Merilyn, from Las Cruces, New Mexico

The Double Eagle Restaurant is in an old colonial house, each of its rooms now a private dining area for a family or group of friends. Michael finds us a table in the courtyard by the fountain; it’s not cleared yet so he suggests we wait in the bar, a pillared and mirrored affair that the bartender tells us once graced the luxurious Drake Hotel in Chicago, where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe carved their initials into one of the hotel’s ornate well-polished bars, unfortunately not this one. Above us hang chandeliers as long as a tall Texan, a thousand hand-carved crystals refracting the light. To Wayne’s amazement, Michael makes him a proper Bloody Caesar, complete with clamato juice and a slug of beef bouillon. Wayne is in tippler’s heaven.

“This is the first time I’ve ever met anyone outside Canada who knows what a Bloody Caesar is,” he says happily, “and even at home, they don’t use beef bouillon any more.” He sighs with the wonder of it all.

“Another, Sir?” asks Michael.

But Wayne’s eye is wandering along the tequila bottles. “Is that Reposado?” he says.

If we had been offered a hundred places to spend New Year’s Eve, this is the one we would have chosen, this old adobe house fitted with midwestern elegance, a fountain splashing in the courtyard beside our small table in Little Tableland, luminarios lighting our way in the starlit desert night, a place we’ve stumbled into not by design, not by good planning, but by accident.

“To luck,” Wayne says, raising his pony of golden Spanish liquor.

I raise my glass of sparkling Perrier.

“To our very good luck.”

(excerpt from Breakfast at the Exit Cafe)