Restaurants dont ordinarily become the repositories of a communitys hopes and dreams, but downtown Cortez boasts an example of why they should.
Tess Montaño, of Pepperhead Mexican restaurant, recently installed a piece of interactive art that she hopes will encourage her customers to share meaningful dinner-table conversations.
Mounted on the restaurants east wall, past the bar toward the back, is a series of three chalkboards where diners can describe what they want to do in the future.
Beside the prompt Before I die, I want to ..., some of the notations are poignant:
See my grandpa again.
Have a baby.
Show my grandchildren this beautiful world.
One writer hoped to have the opportunity to thank the family of the person whose heart enabled his mother to live 15 years after her transplant.
Others are profound:
Understand grace.
Know why.
Figure out why Im here.
A few are boldly romantic:
Make sure my wife knows how much I love and need her.
Many are recreational bucket lists: skydiving, scuba diving, sailboarding, swimming with dolphins, traveling.
Young gourmands have some desires of their own:
Catch lizards.
Go to Disney world.
Grow up.
And quite a few are humorous. For example, on a recent day, on the top line far out of reach of most restaurant patrons chalk, someone wrote, ... be shorter.
On a friends art blog, Montaño said she saw a picture of a similar wall in Chicago. She tracked the idea down to its genesis in post-Katrina New Orleans and community art activist Candy Chang, who, Montaño said, does a lot of cool public art installations.
Montaño thought such a wall in Cortez would help to bring the community together in a positive way. Community interactive art projects are phenomenal for bringing out the best of people.
She bought the stencil, and she, her father and her boyfriend spent a week building and installing the three gigantic boards.
I just hear so much angry discourse, she said. Its been so wonderful to hear people talk about hopes and dreams and things they really dont know about each other.
The blackboards went up the second week in January, and every week since then, the blanks have been filled with aspirations. When that happens, Montaño snaps photos to post on Pepperheads Facebook page, posts a printout in the restaurant, and wipes the slate clean to welcome a new collection of wishes.
A restaurant, where people take time to sit down and savor a meal, turns out to be the perfect environment to encourage conversations about whats important in life.