We arrived at Chilam Balam, a bring-your-own-bottle Mexican restaurant in Chicago a little harried, after some difficulty locating the tiny basement location.  It’s difficult to see as you drive by; yours truly was walking down Broadway with her street (no-I’m-not-a-suburbanite) face firmly planted when a car window rolled down and a loud voice shouted, “GERI!” Being in the center of a cool urban area, this suburbanite didn’t expect to hear her own name shouted at 180 decibels, so after jumping about 10 feet into the air, I spotted Rose looking unhappy and perplexed. “The restaurant doesn’t exist. I drove by and there is nothing there.” She pouted for a moment, then got out of the car and walked with me for another half block. A small sign under a set of stairs pointed the way to a lower level. A series of complicated doors (hey, it’s Chicago—even the storm doors need storm doors) opened into a crowded, bustling room with tiny tables pushed together beneath exposed brick walls.

We grabbed chairs, pulled corks from wine bottles, and began to examine the hand-crafted menu. Although not very extensive, the treats described within the velum-papered, hand-bound menu were too delicious to make easy choices. So we did what we rarely do. We asked Luis, our affable waiter, to start bringing food, and to keep it coming.

Within minutes, before we’d even had a chance to start catching up on our tales of family, work and travel, the food began to appear.

First came the empanadas, little triangle pies filled with braised mushrooms in a verde sauce, cheeses, and roasted green chilies. We cut them in half with our forks and wolfed them down. Next came the crispy flautas stuffed with chicken and topped with a chipotle-mezcal sauce, pickled cabbage, fresh cheese and crema. These were so good that I pulled Luis aside and begged him to bring more. Creamy guacamole quickly appeared and just as quickly un-appeared.  And still, no recognizable conversation. Plates were pushed across the table, exchanged, and wiped clean. Comments consisted mainly of “hmmm,” “did you taste THAT?” and “pass that plate.”

Two different ceviches arrived; an ahi tuna tossed with lemon juice, tamarind, red onion, and topped with toasted sesame seeds plus a halibut ceviche with cucumber, jicama, cilantro, habanero, avocado and tomato. Hmmmm. After explaining to Rose that ceviche is actually “cooked” in the citric juices, our sushi-shy head Diva poked a tentative fork into the fray. She deemed it edible, but preferred the crispy corn masa huaraches, a Mexican version of bruschetta topped with fresh garbanzo bean puree, grilled mushrooms, queso fresco, roasted green chile rajas, sundried tomatoes, avocado salsa and sunflower greens.

Then Luis brought plates of tiny pork belly tacos that quite simply rendered us all speechless. The pork was crispy, nestled in soft taco shells topped with what the menus described as “Michoacán’s famous frijoles puercos” (whatever that is), caramelized sweet onions, diced white onion, cilantro and the most perfect slices of fresh avocado I have ever encountered. Absolute perfect. Days later, I am still thinking about it.

According to the restaurant’s web site, Chilam Balam loosely translates to “Book of the Jaguar Priest” in the Mayan language. The name embodies the restaurant’s commitment to locally grown foods born of sustainable farming methods. Their creations are made without food additives or ingredients such as corn syrup or msg. The Divas were very impressed by the fact that this unique temple to flavor is owned by three young twenty-somethings. One of these is Soraya Rendon, who manages the front of the house from a tiny corner of the dining room.  In her mid-twenties, Soraya left Mexico City when she was 18. She joined us table side while Luis, our waiter, leaned into other diners to snap the obligatory Diva Group Photo. An amazing young lady, she seemed wise beyond her years as she smiled and talked about her love of good food.

Chocolate Dessert

A brief word about the desserts.  Yum.  The chocolate chile mousse actually had a kick to it. The pineapple upside down cake was served as a compact 2-inch tall disk, topped coconut crème anglaise and accompanied by an imported Mexican black ice cream called zapote—again, I don’t know what that is, but it tasted deliciously unlike anything I’ve ever had before.  Two additional deserts included hibiscus flan with vanilla-lime swirl ice cream and little rolled up empanadas stuffed with crunchy peanut butter. This last one came with two dipping sauces: black fig and Oaxacan chocolate dipping sauces.

Because we had spent so little time perusing menus and because Luis was the most efficient food gatherer and bringer, the Divas found themselves paying the check and climbing the stairs back to street level in a little over an hour. But we were full and happy, and content to leave serious discussion to another dining date.

