Barbeque Time
The night is warm with hardly a stirring of a breeze. Windchimes sound the tones that I find soothing after such a day as this. Most of the night is spent in silence, thinking, and sometimes I find that I’ve spent all night pondering things, and not enough time at the keyboard, writing the stories that I love. I think and remember all the memories that are at my beck and call if I so choose. Like the time my parents and I had a barbecue. My dad would arrange the briquets in a careful geometric pattern carefully designed to light and burn efficiently. In retrospect, we would call this a pile. But fathers have this ritual of making a production of the perfect grilling experience, and we’d go along with it, being children and obeying without question. Maybe that’s the problem. We go along with everything that is told to us by anyone older, being of the mind that they have the necessary experience to do it properly. We never question if what they are doing is correct.
So my dad would be geometrically arranging blocks of charcoal as if he was assembling a science project that was to be judged by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA. Every piece of charcoal had to be placed next to it’s neighbor with delicate and precise care, lest the universe dissolve into it’s component parts. Personally, I think they’re sublimating the desire to build models or play with blocks, but that’s just my observation. We were allowed to handle the charcoal and place it in the Master Builders hands, but never were we allowed to actually help build the mystical pyramid lest the barbecuing gods be offended.
In the meantime, mom would be preparing the food. Chopping onions to knead into the hamburger, before being – as with the charcoal – carefully shaped by her hands. No way would any of us kids want to mix meat, and so we were put to work on the exceedingly difficult task of stripping the corn. This is not as easy as it sounds. You had the pleasure of peeling back the green sheaf's, and getting that funny green smell, before you had to work loose all that cornsilk. It took what seemed like hours and you always ended up eating some of it anyway, the texture was as if you were flossing your teeth with thread from your moms sewing basket. They should have just put in the grill and burned it off, it probably would be just as gross, but at least you wouldn’t fell as if you were chowing down on hair.
By this time, your dad, having gotten the briquets in the proper order (which always resembled a pile...or is that just me) commenced to light it, by dousing it with charcoal starter and throwing a match. The funny thing is that it would go out. And yet people continued to use the worthless stuff by the gallon, when it would have been easier to use gasoline and have done with it already. The wind would always shift at that precise moment and send the smoke directly into the kitchen. In fact, it was so reliable, that one could use it as an equation, if one needed an equation to start a grill; knowing your father who had such an obsession with geometrically arraigned briquets, he would have jumped at the chance. Fortunately, no one took the trouble write down this corollary, and so we’re free from one more worthless ritual.
The very act of grilling never made sense when you took the time to examine it.
It is a very hot Summer day and instead of staying inside with the fans and air conditioners, we decided to build a roaring hot fire and stand around it. All this for the love of meat and smoke. We could have just as easily stood at the nearest garage fire and gotten the same smoke in out faces without the meat. But cooking outdoors is like some primitive ritual that me must undergo if we are to pass childhood and become: Geometric charcoal shapers, as our father once were.
Now the reason for this outdoor cooking is that it’s too hot to cook inside. This appears to be sensible unless you look at it from my skewed perspective. Ever notice that whenever you decided to barbecue that things took longer to cook ? Perhaps it has something to do with the mystical smoke/wind formula we overlooked. Ah the foolishness of ignoring that ! While cooking the burgers, there would always come a time when the meat drippings would catch fire and turn the burgers to charcoal. By another strange corollary, this too would happen when the grill was untended. One minute you’d be in the kitchen helping with food or talking and the next thing you knew, there would be a cry along the lines of “Hey !!” followed by a rush out the door to SAVE THE MEAT. Saving the meat was all-important. This was the number one priority, saving your hair and flesh was second. With much hullabaloo and clamor the fire was smothered. Well, this is untrue; the meat was hustled off with a speed that is unmatched by military missiles. Even now, the military is still trying to crack the secret.
After all that, came sitting down and eating. This involved having a peaceful and relaxing meal; for a few minutes, then the bugs would descend in squadrons, undeterred by imminent death by barbecue flames and smoke. The flies were the worst. Lured by the scent of food they would circle like indians around a stranded wagon train, picking off the goods as they sat on the table. Believe me when I say that your desire for a buttered ear of corn goes out the window after the flies have been swimming in the melted butter; dipping their gremlin legs and such appendages in what was once your beloved meal.
Most of the time, we’d retreat to the safety of the kitchen and eat in there, safe from the insects of doom. The bugs would cling to the screen door piteously, as if saying, “Oh Pleeeesse let us in ! We only want a teeny, tiny taste really. Please ? Can’t you hear the voices of our children ?” We would ignore them. This is easy as bugs do not talk except in the minds of disturbed writers like myself. So we would eat inside. This pretty much defeated the purpose of starting this whole foray in the first place, but who would dare to tell this to the King Of The Grill, the Master of the Briquet, the Head Honcho ! Not me. And to this day, we still perform this ancient ritual that was started by Neanderthal man and is frequently heralded by the passed down cry of: “GOD, MY HAIR IS ON FIRE !! AAAAHHHHHH !!
