Thursday October 21st, 2021

 One Summer's Short Story

   Ever try to boil frozen lobster on a barbecue grill in your backyard? And I don’t mean on your metro paver-brick patio with its Spanish flourishes of arched adobe doorways, taco-shaped swimming pool and free-standing fireplace; nor am I talking about a sixteen-hundred dollar grill with a stainless steel hood and five burners.

   I mean using a 50 btu propane grill that you can buy at Wal-Mart for less than $150. My utilitarian-model barbecue grill is right out my backdoor and used several times a week, but I have never attempted boiling lobster on it until just the other day.

   The frozen lobsters laid in a dish on top of the outside central air conditioner awaiting rescue by a fox or large rodent bent on a seafood dinner. They had been in our freezer for almost three months amid an unchanging landscape of frozen bread, venison sausage links, three various sized pizzas, and some old freezer-burnt ice cream.  

   Standing outdoors, unarmed, with almost two miles of semi-wilderness and a winding picturesque creek at my back, is where I do most of my grilling. Some days, I see bald eagles, or turkey buzzards, or sandhill cranes or great blue herons soar by. Canadian geese, mergansers and ducks paddle by on occasion. Sometimes a mink or muskrat will dart from the deep grasses there only to disappear in a heartbeat. But on that evening there was a 20 mph wind, splashed with infrequent rains showers to make things even more interesting.

   “The asparagus and scalloped potatoes are done, Hon! How much longer will it be, you think?” my wife inquired, as she and her daughter busied themselves in the kitchen, watching the ending of Hotel Budapest, a video I’ve never seen in its entirety, entirely.

   “Well, between the wind blowing the burner out, and me turning the grill backwards against the wind, and me dragging the grill up the hill to the south side of the house to get out of the wind, then removing the ‘diverter’ to get more heat, then lowering the lid over the pot...

   "I can see a couple two or three bubbles on the bottom. Won’t be long now!” I replied confidently, although the daughter’s dog saw through my false bravado, and tried to take advantage of my weakened mental state. I peeled him off my leg, the little tosser.

    We had planned to share the lobsters with Chairman Joe, a seafood lover of some renown in Palmville being as he’s from Boston and all; but he and his little woman were away on another ‘holiday’ as they call their runaway excursions to all points of the compass. This one included a luncheon date with a longtime Broadway actress friend performing in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” on-stage, in the Twin Cities, in addition to some wine and pottery shop tours over the days to follow. 

"We had planned to share the lobsters with Chairman Joe, a seafood lover of some renown being as he’s from Boston and all ..."

   I doubted he had really looked forward to eating seafood with the likes of us anyway, especially in such an experimental state this was. I think he’d prefer that we perfected our technique on our time, not his, so the mess was limited to our kitchen and countertops as charred fin-flakes and crustacean armor across a sky-blue serving plate, as it turned out to be later, but let’s not get ahead of the story. Where was I?

   “You can use this timer, dear,” my wife said sweetly, as though it was Mother’s Day and I was doing some cooking as a rare event. 

   An old adage is that a man has never been shot doing dishes, and I think (hope) the same goes for doing some cooking. I rarely cook for other people as I'm not especially good at it, but since I’m the primary eater of the household (my wife exists on a special diet of round wooden toothpicks and small-grain sea salt) I try to do my share of the meat cooking even if my only technique consists of saying to myself,
 

   “Just a few more minutes . . “