Chilam Balam

3023 N. Broadway

Chicago, IL 60657

773 296 6901

www.chilambalamchicago.com

Conversation first centered around our collective relief that the holidays were over.  Some of us reported undecorated homes; others did the whole deck-the-hall routine, but without much enthusiasm. Family gatherings were nice, but many of them were endured, not embraced. Why was this? we wondered.  Was it due to the gloom that hung over the economy and every newscast throughout the holiday season? Or was it a subconscious rebellion against the rampant consumerism that brought our country to nearly the brink of disaster? We couldn’t agree on any single reason to our malaise, but we were united in our relief that the holidays were packed up and put away for another year.

With that came the shared sentiment that 2009 was better off over. It wasn’t that any of us explicitly suffered in the economic downturn. Sure, belts have been tightened and finances monitored perhaps a bit more closely, but none of us had lost a job or a home.  So why did 2009 seem so miserable? We decided that we had collectively allowed the constant drumbeat of doom to get under our skin. And therefore, we decided that a change was in order. We could choose despair, or we could choose optimism. It is entirely in our control.

Mary is a perfect example of our new found commitment to optimism. She originally thought she’d miss our Diva dinner because she had tickets to a Dave Mason rock concert for the same evening. As she pulled away from the curb, she felt her brakes give out. Without her car, she was unable to get to the concert venue.  Her first reaction? “Now I don’t have to miss the Divas!”  She quickly called Chris and Linda, and hitched a ride to Chinatown with them. “Well, I was already dressed up and ready to go out!” she laughed. And she reminded us, “Rose always says, even years are better than odd years.”

For this new year, our commitment to ourselves and to each other is to choose optimism over despair whenever possible. Optimism can be contagious, and that’s a positive virus to spread around.

We eventually got around to discussing health—not ours, but our spouses’. Why is it, Dawn wondered, that men refuse to see the doctor? Her husband has been putting off the task of locating a physician and making an actual appointment.  Chris, our registered nurse, said she has the same issue with her husband. Are they simply in denial that they are “men of a certain age?” Is it fear that post 50, they will have no choice but to make the dreaded first acquaintance with a colonoscopy?  I was pleased to let the Divas know that my own spouse made his first visit (in seven years!) to an internist earlier that very week, and had received a clean bill of health (that, and a referral to a gastroenterologist for his colonoscopy). Dawn scribbled the physician’s name on a scrap of the paper tablecloth, and vowed simply to make an appointment for her husband.  We agreed: Leading your man by the nose seems to be the best/only way to get some them to the doctor.  

Dear readers: If you have found other solutions to getting your man to the doctor, please share them in the comments box below!

With the delivery of fortune cookies, our rambunctious dinner came to a close. Please read our fortunes aloud, as we did, with the words “… in bed” tacked to the end. Enjoy!

“A pleasant surprise is in store for you.”

“The sure way to predict the future is to invent it.”

“Your spirit of adventure leads you down an exciting new path.”

“Your secret desire to completely change your life will manifest.”

“Time to break out of that corner, unstuck that rut.”

“You may have sudden and surprising opportunities.”

“Your companions are your mirrors and show you yourself.”
 

* Moon Palace

  216 W. Cermak Rd. – Chicago

  Chicago, IL 60616

  312-225-4081

But I think I have taken my group-ness to extremes. In addition to all of the above, plus the fabulous Dining Divas, I belong to two other distinct and very special groups.

I took up the fine art of knitting two years ago, and learned immediately that there is something irresistible about a woman sitting quietly with her needles. People are drawn to her, want to touch the yarn, and ask questions. Women in airports and on trains have overcome their reticence to engage with a stranger by their curiosity.  Some have never tried to knit, but want to know, “is it difficult? I’ve always wanted to learn,” and seem encouraged when I tell them how simple and soothing it really is. Others are experienced knitters and offer tips on the best yarns shops or websites. Some have even shared patterns on the spot with me (and one sweet lady on a plane very tactfully corrected my technique back in my earliest moments of purling). I’ve discovered that although knitting is a rather solitary pursuit, one is never alone. There is a vast community of knitters out there. I never noticed them before, but now it seems they are on every bus and airplane, clicking away.

