Serendipitously, my first and last meals at Northwestern were at Tech Express.
On my first visit to campus, two months before matriculation, my mother dragged me into the bowels of Tech in the hopes that she would get to meet some of my future "teachers." Professors, however, are hard to encounter in Tech on a June afternoon, and after some unfruitful searching we resigned to a quick lunch at Tech Express. My mother made unkind remarks about the flatness of the soda and the dryness of the chicken-salad-on-croissant I had chosen. Looking to defend the place where I had to eat for the next three-and-a-half years, I nearly sang its praises. The variety. The prices. The convenience. The cookies.
This past December, I spent the Wednesday morning before my last undergraduate final frantically packing my room into cardboard boxes and trying to re-memorize the different types of potassium channels in nerve cells. After my frantic rush to pack things into boxes and facts into my brain, I stopped in Tech Express for a perfunctory 2:40 p.m. meal before my 3:00 p.m. final. A can of Starbucks double shot, a Chicago dog and a last-minute Kit Kat bar.
I did not pause to realize that this coffee, wiener and chocolate combination was to be my last meal on campus. I just wolfed it down while wondering why the hot dog maker was so stingy with the sport peppers and whether or not I'd catch a glimpse of the cute girl from my class project group before she left the testing hall.
The next morning I headed to Northwestern's medical school at the downtown campus, where I would be spending the next 4 years of my life, for a quick meeting before my flight back home. Craving a Chewy bar, I popped into the Recovery Room Café, a small café around the corner from the Galter Health Sciences Library. The wondrous feeling of seeing my favorite sandwiches in the fridge was sharply attenuated by the lack of a convenient and comfortable seating area and the lack of an impending test or lab session immediately following my meal. I wasn't hungry but I bought a grilled-vegetable panini anyway, as a taste test. It tasted almost the same but the hint of doom that really accentuated my meals at Tech Express was conspicuously absent. It was just a sandwich, not a savory 5-minute respite between one hell and the next. I'm certain that, once the hells resume after medical school starts, the food at the Recovery Room Cafe will closely approximate the food from Tech Express in quality and emotional capacitance. But mounting student loans will see me spending less money eating on campus, meaning fewer grilled-vegetable paninis and fewer comically large chocolate chip cookies. That's fine, though, as I'd rather not have a small, knock-off cafe replace my Tech Express.
I think the reason I latched on to Tech Express was the calming effect it had on me whenever I got a bite to eat there. Regardless of which test, lab or practical I was waiting for, eating at Tech Express immediately helped me relax and stop worrying about what was coming up. Whether this was because I was able to settle a hungry stomach or because slowing down and getting something to eat afforded me time to broaden my perspective remains to be decided, but I personally think it is the latter. Though college was a great experience, it was first and foremost a roadblock between my 20-year-old goal of going to medical school and me. It was a path and, moreover, it was a path that I was not particularly worried about. I often got swept up in the swing of things but when I stepped back to look at the bigger picture, the test or lab I was facing was just another insignificant obstacle en route to my final destination, en route to what I had wanted since I first started talking as a child. And I think this, in the end, is the essence of why the Recovery Room Café will not be able to rival Tech Express. Whenever I eat there I will be reminded that I am no longer only on the path, but almost at the destination. Tech Express enjoyed a privileged position during easier, simpler times in my life. And that’s what I’ll most remember it for.