Does time hallow all chili dogs?

I used to work at a certain little restaurant, and from those days, before they flattened it to buidl a highway, I remember the finest-tasting chili-cheese dogs I ever put into my mouth.

In all the years since, no chili dog has ever lived up to that standard. Perhaps none ever will.

This morning, I played a little Bach on my way in to work, and lamented to myself the passing of that man and the end of that great age of music.

I like my rock as much as the next Gen X'er, don't get me wrong. I know the lyrics to every Tom Petty song, a little Korn, a little Ozzie, a lot of AC/DC.

But seems to me, my thoughts-a-spinning, that the world is a drearier, lesser place since the great classical composers have departed it, since the Golden Age of Music ended.

Where is today's Bach, today's Mozart or Pachabel?

Am I just salivating for a long-lost chili dog and being unfair to the modern composers of great instrumental music who must surely be out there?

Or has that age truly ended, has it passed beyond all hope of reclamation?

You could assemble all the ingredients of a great ethnic recipe from Baluchistan and follow the instructions exactly to make it, and yet never achieve the same results as some little old bent over granny in a dusty Baluchistani village. You can't replicate the soil in which she grew her vegetables, the atmosphere of her kitchen or the tang of the old pots in which she cooked them.

Every work of art, whether a painting, a melody or a fine bowl of Magyar gulyas soup, is a product of its time and place, and when that time and place has passed, the mold has been broken, so to speak.