Grill Tales

Screen door slamming was verboten in our household.

While the front door was equipped with a standard issue aluminum storm door, the kind that was supposed to close slowly and quietly, in actuality, it was so flimsy that a good solid gust of prairie wind could bend the pneumatic door closer into a pretzel shape, resulting in a door that certainly didn’t slam, because it wouldn’t close at all.

But the door to the garage was blissfully unencumbered with anything but a tightly wound spring and, man, if you opened it more than six inches, you’d better have a hand free to set it back against the jam.  Calmly. Quietly.

On the other hand, I couldn’t help but be excited when my father fired up the grill.  As I remember it, our grill was a very simple affair, more of a campfire on three legs than the scientific kettles of today with their multiple vents.  He grilled in the garage and the smoke made my mouth water. But when he called through the screen door to my mom, “Toots, I’m ready for the sauce…”, that was the real signal to salivate.  Everything got a basting with my mom’s concoction of chopped onions sauteed in butter then drenched with Worcestershire: hamburgers, chicken, and best of all, steak. My mother loved steak, and I know he cooked it for her exclusively because his teeth weren’t up to the challenge.  

My father called my mom ‘Toots’ every once in a while.  Usually it was Ginger or even Gingie. “Toots” came from my Grandpa Froerer. Crusty as he was, I remember him calling my sister Laura by that nickname and I can only assume she reminded him of my mom as a little one.

My dad's dad, C. John Renken, Sr. manning the grill and the sauce....

A family get together of any size was reason to grill.  When all the aunts, uncles and cousins came to the farm for 4th of July, he’d prop up the sides of a piece of corrugated tin between concrete blocks, fill it with coals, and cook an army’s worth of pork steaks on a slab of cattle panel.  For our visits, he’d babysit a roast on the Weber, or perhaps pork chops, whatever the weather, whatever the season.

This Sunday, I fired up my Weber grill.  It’s our second one. The first Weber was my baby gift upon the birth of Annie on July 5th.  My mom had come up to stay for a few days, riding the bus up to St. Joe where Blake picked her up.  Before they came home, she bought us a grill, figuring that the second little girl was already well supplied with hand me downs from the first little girl!  Life on the farm was hard on that Weber….after too many summer windstorms, the lid was no longer tight and the third leg had to be replaced with a stack of concrete blocks.  Nonetheless I cooked with it for twenty two years until Lee and Ann and Ryan and Matt bought us a new one for our twenty fifth wedding anniversary. Weber #2 is the one feeding us now.  Fifteen years of fire has burnt up one of the vents, but life in town is less perilous and I’m hoping it holds together as long as its predecessor.

Millie and Charlie bought us a gas grill years ago, probably assuming a need for speed when it came time to put food on the table. But I could never get attached to it, nor particularly good at cooking on it, so when one of those aforementioned thunderstorms blew it over and bent it to pieces, I took it as a sign…..

Here on the cusp of summer when charcoal smoke is in the air and kids chow down on hot dogs at ball games, burgers on the grill is a pleasant remembrance and tribute to the man who taught me to build a fire and conserve coals for the next time.