My father's company gave him this grill to celebrate 25 years of employment. It's almost paleolithic these days, to have a single-company career. I imagine that my own future resume will bounce from brand to brand, essays distributed among various online portals. Of course, there's no way to know that--the future is still on its way. Give the tech world a decade, and my current aspirations may be old hat. I'm running full tilt toward my own obsolescence.
The company sent my dad a congratulatory letter and a brochure. "Happy Anniversary, Mister Employee! Here's what you can choose..." The grill was one of the gift options. Dad could have picked a semi-fancy watch. But he's not the ostentatious type; my father is satisfied with his $25 Target-brand timepiece.
The grill gets a lot of use, especially during the summer. Using the stove or the oven makes the kitchen air start baking--I'm not bothered, but my mom is menopausal and short-tempered with heat. The grill sits out on the patio, occasionally half-coated with sunshine but often covered by the blue shadow of the house. In the kitchen, my dad twitches his hips to songs streaming from Pandora, dropping duck legs into spicy, acidic marinade. He calls to me, "Sonya, will you make a salad?" I will.
I scoop sliced chunks out of an avocado, depositing them on top of sliced tomatoes and chopped lettuce. My elbow knocks the stainless steel bowl and it spins a quarter turn. Dad reaches for the drawer below the counter where I'm working, and I have to step back, pausing my spoon in the avocado. We laugh, extracting the familiar joke that whenever more than one person is in a kitchen, they want to be in the same place. "Science says so," I giggle to him.
Middle-class suburbia, summer suppertime paradise.