One day, I brought a project to the office and sat quietly in our company café. It didn’t take long before other knitters stopped by. Today, an entire group of knitters has banded together. Known affectionately as the “KnitWits,” we gather weekly over lunch. In the year we’ve been together, we have knitted for charity:

• A blanket crafted from individually-knitted 12-inch squares. We raffled it off for $1,400 and donated the proceeds to the Chicago Wilderness Foundation’s initiative, “No Child Left Inside.”
• 51 wool hats for a charity called the Warm Woolies (they provide woolen clothing for children in orphanages in Asia, where central heating is rare)
• 30 blankets for Project Linus, whose mission is “to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children who are seriously ill, traumatized, or otherwise in need through the gifts of new, handmade blankets and afghans.”
• 20 vests (with yarn donated by Land’s End) for needy children in the US

I’m also becoming extraordinarily close to a group of my cousins. My mother and her six siblings together raised 34 O’Grady cousins. With just about all us on the far side of 50, smaller “clumps” of cousins have taken to traveling together, starting with a trip to Seattle four years ago to celebrate Peg’s 50^th.  We now have a standing trip to Florida every February that’s open to any and all. We descend on John’s home in St. Petersburg, where we spend many hours in the kitchen cooking, eating and laughing.  Our joke is that if you leave the room, the others have free reign to talk about you behind your back. We’re hoping to plan a trip to Ireland in 2010, if we can only agree upon dates.

With most of our parents gone, enjoying the company of our cousins is very special and comforting indeed. It brings us back to our childhoods, when a typical Saturday night out for our parents meant going to this Aunt’s or that Uncle’s house to play cards. The kids were naturally dragged along to get into whatever mischief we could. As adults, it’s been revealing and fun to rekindle that closeness. An extra bonus is discovering cousins who were out of the narrow age band we played in as children.  Cousins who were 8 or 10 years older than me as a child might well have been senior citizens as far as I was concerned, seen only from afar as they went about their exotic ways, going to sock hops or going on actual dates.  Today, they are my friends and guides along the bumpy road of life. 

There’s even a splinter cousins group devoted to, you guessed it, knitting! We haven’t given ourselves a formal name, not yet anyway. But we have a motto (taken from the outside of Peggy’s knitting bag):

“I have 8 inches of cold hard steel and I know how to use it!”

It’s easy to feel like a dinosaur.  Our children are all too happy to oblige us with frequent eye rolls while they mock our inability to grasp the latest zombie-killing video game or the loudest heavy metal band.  (Hey, the joke’s on them—they’re playing the BEATLES on Guitar Hero, for Pete’s sake. That music is, like, ancient.).  And then there’s the confidence-killing comment just as you are about to bolt out the door for the morning commute: “You’re not wearing that to work, are you?” What? Am I showing too much leg? Did I miss the memo about shoulder pads being passé?

You don’t need children to feel the sting, either. Divas without children also report encountering the intolerance (or worse, overwrought respect) of the young in restaurants, at the doctor’s office, and at work.  As Mary explained, “the expressions young adults use make me realize my age,  both in being embarrassed at my gaffes and in my disapproval of some commonly used terms like bitch and ho.  I realize I sound like a prudish old lady if I suggest the inappropriateness of these commonly used words.” She added, “Just so you know, ‘hipster’ is not a compliment to funky, artistic, alternative types.  I found out after insulting a few ‘cool’ co-workers.  It apparently means poseur.” 

Dawn’s biggest beef about getting old are her eyes.  “This is probably lame but I really feel old that my eyesight is getting worse. I really need a bright light to read things nowadays, rather than when my eyes were only 30 years old.  And it’s hard to distinguish faces unless people are close by.”

Linda said that being offered a seat on the train “usually does it for me……not that I don’t accept the offer!” Other transgressions that irk the Divas include being called “ma’am” by rosy-cheeked wait staff, or being required to address the history teacher as “Mister Jones” when he looks barely older than your 17-year-old high school senior.  We know we look older on the outside. We simply don’t appreciate the reminders, thank you very much.

As Chris put it, “I do not ‘feel’ 53.  I feel 40 or 45.” She grinned and said, “I hope to keep moving and toolin’ until the day I kick up my toes!”

I don’t recall my mother worrying about being out of touch in her 50s. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but it seemed to me that that she and her contemporaries (the female half of the “Greatest Generation”) had a much more laid-back approach to getting older. They all seemed to accept the extra pounds and that funny tubular shape so many of them had acquired. Gray hair was normal.  So why are we, their offspring, so resistant to the normal aging process?

When I shared the Divas’ concerns with Kathy, a colleague at the office, she laughed and offered her take on the baby-boomer generation. “We mistrusted anybody over 30, remember?” She explained, “Our generation rigorously embraced youth. We even called it the Youth Movement!  We thought we had the answer to everything. Now, we just can’t fathom that we have become… our parents!” Kathy, who in her 50s has developed a sudden allergy to hair dye, professes to be completely dismayed by the two inches of silver hair that top her brown coif.  “I look in the mirror and wonder, ‘who IS this woman?”  But she is laughing as she says this, and when the brown is completely gone, she is going to look absolutely chic and stunning with that silver hair.  In addition to being engaging, energetic, and healthy, her strongest weapon in the battle against becoming irrelevant is her wicked sense of humor.

