Category: Meaningful Memories

The Patient Predator

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Those of us from an an agricultural area have all heard the tales about a parent, usually a mother, preparing a chicken for dinner. When we city-dwellers think of the preparations necessary for a chicken dinner, we think of the five-minute drive to the local supermarket, the time it takes to select the best frozen chicken, and choosing a batter (if it’s not pre-battered). We then sit down for our chicken dinner about a half hour later. That’s been the process for so long that most generations have never heard that for farming families, past and present, there are other steps involved that they’ve never heard about when mothers prepare a chicken dinner.

Disclaimer: Some might deem the following Not Safe for the Workplace, and if you are in anyway squeamish, I suggest you locate the ‘X’ in the upper righthand corner of this screen and exit stage right. Some might deem ‘the other steps’ violent and brutal, but they are a way of life on a farm. “It was just the way we did it,” they say. They way they did it, involved a mother entering a chicken coop to retrieve a chicken or rooster for that day’s meal. Once she catches it, she chops its head off and releases it to allow it to run around, headless, until the life runs out of the body, and it unceremoniously falls to the ground. It usually runs around, crashing and smashing into whatever is around it for about ten seconds without a head, until whatever nerves or final vestiges of their muscles finally run out of power. Some find this funny, others consider it sad, and still others find it so funny that it is kind of sad. Whatever the case is, the next time your mother says that you were “Running around like a chicken with its head cut off” you now know the origin of that phrase.

These chicken/rooster post-mortem displays prompt the question, do all animals do this? Do human bodies run around, crashing and smashing into things for ten seconds after the head gets chopped off, until the lifeforce drains out? There is no evidence that suggests human bodies run around in this manner, but there is some dubious evidence that suggests some consciousness remains in the head. The scientific data is about as far from conclusive as possible, but a researching physician in the French Revolution claimed, based on his observations, that a severed head could retain consciousness for 25 to 30 seconds.

As many times as I’ve heard these chicken preparation stories, over the decades, Ken’s version of this practice involved a twist I’ve never heard before. In his retelling, he remembers his mom stalking roosters in the coop. She would enter the chicken coop with a rooster in mind for their meal before she entered. We could write, “At one point, she caught the rooster,” but this does a disservice to the art of catching rooters, as they are notoriously difficult to catch. We could put them in the smallest of pens and coops, and they will still find ways to elude capture with exceptionally quick movements, tricky maneuvers, and some flying involved in their quest to escape. We could also write, right here, that they’re unusually crafty or surprisingly smart when it comes to eluding capture, but they’re not. They just have what athletes call quick-twitch muscles. As usual with animals at the bottom of the food chain, like the rabbit, roosters have quick-twitch muscles that allow them that first-step quickness and that quick change-of-direction speed and agility that athletes prize. These animals obviously need these abilities to avoid faster predators to sustain the species.

Ken’s mother knew this all of this course, and she knew she wasn’t fleet of foot. She knew she wasn’t quick enough to catch a rooster, because no one is. She knew her only path to success involved a patient pursuit. She could have a rooster cornered several times, in corner after corner, and she knew he would continue to successfully escape until eventually he tired out. “She never grew frustrated by her inability to catch the rooster,” Ken said. “It’s very difficult to catch a rooster, and she knew that.”

It would prove a difficult chore even if it were just she and the rooster in the coop, but what makes it even harder are all of the other eight to ten chickens in the coop running around and flying in short bursts to try to avoid their own capture. As such, Ken’s mother would have to watch her step in pursuit, to avoid stepping on any chickens. We can also imagine that with the effort she put into the pursuit, combined with the heat outside, she would sweat profusely throughout her chase, which would lead to all of the feathers flying around the coop to stick to her face. We have to imagine that this would only add to the frustration and anger of even the most seasoned rooster stalker, but she never showed it. “She never grew frustrated or overly impatient,” Ken said. “She knew all that was just part of it.” There were probably occasions when she caught the rooster fairly quickly, but for the most part she had to engage in this patient pursuit, until the rooster eventually tired out, stood in place and fell asleep. At that point, she grabbed it and twisted its neck.

