Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Day Three of the Birthday Bender

Birthdays should be celebrated on the Hanukkah model, they should be multi-day affairs. Luckily, I have a bunch of friends who were born in mid-June, and unluckily, my work schedule is heavily weighted towards weekends, which luckily means that I have three days off each week. Yeah, I’ve had some booze, but I think that made sense.

Tonight, I met with a coworker whose birthday was last Saturday and a former contractor we have become close with whose birthday is today- his husband rounded out the group. We hit the Maya Riviera restaurant in the village of Briarcliff Manor, about seventeen miles north of the City of Y_____. It’s a nice, old school Mexican restaurant, but not particularly ‘Mayan’ (they don’t serve the typical Yucatán dish cochinita pibil, which is pork stewed with blood orange juice and black peppercorns in a banana leaf and served with pickled onions). I ordered chicken mole poblano, which is sauced with an elaborate melange of chocolate, nuts, and spices. It’s a culinary tour de force, the kind of dish that involves a lot of grinding and mixing- I’ve only made it once, for a special occasion, years ago.

It was one of those slow dinners, very talky, pretty boozy... just the kind of dinner between old friends celebrating getting older. The birthdays continue until next week, but the bender ends tonight- this guy’s work schedule is heavily weighted towards weekends, after all, and with maturity comes responsibility.

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