There was a Taco Casa in the town where I went to high school. I didn’t know it was a chain. I thought it was ours. We went often and filled up on Tex-Mex, and I would have told anybody who asked that I loved the place.
Twenty years ago I found another one in Gainesville, Texas, and was delighted. Same food. Still tasty. Taco Casa has a ton of stores now, several in Oklahoma City, which is how it ended up in my passenger seat.
It tasted the same and not as good, both at once.
I used the wrong word back then. I never loved those tacos. I enjoyed them. The proof is that the word didn’t keep up. It made it as far as Gainesville. It didn’t make it to my passenger seat.
I have been married twenty-seven years. My wife is not the woman I married. She is more. Neither of us is who we were, and the word has held through both of us changing.
The tacos held still. She didn’t, and I didn’t, and the word went with us.
