Issue Five: Diners

editor’s note

H​​ash browns at the Frontier. Teenage midnights at the Village Inn. Breakfast at 3 am after a punk show, at a diner, now closed, where the ash of the server’s cigarette dangled precariously close to the obscenely large omelettes on his tray full of plates. Cozy family breakfasts with pancakes and bacon, everyone crammed together into a booth. Pies of every imaginable kind. Diners full of kitsch, walls plastered with icons of the ’50s or the old Route 66. The diner-cum-gas-station outside Socorro, where one chatty old-timer tapped half-and-half into his classic diner mug, spouting the unbelievable news of the day to a one-woman staff he seemed to know so well they might’ve been married. The cracker crunch of Terry Allen’s “Beautiful Waitress.” Places we’ve walked by a million times without ever stopping in.

These are a few of the inspirations. Plus, it’s January—a new year, per the Gregorian calendar—and with it comes a call for rebuilding routines. What better time to reconsider the familiar, the known, to slow down and savor what has been right in front of us all along?

It might not be how it used to be. Then again, maybe it never was. But one thing is almost certain: so long as you’re within the limits of New Mexico, there will be chile on the diner menu.