This is the “Wait a second, what?” twist in story. When someone tells a story that is consistent with everything we’ve heard before, we tend to drift a little. We don’t mean to be rude, but we’ve heard this story so many times, and we all know how it ends. Every time I’d heard this story, it ended with an ax, a knife, or some other sharp instrument applied to the member of the fowl family. The entertaining part, if that’s what you want to call it, usually involves the portion of the tale that describes the rooster running around with its head cut off. So, when Ken added the following, the glaze over our eyes lifted, and we said, “Wait a second, what did you say?” to help the rest of our senses catch up. 

“She would hold the rooster over her head, by the neck, and spin it, until she felt its neck snap,” Ken said. “She then released it and allowed it to run around the coop until the life drained out of it. Then she picked it up, stripped it of its feathers, put it in water, and took it inside to continue preparing it for our meal.” 

“Wait a second, what did you say about spinning?” his open-mouthed audience asked. Ken repeated the bullet points of it. “Did she do that to be … theatrical?”

“My mom didn’t do anything to be theatrical. That was just the way she did it.” When asked if he considered her method in any way inhumane, violent, or brutal, Ken added, “Again, that was just the way she did it. My guess is that that’s probably the way her mother and her grandmother taught her to do it. If you asked her if she considered it theatrical, violent or brutal, she wouldn’t understand why you do. It was just the way it was done as far as she was concerned.

“All you need to do is give the neck a quick jerk,” Ken clarified. “Something to snap the bone. It’s really not as difficult or as violent as you might think.”

***

Flash forward, a couple years, and Ken is a teenager. Ken admits that he was a particularly naughty kid, in his youth, and he met the back of his parents’ hands “More times than I can count. My parents were never ones to spare the rod.” As a teenager, it had been a number of years since any of his punishments were physical, but he upped the ante on one particular occasion. “I can’t remember what I did, but it was above and beyond the typical teenage tests of parental patience.”

“I’m going to have to give you the switch for this one,” his mother informed him. “You have to learn your lesson.”

“That’s all well and good,” Ken said, “but I’m a teenager now mom, and I’m a lot faster than you now.”

“You do what you have to do, and I’m going to do what I have to do,” she said, “but we both know how this ends.”

“We’ll see,” Ken said, as he eluded her and sped out of the house. Out on the farm, we can imagine that Ken found so many hiding places that he had a few favorites that he couldn’t wait to use on this day. He probably heard her calling out to him from his favorite hiding place on the farm, and he probably giggled when he heard the frustration in her voice, but she eventually found him. When she did, he managed to elude capture again, and he hid in another one of his time-tested hiding spots. When she found him again, he ran away and hid again. “I don’t know how long this lasted, but it lasted a pretty long time, hours I think, until I eventually got tired of running.  

“I had it coming, and we both knew it. I didn’t fall asleep, like the rooster, but at some point, I just tired out. To be honest with you, I didn’t see the correlations between her patient pursuits of the roosters and me until much later in life, and when I did, I realized it was pretty funny. She never gave up, she was like a patient predator, and I saw it with the chickens and the roosters. She just never gave up. It was just her way.” Ken’s mother did not further Ken’s punishment by lifting him over her head and spinning him, but Ken never forgot that day with the switch. “It hurt like hell. I still remember how bad that hurt to this day, which was kind of the point. She only swatted me a couple of times, and she was done when she thought I learned my lesson.”    

DIY Garbage Disposal Installation: It Ain’t Easy

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“I done got my ying yang broke,” I would call out to my apartment managers. “Send Scully!” 

“Why do you pay rent to an apartment complex?” my friends would ask me over the course of twenty years. “You’re just throwing money down a well.” This! This is one of the many reasons why, something breaks, call Scully. We don’t have to mow, shovel snow, or know how to fix things with Scully around the corner, and we’ll never know what we don’t know, unless we make the leap to home ownership. When I made that leap, I realized if my dad ever taught me anything about home maintenance, I forgot all of it in those twenty plus years I just called Scully.

