At long last Memorial Day has arrived. The Unofficial Kickoff (Tipoff or Ceremonial First Pitch, if you prefer a different sports cliché) of grilling season. Well, we grill all year, it’s not unusual for us to scoop the snow away from grill and throw on a few steaks. But, for most people, this is the opening ceremony (sorry, once you start these sports metaphors it’s like eating peanuts, you just can’t stop).
Now you’re going to want to head to the store.
Grab a bag of charcoal right away. I know you forgot to check to see if you had any, and you don’t want to admit to that oversight when you are getting ready for the savory, sweet, smoky goodness of grilled pork. Grab a can of lighter fluid too, nothing worse than a pile of briquettes mocking you while you throw one match after another onto the smug, flameless mound of black rocks.
Of course, you’ll need beer. Memorial Day barbecue without beer, get real. Sometimes I wonder if you’re even an American. To be safe buy something imported, maybe from Mexico, or Jamaica, they know how to brew beer for hot weekends.
OK, now we move onto the meat section of the supermarket. It’s easy to find, racks and racks of coolers tended by serious, unsmiling men using razor-sharp knives to dissect cattle and pigs into saleable slabs of a size appropriate for a barbecue grill. Either that or they unload boxes of packaged meat into miles of electric coolers, I’m not sure what they do, and I don’t ask, these are the sternest, most serious employees in a grocery store. Unless you count the customer service counter. If you’re too sullen and uncommunicative to be a butcher they make you a customer service representative.
Ok, you found your way to the “meat department.” Next you have to find the refrigerator with the ribs.
It’s empty, picked clean, it almost looks new.
Oh well, steaks would be good too. Wait, there are no steaks either, gone, all of them.
Maybe you could throw a few burgers on the grill, but there is no hamburger, it’s empty. Chicken, wiped out. Bratwurst, gone. Fish, gone. It’s all gone. This is how the sack of Rome had to look.
The whole place is filled with the low buzz of refrigeration casting around, looking for something to cool. Everywhere you look there are people pushing a cart from one void to the next, peering into the abyss, soft moans drift across the bleak, empty refrigerators, tears drip and cool, little puffs of steam rise from the emptiness. At some point they just wander away from their carts, leaving them between where the shrimp used to be and where the pork chops were. Everybody was going to throw something on the grill.
I look at the listless people drifting silently, sadly to their cars, they will try Kroger, Giant Eagle, Meijer, Walmart, Target, Fresh Thyme, everywhere. Eventually, they will end up at Speedway, or BP or Conoco and buy some hotdogs off the rotisserie thing, take them home and sit on the patio and take part in the most American of traditions, the picnic.
Frisbees will soar gently, gracefully, sprinklers will be run through, and sunburns, mosquito bites and beestings will pop up all over. Tables will be filled with containers of store-brand cottage cheese and deli counter potato salad. Flags will still fly and parties, large and small will still happen. And for a weekend I can see hope for a brighter future. Sometimes humanity surprises me.
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