8. Quest for Fire

We are in the season of grilling. Like watching football, burping, and working on cars, grilling is primarily a man thing. Ask a man if he cooks, and, more often than not, if he answers yes, he’ll mean that he grills.

I won’t even get into the fact that in some parts of the country, “barbecue” and “grill” are interchangeable verbs. Not here. Not where I live. Barbecuing is a process of cooking dry-rubbed meat over indirect fire in a long, languid interplay of heat and smoke. Maybe late in the process, a liquid baste is mopped on. Grilling is raw meat (and other things) placed squarely on an oiled grate over raw fire, charcoal- or gas-driven.

The latter issue divides grillers. My Gregory was a charcoal man. He was about gathering twigs, scrunching up newspaper, and lighting a starter fire with a single match. He’d blow and poke and stand back and contemplate and poke again until he had a healthy flame churning. With this, he’d ignite charcoal briquettes. Chemical starters were unacceptable.

When he lived in Salt Lake City – when his career as an economist was just beginning and before the death of his father would call him home – he used to grill all the time. Even in the howling depths of winter. He didn’t care if there was snow on the ground and it was 20 degrees outside. “It’s never too cold to grill,” he declared.

Mario, on the other hand, is a gas man. He fires up the grill with the turn of a knob and the flick of a lighter. He turns out some good grilled food. He is a consummate cook. But – how shall I say? – his grill lacks the smoky nuance that a charcoal fire, with its wood-chip variations and dance of direct-indirect heat, provides. No. Let me go farther. It is a nasty grill. Its grate is caked with char, and the gas flames flare at one end, sputter at the other. Yet Mario, like a surgeon forced to use a Swiss army knife, manages. He even defends his grill.

Almost every weekend, Gregory would grill at my house, where he kept his Weber “Smokey Joe.” Yes, the company spells “smoky” incorrectly. I called the grill Little Joey. Gregory would hunker over the glowing briquettes and wood chips, tending them like a mama duck with her ducklings. He’d take my daughter out on the patio with him and indoctrinate her into the mysteries of monitoring heat and smoke, or flipping meat with tongs. In a heartbeat – there’s that heartbeat again – they would be transported to the mouth of the cave in who-knows-what millennia.

The amazing thing is, there was a municipal ordinance in my neighborhood against outdoor grills. It was not uncommon for neighbors to call the police if they smelled grill smoke wafting from some clueless newcomer’s patio. It was almost a competition to see who could get to the phone and call the cops on them first. Yet Gregory and I grilled almost every weekend, unimpeded, for five years.

During my time with Mario, I’ve tried to convey the difference a charcoal grill makes. For though I am a woman, I fall squarely in the charcoal camp. I’ve given him wood-chip pans and wood chips, received about as enthusiastically as a do-it-yourself vasectomy kit. I’ve dropped broad hints at restaurants, like, “This mesquite-smoked steak tastes soooo good.” I might as well be petting an armadillo.

After Gregory died, Little Joey was consigned to a box on a shelf. I just couldn’t bring myself to grill on it, even though I knew how. Besides the emptiness of Gregory not being there, I was sure that the first time I lit up, someone would call the cops and I’d be busted.

I accepted Mario’s pathetic gas grill as I accepted other aspects of his character that were different from Gregory’s. And indeed, there’s a Calabrian dish Mario makes that requires grilling many slices of eggplant. I’ve seen him spend hours, sweat dripping off his face and chest, hunkered over that grill, achieving just the right balance of soft flesh and char out of those gassy, fickle flames. He combines this eggplant with layers of marinara, a combination of cheeses, hard-boiled eggs and seasonings to create a rustic eggplant parmesan of ambrosial dimensions. It’s hard to argue with his success, despite his limited tool.

Lately, though, Mario has decided that he needs a new grill. Not only that, he has his eye on a charcoal-fired hottie – a Hasty Bake, which grill cognoscenti will recognize as the Maserati of home units. Am I excited because this will this make him more like Gregory? No! But I am thrilled to see him stretching to explore a new way of playing with fire.


Wait. There’s a post script here. I allowed Mario see this entry up to this point before posting. And he was so taken aback and ashamed at what I had written about his gas grill that he spent an entire afternoon refurbishing it, top to bottom. Fixing the element. Cleaning the grate. Making space for a smoker box. Making sure that I would never use adjectives like “pathetic” and “nasty” again. That's the newly refurbished gas grill, up there with the T-bones on it.

Who knew!? He and Gregory share a near obsession with order and cleanliness. For Gregory, that meant expensive shoes lined up in his closet like spit-and-polished little soldiers, all in a row. For Mario, it means turning into the White Tornado every Saturday morning in an orgy of house cleaning.

Mario's idea of the ultimate grill, designed & built by chef
& owner Victor Arguinzoniz, of the renowned Etxebarri.

I guess Mario found my analysis of his nasty, pathetic grill at odds with his pristine, Mr. Clean self-image. Or maybe, the hair on his legs just got a little thicker. Suddenly, he takes his role as keeper of the flame very seriously. That is good. The torch has passed. Somewhere, Gregory is smiling.

7. Sing Me A Song

It is difficult to believe that Mario and I have been friends, a couple, almost as long as Gregory and I were together. And it is now going on – what? – eight years since Gregory’s death.

Helena, who was 12 then, has turned 20. Gregory completely missed her teen-age years, her blossoming into womanhood, which he would have enjoyed. My two boy cats, which he lovingly tormented, are now stiff, old men.

But Gregory is “forever young.”