And it’s possible that my dad did teach me some things, but I was so bored by it that I didn’t pay attention, or if I did, I forgot all about everything he said as soon as the thing was fixed. I’m still so bored by it, twelve years into the leap, that I forget everything I learn soon after fixing it. If you’re one of us, and you’re tired of paying the Scullies of the world to fix it for you, YouTube is your friend. If you don’t already know this, YouTube is loaded with Do-It-Yourselfers (DIY) who will show you how to fix everything from a leaky roof to your poopeé (as opposed to your pooper, which, to my knowledge, still requires professional consultation).

“It Ain’t Easy”

One of the reasons I recommend YouTube, is that one of the alternatives is the company’s step-by-step instruction manual. My favorite thing to do with a product’s instructional manual is to crumple it up and try to sink it in the nearest waste barrel from what I deem a three-point range. My crumpling process can garner unwanted attention, as I passionately express the bottled up rage these vague, incoherent little pamphlets have caused me over the years. I can do this now, because the Do-It-Yourselfer videos provide so much more clarity.

These DIY videos don’t just instruct us how to fix our appliances and make better homes and gardens, they show us. They show us the difference. “This is a bolt,” they say to explain that which a product’s manual assume we already know, “and this is the difference between a bolt and a washer.” If they don’t say such things, you can see the difference. They’ll hold the bolts and screws in their hands, so you can see the differences in sizes before you start screwing on and screwing up. They’ll also suggest that you might want to consider borrowing your neighbors’ tools before you start, because the “tools” the companies provide are often so basic that they’ll only make your job harder. 

One warning before you start searching for these videos, almost every DIY guy will begin their video with, “[This] is pretty easy, IF you know what you’re doing.” Okay, but if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t have clicked on your video. For those of us who don’t know what we’re doing, they’ll add, “And I’ll show you how in one-hundred and twelve simple steps.” My guess is that most DIY guys have either done this over hundred and thirteen times, or they had some handyman job where they did it frequently. We do want this level of expertise, of course, but some of the times their knowledge and expertise leads them to take some knowledge for granted. 

If you’re anything like me, and you’ve spent most of your life calling Scully, I’m not going to kid you, fixing most household items properly is hard, or at least they were/are for me. My apartment dwelling friends say, “Just submit your name to that ambitious, industrious kid’s weekslong wait list. It’s worth the wait, and the labor fees, to have someone else fix it properly for you.” 

Another annoying refrain from DIY guys is the “Anyone can do this from the comfort of their own home.” Anyone can change a garbage disposal? Have you ever lifted one of those things? Try it. Walk into a hardware store and lift one, just for giggles. I can lift a garbage disposal, and I could probably curl it over 100 times, average weight 13.4 lbs., but –and this is a huge but— the angle of the extremely tight kitchen cabinet, beneath my old-world kitchen sink, is such that I can’t put my shoulder into it. For me, holding a 13.4 lb. garbage disposal is all forearm, and although I didn’t have to lift it over 100 times, it felt like it, because of all the holding, positioning, and twisting the task requires.  

To connect a new garbage disposal, we need to lift one from a very difficult angle, position it perfectly, and twist it into a groove. “EASY? You think this is easy? DIYers around the world, do me a favor, drop the word E word from your vocabulary. As David Bowie once sang, It Ain’t Easy, at least not universally.” Some of you are probably laughing at me right now, because you think it is easy. All right, well, let’s gauge the relative term easy through another relative term, experience. How much experience have you had doing this? How much experience do you have doing that? Yeah, I can do that, and I’ve done that so often that I consider it easy. So, there’s that.    

