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.  

God Bless the Child

I’m painting again….

Seems like I’ve spent more time painting in my life than most folks: painting as in primer and enamel, Rustoleum and latex, barns and gates and secondhand furniture.  Walls and wallpaper (don’t judge), ceilings and cement.  Scenery, signs, one 1966 Chevy pickup (construction orange) and perhaps my finest work, the big red geranium in a clay pot that graced both the false front on a long gone greenhouse and an even longer gone Ford three speed delivery van.

 

This propensity to paint is just one way I am my father’s daughter.  The only question is whether this craving to cover with color is a result of nature or nurture.  We earned our stripes the old fashioned way: no paint brush until until the target was scraped clean or wire-brushed free of flakes and rust.  My sister and I served at least a seven years’ apprenticeship painting farm gates and ourselves with gallon after gallon of barn red from Orscheln’s.   By nature, these children of the Depression and wartime were thrifty and fixed what broke, a task made easier by my mom’s talent with a sewing machine and my father’s engineer mindset.  By nurture, their children picked up sticks, pulled weeds, painted peeling farm buildings….and still do all of the above.  I shared with both my folks an appreciation for the timeworn and a desire to resurrect and put back to work stuff with some miles left to go.

Me, painting the numbers as high up as I wanted to lean

My dad, painting at the peak of the Red Barn roof

That's me, painting the numbers on the big red barn lots and lots of years ago.  In this picture, I've got a lot of rungs in front of me and I'm feeling pretty secure up high. Full disclosure, I did some of the painting on the gable sides of that barn, as high as that ladder could reach.  It was terrifying; I even curled my toes inside my shoes in an effort to make myself one with that ladder.  Exhibit two: my father, two ladders up on the steeply angled roof of the tallest barn in Moniteau county.  Lightning bolt high.  Once, on a vacation in South Dakota, he offered to race us to the top of a fire tower.  Laura scampered up ahead, as nimble as a squirrel on a high wire.  I made it about three flights before freezing up and retreating to join my mother on the ground.  When it came to heights, I was definitely my mother's daughter.

By nature, my father was orderly and tidy...I’d say almost to a fault, but that would be accounting using my standards of organization.  My mother’s best friend says my mom would hurry home from a visit to make sure the messes on the counter, or table, or other remains of the day were shoved under a counter or into a closet or otherwise cleared from the deck.  This story makes me laugh, being as picking up stacks of books, photos, mail and magazines and transporting them upstairs far from the beaten path of any company is my chosen way to deal with clutter. This habit is just one of the ways I’m my mother’s daughter. Over time, piles of lists and papers and catalogs accumulated on my parents’ kitchen table too, proving that even my father’s sense of order was no match for Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The haphazard little girl learned discipline primarily through practice.  For much of my life, music was the strongest bond and common language between my father and me. He was a good teacher; I learned to listen to the sound I was making, to formulate an ear for what a clarinet should be...based on my dad’s clear bright tone, not the assortment of squeaks and groans in our school band. In music, he was patient with my mistakes, counting effort and practice to the good, but that didn’t keep me from quaking every week when it came time to test my exercises. My life is forever richer for the bond forged with my dad and the knowledge and appreciation of music heard and music performed.

My father was witty, quick with a quip or retort.  I wished I could be.  He was the sort of man one listened to.  My mother was kind, a patient and sympathetic ear during our one long distance conversation a week during college, or while she cooked in her farm kitchen and I chattered from the table.  In her later years, she was quiet, and I missed our conversations, though she was still perfectly happy to hear me talk about gardens and kids and loved to look at the pictures I took of home and farm or travels far away. Now I have stacks and stacks of the photo albums she constructed, reminders of a curious mind and an artist’s eye with the lens. I grew up with houseplants in every room and a camera bag on every outing; those habits are second nature not just for my sister and me, but deeply ingrained in her grandchildren as well.

What do we remember of our childhood?  I watched two people do their jobs: my father as the breadwinner and spiritual leader and my mother as caregiver, homemaker, and partner.  But these separate jobs were overshadowed by what they did together, which makes Clint Black’s lyrics oh so true….

“The way we work together is what sets our love apart

So closely that you can't tell where I end and where you start.”