That was one of his favorite songs. An anthem, really. It underscored his commitment to fitness, eating well and taking care of oneself. When we first began going out, his skin was so luminous, his body so lithe, that I was concerned that he might be too young for me. Only later did I learn he was two years older than I.

Once, he was grilling outside on my patio as I was preparing the “inside” food.

Gregory hears Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” playing on the radio and impulsively grabs me from the kitchen and starts twirling me around in an impromptu dance. This, from someone who would rather sit on a fire ant mound than dance. What a wonderful moment it was, our bodies bending and swaying as one.

“Forever Young” was a song we would play at the memorial service, a wretched organ rendition by a musician who “wasn’t familiar” with the tune. The memorial service consisted mostly of tributes to Gregory and memories of him, from his Little League teammates who marveled at his intensity even at an early age, to those, like me, who were close to him on the eve of his death.

Some of us read our own, and some were read by a priest that Gregory’s mother insisted participate in the service. I remember this one from a business client: “Gregory’s passion was helping others help themselves. Gregory had vision that was clearer than most people. He had the ability to look at chaos, real or apparent, and see a path to order.” Little did this man know – little did I know – that Gregory had spent a lifetime honing that skill.

But the moment that took everyone aback occurred after we thought the remembrances were over. Out of nowhere, this lean, handsome black man in a neatly tailored suit bounded up to the pulpit and begged our indulgence. “Please,” he said, waving a crumbled piece of paper from his pocket. “I didn’t have time to write what I wanted to write.” We had asked people to submit remembrances in writing so that we might not only read them, but print them in the program.

“Please,” he said. “I would like to offer this tribute to Gregory for all he did for me.”

The chapel fell silent.

And then, out of one soul’s depths arose this sonorous baritone: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me….” A capella. Like a river of music, bubbling up from an ancient spring in an aching heart, and gathering strength before erupting into a full-blown torrent of raw emotion.

Without prompting, other voices began to chime in. Until the chapel was filled with soaring, keening voices, melding as one. Undulating, rising and falling in waves of hope and love and grief and despair.

When he was done, the man bowed his head and walked silently back to his seat, soft tears at the corner of his eyes. In that moment, there could not have been a more perfect gift – to Gregory, to all of us.

6. “Tell her NOW”

Mario and I went to dinner at some friends’ recently. This couple had just gotten back from Italy, and oh, the meal was fantastic: an ambrosial fresh tomato soup with ricotta and basil, al dente pasta with wild mushrooms and olive oil, arugula salad, a mixed grill, grape compote on baked ricotta, and more. With, of course, wines to match.

Somehow the conversation turned in such a way that he was relating a story and she was rolling her eyes. Seriously rolling her eyes. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but in retrospect I wanted to sit them both down like little children and say to them: “Do you not appreciate what you have? Why are you being careless with your most cherished companion? You must never take him or her for granted.” And to the eye-roller: “Tell him NOW how much you love him.”

But this is the chasm. It is impossible to understand how death changes your life, and changes your appreciation of a life, until it happens to someone you love. Mario and I are not perfect together. But our appreciation for one another runs deep. When our differences grate upon each other, we find a way to laugh and move through the moment. We have had some disagreements. But they flare like sheet lightning, and then we find our center again.

I do not mean that to sound boastful or prideful, like we are so perfect. We’re not. Let me share a little more of my back story to give this context.

When Helena’s father decided that he did not love me (the beginning of the end of what I thought was the “forever” marriage), it was the worst love disappointment I had been through to that point. At times, I wished out loud that her father would die so I could extinguish my irrational hope for reconciliation.

After Gregory died, I understood how foolish and shallow that wish was. Death carries with it a finality that most of us are unprepared for. Those songs that talk about loving forever, or loving till you die – you hear them in a completely different way once you actually lose someone.

Maybe the physical, earth relationship ends with death. But the love? The love feels eternal, bridging the gap between life and death.

After Gregory died, we had a memorial service, which I helped to plan. His family was so far out of touch with who he was that when I suggested the need for this, they said, “Who will come? Who will care?”

Well, the people came. They were his people. And my people. And they filled the chapel. Helena’s father came with Helena. I sat between one of Gregory’s lifelong friends and one of my dearest friends, a woman who was a reluctant psychic. By that, I mean B.A. (short for Beatrice Ann) found herself channeling and receiving information quite unbecoming her station as the wife of an oil industry executive.

So we are sitting at this memorial service for Gregory, and it’s a silent, meditative period while soft music is playing. B.A. leans toward me and says, “He says to tell you he loves you, that death doesn’t change that.” She adds, leaning closer: “He says to tell you NOW.” B.A., who had never met Gregory, explained later that she had resisted telling me because it seemed inappropriate to the moment. But Gregory had insisted.

Of course, you can never prove this kind of “communication.” But in the arc of emotion that made up the service, I felt that she was getting something. The urgency rang true.

For all the loss I felt in the suddenness of his death, there was nothing left unsaid between us. Every day that Gregory was in my life, I let him know how precious he was to me. He did the same. That brought me a small measure of comfort.

I wanted to look at the couple who prepared the wonderful dinner for Mario and me and say, “Stop it! Stop it, both of you. Don’t you see what you have together? Appreciate what you have! Tell each other NOW, and get past the petty, superficial static. Appreciate that this could all change in a heartbeat.”

One skipped heartbeat. Leading to another skipped heartbeat…. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the guts to say that to our friends. But Mario and I are clear on the concept of appreciating one another here and now. There’s got to be an easier way to learn this.

Photographs by Ansel Adams