The first step, for those of us with no experience changing a garbage disposal, is to make sure your old garbage disposal is completely done. That’s right, it might not be broken, it might just be jammed. First click the overload button to reset the unit. If that doesn’t work, make sure the disposal is plugged in and the switch is working. (If you have no experience with garbage disposals, it will benefit you to run through this basic checklist before you go out and purchase a new one.) If all that checks out, find what they call an Allen wrench. Put it into the flywheel turning hole at the bottom of the garbage disposal and turn it. Turn it two to three times. If it’s a jam, you might experience a tough turn at some point. If you make it through the tough turn, and it turns with greater ease, you’ll know it was just a jam. Turn it on. If it doesn’t work initially, repeat the process (I had to do this three times on one occasion.) If that doesn’t work, your disposal might need replacing.

flywheel

Taking an old garbage disposal unit out can be accomplished by most. I’m not going to drop the E word here, but if I can do it, I have to imagine there are ten-year-olds out there, who’ve never heard the term garbage disposal, that can remove one. Follow the DIY guy’s instructions by unscrewing all of the this and thats, disconnect the tubes, and then twist the old garbage disposal out. (Note: Be careful that you don’t crack any PVC pipes.) It’s at this point, right here, when my fellow apartment dwellers say that they would just hire some ambitious, industrious kid to do the rest. I would’ve laughed hard at that ten years ago, but I nod solemnly now. “It’s probably for the best,” I now say, “because putting a new disposal on is hard. Don’t listen to the DIYers and their E words. Not everyone can do this.” 

To install a new garbage disposal, you have to position it just so, and twist. It sounds easy, but as I said that heavy thing becomes heavier through all the trial and errors. If it weren’t so heavy, it might be easy, but it’s hard to hold up there for as long as those of us who don’t know what we’re doing to slip it into the waiting groove perfectly for that final twist. If your cabinet is as tight as mine, you might try eleven to thirteen angles before you realize that there is only one angle that will work. You might look at the top of the unit, five to seven times, and try to line it up. It Ain’t Easy.

It’s frustrating, and yet it’s so frustratingly simple that it will become so frustrating that you might reach a point where you consider it impossible. If you reach that point, it’s time to take a break. If age has taught me anything it’s that it’s okay to take breaks, and in some cases, it’s almost mandatory. We’re conditioned by parents, employers, and other authority figures to think in terms of time constraints. Time constraints also define competency and mastery of a project, “I had some problems, sure, but I got it all done in under an hour.” It’s all true, but it’s also true that if you’re as frustrated as I was, you reach a point of diminishing returns. What are you going to accomplish beyond exhausting every profane word you’ve learned from high school? If you continue, trying to achieve a respectable time frame, you’re probably going to be easily satisfied with a half-ass job just to get ‘er done, then after you calm down, you’ll go back and do it correctly.

To clear the mind and approach the project from a new perspective, I suggest taking two breaks. Watch an episode of your favorite comedy in the first one. It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, show, or podcast. You need to get yourself laughing. In the second break, one that occurs after another thirty minutes of frustration, try punching a punching bag for thirteen minutes. After thirteen minutes of picturing that DIY guy’s face on your punching bag, coupled with attaching some offensive terms to his “Easy” assessments, you should be able to approach this project with a clear mind.

If you take nothing from what I’ve written thus far, remember these two words: The Plug. All garbage disposals come with a plug. The manufacturers add a plug on every the garbage disposal, because some under-the-sink systems (sink, garbage disposal unit, and dishwasher) have the garbage disposal connect to a dishwasher. Some kitchen systems allow dishwashers to connect to the waterline independently. You will need to determine which system you have before installing the garbage disposal. Before removing the old garbage disposal take note of how your under-the-sink system is set up. If the dishwasher connects to the garbage disposal, and you didn’t know anything about the plug, your dishwasher will flood. 

The DIY guy I watched probably covered this, but some of them fellers talk so much that they remind me of my eighth grade teacher. My eyes glaze over, I miss critical information, and I dismiss some of their instructions as blather. Regardless how I missed the information, I knew nothing about the plug, so I installed the garbage disposal with it still attached. When our dishwasher began flooding, we ripped that appliance apart and cleaned every single element on it. We were so confused, until I retraced my steps and realized that all of our dishwasher problems started soon after I installed the new garbage disposal. I turned to my DIY guys, and surprise, surprise, they taught me about The Plug.

