Letting go some things

A lifetime ago I was living, newly, in a midwestern city that shall not be named. I was enthralled with the idea of restaurants--restaurants that weren't Perkins or Pizza Hut or the shack that turned out maid-rites. I was also pretty darn broke, and interested in new experiences, so I found this hippie kinda vegetarian restaurant called The Mud Pie. And I brought my friend there, that friend I've known the longest, and we loved loved loved this dill dip they had there. It was called tofu dill dip, and we would go there just to eat that on some tortilla chips and mope out the window at the snowbank because we were in our 20's. The Mud Pie has long since closed and the location is now home to a sports bar. Because we need more of those.
A million times I have tried unsuccessfully to duplicate this stuff. You'd think it would be easy--c'mon, tofu dill dip? Memories are hard to taste. Last weekend I was at my favorite grocery store, and they was having a chip tasting. I dipped a tortilla chip into a bowl of dill dip. MMMMM! It was awfully similar to my memory of the Mud Pie's dip, and I grabbed a recipe. I got very excited when I read the recipe card, because it called for not mayonnaise, but tofu! I grabbed a container of soft tofu and came home and got my friend on the horn. She does not cook, but she wanted the recipe. We decided to convene the next day via phone to make the dip together. Long story short, the dip is okay, but it isn't all that great. It isn't what we used to go to the Mud Pie for, and say mmmmm after the first bite, and then stare out the window into the snowbank with Tori Amos songs in our heads. Nope.
Some things, I guess you have to leave where you found them. I miss eating with my old friend across an old wooden table, delighting in simple things like salt and corn and tofu. She says she's thinking of moving here, and I would love to sit across the table from her again on a regular basis, say, with a bowl of pimento cheese, or yummy chicken wings and quaff some ale.
I am happy to have left those times and places behind, but glad I got what I got from them. Back then, everything was unstable, uncertain, and the world was a cold and scary place and mostly everything seemed impossible to me. Things are still unstable and uncertain and scary, but they are also rife with possibilities, and lots of love and care and laughing.
I suppose I can drop the thing with the stupid tofu dill dip. Who knows? Maybe it is just that my palette is more discriminating. I mean, come on. TOFU dill dip? What were we thinking?