Flashes of Panic

All weekend, the air in this residential neighborhood smelled like lighter fluid and charcoal briquets.

Tonight, I dragged out the baby Weber that’s been with me, unused, through the last three moves (two apartments without lawns,) and fired it up for what may have been just the second or third time since I moved back to New England. While I waited for the coals to be ready to cook, I breathed in the scent and reminisced. (I’m getting good at that. I’m practicing to be old, I guess.)

In the house where I lived with W and Z, we grilled a lot. W was stereotypical carnivore, but some time after he moved out, Z fell off the vegetarian wagon in a big way, and we would grill three or four nights a week. We had some basic plastic furniture and a low-end hammock set up on the concrete apron behind the house, and we’d sit around the baby Weber with our supplies, watching the coals in the chimney-starter get pumpkin-red before we dumped them in and started cooking: burgers, pork chops, fish, corn on the cob, whatever came to mind.

I’d sit sideways in the hammock with a beer and dinner, and afterwards we’d skewer marshmallows on bamboo kebab-skewers and toast them over the remaining coals as the neighborhood got dark. We’d discuss our plans to get out of our jobs and that house, our relationships or lacks thereof, and whether the lawn needed mowing. (One blistering summer, it never did; the only moisture it got was when I discovered that our six-pack of Catamount was skunked, and split it between the lawn and my garden plot.)

We hosted one party involving half-liter bottles of Hacker-Pschorr (my, was that ever good beer,) party food from the grill, and marshmallows; I remember the then-editor of Men’s Health idly burning skewers with no marshmallows like cigarettes he couldn’t smoke.

At this remove (by this time five years ago, I had already interviewed for my next job,) there’s a pretty high tinge of nostalgia going there, but there’s nothing wrong with remembering the past fondly as long as you don’t prefer it to the present. Tonight was a good dinner, even though I don’t have any marshmallows in the house.

Now Playing: The Day I Let Glory Steer from This Town Is Wrong by Nerissa & Katryna Nields