If you failed to remove The Plug the first time through, it turns out that you have to undo everything you’ve done. All that frustration that led you to the most comprehensive spiritual experience you’ve ever had, that included forsaking your creator and welcoming him back into your life, was for naught. If you forgot to remove the plug, you’ll have to take the garbage disposal off, grab a screwdriver, and hammer the (expletive deleted) plug out. That sentence was so easy to write, and it was probably just as easy to read. Take it off and put it on again, it’s easy, a trained marsupial could probably do it after they’ve already done it. The reality of removing the garbage disposal, watching the DIY video guy again, taking two breaks, punching him in the mouth for thirteen more minutes, and watching my favorite comedy was as exhausting as the first time through. 

The first thing I think, soon after I’m done, is some people love this. They love getting their hands dirty, doing it themselves, and they love it so much that they invent new projects for the ostensible purpose of updating, modernizing, and renovating. “I think my ceiling fan needs some updating.” Your old one still works. “I know, but it’s so old world.” You can see it on their face, and in the songs they sing while doing it, they love this stuff, and I just sit back shaking my head, asking myself: ‘Why? For God’s sakes why?’

“I’m smart, not like everyone thinks, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect.” I’m not as dumb as I look. I can do things, other things that other people can’t. Some of the things I do are considered hard, very hard to some, but I can accomplish them with ease. I might occasionally, and accidentally, betray some level of arrogance with a look, some sort of unintended feel, or a couple of words, but whenever I start to get all full of myself,  all I have to do is try to fix something in my home that everyone considers so easy to realize that I’m not half as smart as I thought I’d be at this age.   

You Don’t Critique Another Man’s Meat

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“I love grilling,” Leonard said. “Absolutely love it. Some people do it, and some just do it, but for some of us, it’s a passion.” 

If someone said this from behind one of those sleek, compact, Three-Burner, Liquid Propane grills that feature porcelain-enameled, cast-iron cooking grates, you’d scream, I’d scream, we’d all scream for red meat. Check that, I probably wouldn’t scream, not anymore. I’ve been beat down, brothers and sisters, by all them grill-at-the-parkers hollering about how salvation is near. I’m here to testify that those Willie “the wunderkind” types who man the grill, and who, by all appearances should be the chef du jour, are false prophets.

You’ll be disappointed too, but you, the patron of the park, the family and/or friend of the chef, keep in mind that you ain’t paid a dime for that meat, the seat, or anything in between. You are to be grateful, always grateful, when someone hands you a plate, telling you to “Dig in!” on what you’ve been smelling and salivating over for the past ten minutes. You go grateful and stay grateful, because they paid for that meat, and they’ve been slaving over the fire, and you ain’t paid a dime. 

It’s that smelling that gets us, and it leads us astray, my friends. I’ve been there, you’ve been there. We believed in that smell, and our expectations went sky high. We tried to listen to Niece Maggie talking about her volleyball matches, but we don’t hear her, because of the symphony of sizzles going on behind our back.

When the moment of truth arrives, and I mean that in the most literal sense, we don’t even notice the au gratin potatoes when our plate hits that table. All we see is meat, all we hear is sizzling, and if the Promised Land smells anything like this, we might not mind going there a little sooner than expected. Then we get a taste, our first taste, finally, after all that waiting, and our sky-high expectations hit a gut-destroying, roller coaster dip.

“Is it just me or is this … bad?” we ask ourselves, and we’re all asking ourselves that question. You can see it at the table, especially on Cousin Teddy’s face. Do you have a Cousin Teddy? He can’t hide it? He has an eyebrow raised, but-I-ain’t-saying-a-word look on his face, but that face is just saying what we’re all thinking. Is the meat that bad, or are we all just that picky, and do we have a right to be picky, seeing as how this was all free? “But I had such sky high expectations. Doesn’t that warrant disappointment?”