Maybe that’s the key. Resistance to aging is NOT futile. We don’t have to give in as easily as our mothers did. We can eat right and we exercise to keep our bones strong (and to keep some semblance of a waistline intact). And we can remember that a finely-tuned sense of humor can help us through the most mortifying reminders of our impending dotage. After all, there are some benefits to being on the far side of 49. Being out of touch can be so… liberating.  Among other things, we don’t have to pretend to like movies about teenage vampires or the D-list celebrities cavorting on Dancing with the Stars. 

I’ll leave you with a toast from the Dining Divas:  Here’s to freedom from the tyranny of being young and hip! (Just don’t call us hipsters, do you hear?)

It started innocently enough. The woman who has been wrangling my hair into presentable shape for the better part of three decades was celebrating her 49^th birthday. Rosemarie had had a difficult year. The financial pressures of being in business for herself, plus her long-time partner’s entry into a skilled nursing facility, were taking their toll. Three of her customers, Katie, Linda and I, decided that a civilized night out on the town was just what Rose needed to mark the day.

Rose is not what you would call an adventurous eater, but she selected a Japanese steakhouse because it sounded like fun and the food would be cooked all the way through, unlike (shudder) sushi. Knives were flashed, various proteins were sliced and diced before our eyes, and when the evening was over, four acquaintances had become four friends.

We decided to do it again. The next month’s cuisine was Brazilian, and Rose invited Chris, another faithful customer and mother of five, to join us. We each received a little green and red disc slightly larger than a poker chip. Turn the green side up, and handsome men bearing long spikes of freshly grilled meats would descend upon the table, heaping food on our plates. Turn the red side up, and they would stay away. Much laughter (and much MUCH eating) ensued.

When we came up for air, we agreed that we’d discovered something special. Dining out regularly with a sympathetic group of women was just what we needed, but until now, hadn’t realized. We were all from different neighborhoods in Chicago, but besides our tie to Rose and her hair salon, we had little in common. Some had children, some did not. Some were homemakers, others had full-time jobs. But we were all women, and we were all, as they say, “of a certain age.”

We made plans to do it again the following month. And we decided to make it an official club. But what could we call ourselves? What would be descriptive, yet have the appropriate attitude? Linda, our 60-ish school teacher, suddenly shouted, “I’ve got it! We’ll be the Dining Divas. We’ll call ourselves the Double-D’s for short!”

And so it came to pass.

Today, the Divas count eight regulars, all over 50. There is Dawn, who runs an energy business with her husband and like me, has two children entering adulthood. (We were driving to dinner together one night and realized that we were both married on the very same day nearly 28 years ago!) There is Gloria, single and ageless and scathingly funny. And there is Mary, an avid gardener who will love rock and roll forever. And there is Cathy, a petite registered nurse and married mom of two.

It’s been two years and counting now. We’ve dined all over the Chicago area, north, south, east and west. From a Chinatown noodle joint, to Emilio’s Tapas for Spanish food, to Greek Town, and multiple forays into Chicago’s famed Italian and Mexican restaurants. We’ve experienced Oktoberfest together, gathered in a church basement to celebrate Linda’s retirement party with all of her friends and family, and four of us even traveled to New York for a long weekend of sightseeing (and eating, naturally). We share the ups and down of mid-life, surviving the recession, handling college expenses, and we shake our heads wisely over the poor, benighted men in our lives. As one of us said, “It’s like a book group…only better, because there is no book!”

Each month, somebody volunteers to find a fun location and handle reservations. Then we arrive with our month’s backlog of stories, pictures, and laughs. And at the center of each dinner is Rosemarie, our Diva-in-Chief. Rose has known each of us for 25 or more years. She knows our quirks and foibles, and she intuitively figured out how each of us would complement the others.

Back in the days before nightclubs and television, soirees known as “salons” were extremely popular. Dictionary.com defines them as “an assembly of guests, common during the 17th and 18th centuries, consisting of the leaders in society, art, politics, etc.” Benjamin Franklin was a regular at the Paris salons during his tenure as the American Revolution’s spokesman. Our Rosemarie runs a hair salon, but the “salon” she created in the Dining Divas is unique. For each of us, the Divas provide a special support network outside of the usual family and friends.

We’ve come a long way from that first dinner during troubled times. As Divas, we’ve cheered as Rosemarie picked up the pieces of her life. She is now happily engaged to Dan, a Dining-Diva-approved gentleman who loves her with all his heart.

But we still can’t convince her to try sushi!