A wiser man than me once said something that I never truly understood until just recently.
“All good things must come to an end.”
(Or something philosophical like that)
There was a time in my life where I used to believe that this cliche quote was just an extremely negative outlook on life said by people who pride themselves on being Debbie-Downers, who are filled with nothing but rotten vibes and really long Facebook posts about how life sucks. It never made sense to me why one would start thinking about how all the awesomeness that is currently going on in their life will inevitably come to an unfortunate end. I simply couldn’t comprehend this. But that was only the beginning of things I didn’t understand, until all that changed on the fateful day when the Olive Garden Pasta Pass took over my life.
For those of you who aren’t aware of the greatness that is the Olive Garden Pasta Pass, it is a SPECIAL (can’t emphasize this enough) promotion that America’s favorite Italian restaurant offers to the public. Olive Garden’s pasta pass is a 9 week-long ticket for your trip to a world of never-ending pasta bowls that also includes your choice of soup or salad and of course, the world-famous Olive Garden breadsticks, which will go down in history as one of, if not THE, most iconic symbols of the bread family. That’s all I, the self-proclaimed number one fan of Olive Garden, needed to hear to get myself ready for what I am calling the most delicious 9 weeks of my entire existence.
Blair_witch Years and years would go on in my childhood with me pestering my parents to take me to The Garden, but unfortunately, my parents weren’t easy to convince, and I would be filled with nothing but disappointment in the backseat of my mom’s Ford Excursion as we drove past the ideal place for a terrific meal, watching helplessly as my family would miss out on another perfect opportunity to have a meal that consistently ends in extreme satisfaction and a delicious chocolate mint. A complete mystery to me was why my parents just didn’t seem to share the same love for The Garden that I had, even going as far as to scoff at the idea that it is a “true” Italian restaurant. Maybe the name Olive Garden gives it this false narrative, but The Garden is an iconic brand in this country for a reason, and that reason is that their food is the pure definition of what it means to be tasty and delicious. I mean, what is more Italian than good food? Using this fact, along with promising to do chores around the house for the next week, I was able to create rare occasions where I made my case strong enough for us to eat at The Garden. Every single time one of these rare appearances happened for the Perlin family, our car ride home always featured the exact same sequence of satisfaction from my parents. It would feature my dad giving a passionate speech on how the breadsticks found a way to melt in his mouth while being the perfect complement to his “Taste of Italy,” and my mom inevitably finding a way to interrupt just so she could discuss the deliciousness of the salad dressing, then forcing my dad to stop at the nearest grocery store to get her a bottle of the good stuff. This would literally happen EVERY SINGLE TIME, and usually, my parents repeating themselves over and over annoys the life out of me, but when it comes to discussing the greatness of Olive Garden, there simply aren’t enough words.
So when the day came that I learned all about what Olive Garden aka “my favorite place in the entire galaxy to eat” was going to be doing with this too-good-to-be-true pasta pass, it was in that moment where I felt like it became my life’s mission to do whatever I needed to do in order to make this dream come true. So when that fateful day came to obtain the Olive Garden pass, there was no doubt that I was born ready for what was about to happen next.
Once I finally purchased my rights to the most glorious pass in the food industry, the wait for the promotion to start was around a month long. At the risk of sounding like a snob, I feel like it was a bit too long to wait after dropping $100 on pasta, but I can’t express into words that feeling I got on the first day of being able to use the pasta pass. The day arrived like Christmas, with my excitement level right up there with any kid's emotion during that highly-anticipated December 25th morning. From that point on, I indulged myself in an essentially Olive Garden-only diet and dedicated my entire life to this. I understood the amount of carbs that were about to enter my body and to ensure that I didn’t turn my body into a human-size balloon, I came into this new phase in my life with a strategy. Each day during this 9 week period, I would starve myself for an entire day so that when I finally walked into The Garden after a long day of working on my mom’s favorite morning show “Ben and Woods,” then immediately working my 2nd job at Nordstrom with absolutely no food in the system, I would walk into The Garden as a dude on a mission with the same mentality as the man, the myth, the hot dog eating legend, Joey Chestnut for a 4th of July hot dog eating contest. Using this strategy of starving myself for only one incredibly large feast a day, I not only was able to maintain the same pants size that I came into this pasta pass period with, but the feeling of dominating each pasta that they served me would allow me to leave The Garden in complete Joey Chestnut fashion. That’s with a champion-sized smile on my face with Alfredo sauce spotted cheek to cheek and that post-Thanksgiving meal belly that limits your physical abilities to almost complete immobility. A simple, yet beautiful feeling.
During these few months, I couldn’t help but continue to go back to that old, cliche quote of how “all good things must come to an end.” The more I experienced my life to its fullest potential thanks to the pasta pass, that original sense of negativity that I used to believe was behind the intended meaning had soon vanished. Olive Garden’s Pasta Pass enlightened me to what is the true definition behind the misunderstood quote and what I finally realized is that the true definition of what it means when people say “all good things must come to an end” isn’t about the negative aspect that it is all over. The true meaning is all about appreciating every single moment and making sure that you are not taking even a second for granted.
What this all comes down to is that this Olive Garden Pasta Pass didn’t just give me an opportunity that would allow me to eat pasta whenever I felt like it for about 3 months. Was this just another classic example of how all good things come to an end? Of course it was, because that’s essentially the whole idea behind this journey we call “life.” But after this reflection on what I had just gone through, there’s only one way to look at my Olive Garden Pasta Pass experience. So in the grand scheme of it all, this can all be summed up with another cliche quote...
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened”
:)