“No, here’s what you do,” a friend of the family once informed me. “You shut your trap, and you keep it shut. That’s what you do. You open it long enough to put the food in it, then you close it to chew, and you keep closing it, until you’re headed home, whispering it to your wife on the drive home. You wanna be starting something? No, there’s nothing to be gained, at a family picnic, by critiquing another man’s meat.”

And when we talk about meat, we’re not talking about pork, brothers and sisters, because pork is tough to screw up. You know it, we know it, because we all done it, and we know it takes a whole bunch of stupidity to mess pork up. Brats, and all of the other meats that fall under the wiener umbrella, rarely knock our socks off or sadly disappoint, and we’ve had an absolutely horrible piece of chicken, what once? Twice, maybe twice. Red meat is the all-knowing meat. Red meat exposes a man’s under belly. It tells us who we are, who we really are. It tells us something about our attention to detail, the vulnerabilities of our spatula, and the frailties of our fork. Red meat does not forgive and forget, and it’s all about red meat.

Red meat is the reason we just drove thirty minutes to this park. We love our get-togethers, spending time with friends and family, and all that, but red meat is special. Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters? A soft, juicy hamburger is sublime, but a properly prepared steak is divine. I don’t care where they cut it, steak is the meat.  

I don’t keep a ledger on my disappointments in life, but when it comes to steak, I’ll throw out a whopping 95%. The fellas with the finest forks have disappointed me 95% of the time. The gas-grilled steak is edible, most of the time anyway, but it’s not Oh!-I-gotta-have-it scrumptious. It’s usually about two notches above edible.

I’ve seen them roll the most beautiful, top-of-the-line, stainless steel, propane gas machines into the park, and I’ve seen who’s ready and who ain’t. I’ve heard the grillers-in-the-park talk about those machines and how their top-of-the-lines can distribute heat so evenly across the grate, and how their four stainless steel burners can produce incredible amounts of BTUs that enhance heat retention so all that cooking “is not only more efficient, it’s convenient and quick.” And I know nothing about their world. I know nothing about all the knowledge they’ve attained from their research. But I’ve done my own research. I’ve researched what they generously produced for me with all their time and effort, between my teeth and gums, and I can’t remember eating a gas-grilled piece of red meat that’s earned those blue-ribbons. It’s quick, your propane grills with all their fixings are quick, but blue-ribbon? What are you smoking son?

So, we all giggle when Terrance rolls in with his $89.00 charcoal grill that he says he bought on sale at Walmart. We join in the giggles with the fellas-in-the-park, with a beer in our hands, because we know that they know, because they’ve been grilling for thirty-some-odd-years, so we trust they know their ins and outs. When the unassuming Terrance reveals his charcoal chimney starter, his flipper, his forker, and some tongs, the very, very basic three-tool set, that he purchased with the grill “all for a little over a hundy,” we join their public chiding, their gentle public shining, and we even join in on their private, and less gentle, scorn.

Terrance doesn’t talk the talk or walk the walk, because he don’t know it. He lived in an apartment and worked in an office for most of his life. Terrance is the type who prefers to eat out. He prefers restaurant food, and we all whisper that while he’s cooking, and we do it in the most condescending manner you can imagine. Terrance is the “doesn’t get it, and he probably never will” type of chef, because he started grilling late in life. If we talk about grilling with him, we started the conversation, not him, and we find he’s pretty insecure about his ability to cook a meal for the entire family.

“I let you guys do it for so long, because you love it. You all love doing this far more than I do,” Terrance whispers to me. “But I got a wife, and I got a life, so I decided to what-the-hell it.” So, it was the wife who talked him into grilling for the whole family. She also told him he was pretty good at it.

