home is where the memories are

I'm headed home to Buffalo for the weekend in a couple of weeks, and started thinking about what I wanted to revisit (besides my mom!) and what I wanted to reconnect with in my home town.

There are a certain set of foods for which Buffalo is famous: Ted's Hot Dogs and Anderson's Roast Beef on Kummelweck, and of course I will be headed back to Boston with some Weber's horseradish mustard. But then I remembered a very special pub... One that my first boyfriend would bring me to, with old graffiti-covered wooden booths (I believe our initials are on them!), and delicious frozen drinks with "no filthy dairy products" in them (I don't know what WAS in them, that was a secret, but they were really special!) Last time I was there was probably well over 20 years ago, but the same bartender with the gravelly voice was there, with the same banter about "straw to the bottom of the glass" and the disparaging remarks about dairy products. I really wanted to go back... So I was very sad to discover in a google search that the Rendezvous is no more... And actually that the Rendezvous that I remember has been gone for a very long time.

So I'm headed "home" again soon, but the Buffalo I see will not be the Buffalo that exists today, but rather the one seen by the girl who sipped magical drinks with a boy, holding hands across a wooden booth.