, with the kick of a jackrabbit instead of a mule.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
On another visit to Santa Fe, this time to watch the Immaculate Conception Colts take on the Santa Fe Demons, in tournament action, I learned yet another shade of meaning for chile.<\/p>\n
One of the many Demon fans in the bleachers worried when the Colts actually took the lead against the boys from the much larger school. But not to worry: A spectator assured his friends, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ahorita se enchila Ramon (Sena).\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Several of us Las Vegans were puzzled by that expression until Demon forward Sena actually did \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enchilar\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the game. The fan had used \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enchilar\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as an intensifier, to mean, roughly, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Soon Ramon Sena will heat up and blister the nets.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And he did, scoring 17 points, only three points fewer than our own Leland Abreu, the game\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s high-point man.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never heard \u00e2\u20ac\u0153chile\u00e2\u20ac\u009d used in the Ramon Sena way. But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s strong evidence that chile was hotter in those days. Now that cooks have cooled food to customers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 dubious satisfaction, we wonder how many decades people need to go back to rediscover the days when chile was hot.<\/p>\n
Does the spiciness of the chile diminish as people age? I can remember needing to down several glasses of water after a bowl of my mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s chile, back in the days when we had chile as an appetizer, the main course and sometimes even as dessert.<\/p>\n
As my parents aged, the heat index decreased as well, and after the meal, there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that familiar gasping and grasping a piece of pineapple, a natural coolant, or a glass of water.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
This topic might not even have come about if our son and his family, now living in Denmark, hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t traveled here last week. At lunch at Smiling Faces, the waitress offered us three kinds of chile even before we saw the menus. Son Stan and I chose a spicy variety, while daughter-in-law Lizbeth tried a milder version.<\/p>\n
I appreciated the samples; they allowed us to select the right style of chile for each of us. And what I ordered reminded me of the good old days.<\/p>\n
Yes, my friend Frank Reesor would have complained that it was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153all heat and no flavor,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but he would have been wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A young man, who left his studies at a Trappist Monastery in Kentucky, came to live in Las Vegas around the time I entered Immaculate Conception High School. Frank Reesor, who died in his 40s, became my next-door neighbor, and more importantly, an older brother who spent time with me discussing religion, morality and maturity. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1525,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1524\/revisions\/1525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}