“But, for the whole family?” he complained.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

We don’t think he’ll be fine. We wonder what she was smoking. I mean, Terrance doesn’t even own an apron that says something funny about the chef on it. He’s so insecure about his abilities that he doesn’t even join the joke Aunt Pat is telling about the time “Terrance couldn’t find the anus on a trout for cleaning.” He doesn’t know what he’s doing behind a grill, so he ain’t got time for her playtime. He needs to concentrate on trying to cook a fairly decent meal for the whole family. He also doesn’t want to make anyone sick, so he keeps plugging his “Walmart temperature gauge thinger-diller” (a term he uses because he can’t remember the word thermometer!) in the meat, and upon grilling, the verbal kind, we find he isn’t “totally sure what’s the difference between a sirloin and a ribeye”.

The “Oh, boy” we give is not kind. “Oh boy, we might need to get someone else to man the grill Helen,” our brother Jerry says about halfway through. “I’m not sure if Terrance is da man,” he adds, and oh boy do we laugh.

That “Oh, boy” consensus quietly turns kind, about twenty seconds after we sink our teeth and gums into Terrance’s finished product. “Oh, boy!” we want to say, but when no one else says a word, we quietly devour this tender and soft piece of meat that quietly changes everything we thought we knew about grilling-red-meat-in-the-park.

A hint of crisp on the outside is expected, but nothing can prepare us for the soft and chewy 145 degrees of medium-cooked insides that informs us how much dopamine the brain can reward a human being for the sense of taste. Everyone has Aunt Phyllis’s green bean casserole on their plate and Aunt Donna’s au gratin potatoes, but no one has touched any of that yet. There is no talk of trout anuses, fishing trips with our recently-deceased Uncle George, or any of the other great times we’ve had at this park over the years. There’s also no talk about how Terrance and his “under a hundy” arsenal just upended thirty years of grilling research the fellas attained with their top-of-the-line materials. We just quietly devour what Terrance made on his “one healthy sneeze and that thing’s going down” piece of junk, Charcoal grill that he purchased, on sale, from Walmart ten years ago.

Now that our course has been corrected on grilling at the park, we love hearing Leonard go on about how he knows his way around a grill, and how it’s all about love and passion for him. He has all of the latest and greatest cooking utensils, coupled with his ‘Kiss the Chef!’ apron. His stainless steel, propane gas grill has a brand name with numbers behind it that Leonard spouts as if it’s a limited model Lamborghini, and the aesthetic design of it is an absolute feast for the eyes. His wife further amplifies whatever Leonard says about himself and his new grill, and you watch him to see if there’s anything you can learn from a bona fide master. Leonard has a wide variety of wood chips, and he “ain’t afraid to use them”, and he “ain’t afraid to season neither.”

“Delicate and measured,” he says. “I know it’s verboten among the smoke whisperers, but if you keep it delicate and measured, seasoning enhances as opposed to overwhelming.”

When we finally sink our teeth and gums into the finished product of Leonard’s decades of fine-tuning, through trial and error and research, we find a truth about his marvel of science and engineering. We didn’t want to find it. That’s the most important note I want to leave you with today. When Leonard started going on about his passion for grilling, we thought we were going to be rolling around in it minutes later. Our only concern was that we would love it so much that we might make noises when we eat, and some of them might not be human noises. 

We didn’t want him to be wrong. We didn’t want him revealed. We wanted a savory slab of steak between our teeth and gums. When Leonard graciously gave us one of his steaks, we were grateful, but we couldn’t help but notice that it produced a flavor so close to steak that it was edible, but compared to Terrance’s amateur production, Leonard’s steak was anything but we we call a tour-de-force.

“It was actually pretty bland,” we whisper to our wives on the ride home. We don’t say this to Leonard, however. We lie to him, as any respectful guest who just ate the product of another’s effort and generosity will. We whisper that Terrance, and his piece of crap $89.00 cooker, “Actually grilled up a better steak.” We whisper that because we don’t want anyone to know what we don’t. 

“I know,” she whispers back, “But shhh!” We’re in the privacy of our own car, and we’re whispering, and she’s shushing me to try to prevent me from carrying on to the point that someone might hear us and know that we don’t know what we’re saying. We don’t know anything. We know so little that we don’t even know what we don’t know, but we know what we know, and we know you don’t critique another man’s meat.