When I was a kid, my mother was heavily into antiques and she did — she had furnished our house in completely, for the most part, antiques. The chairs were not very comfortable and it was — very much a lot of antiques in this house. Anyway, she didn’t want a regular grill in the backyard because it bothered her look. So, she bought a big giant kettle and got ma- had a stand made for it and she got a grill for the top of it and then she put the wood, or the charcoal in the, in the kettle with the lid, and that was our grill. Okay, fine. It was kinda dorky, but it was okay. My dad grilled. My mom did not usually do the grilling. My dad did, but my dad couldn’t really cook.
So anyway, one Friday night, it was kind of late, and my mom had gotten home from school late, and my dad had gotten home from work late. And it was probably in May or June, it was fairly warm outside. Not much was going on, but it was starting — looked like it was going to rain and my father said, “Oh, I’ll just go out and I’ll cook some hot dogs on the grill.” And my mom said, “Well, you better hurry up ‘cause I think it’s gonna rain.” Well, my dad took lighter fluid out to the grill and doused the charcoal with, with lighter fluid, stuck part of the newspaper on top of it, and lit the match. It kind of exploded. He bounced back very quickly and he was not hurt, thank heaven. But the fire that it — the fire in, from that grill went very, very tall and went up the tree that was next to where my mother had parked this grill.
And, fortunately, the hose was there and my father put the whole thing out with the hose and was running around. Everybody was running around, my mom was screaming. The hot dogs are, you know, just sitting on a plate. Everything is running around like a, I don’t know, circus. But the tree was kinda severely damaged through this and eventually we had to have a tree person come and eventually that tree had to be taken down.
And it’s one of those things that I always — I never really let my dad forget about. Whenever we were talking about grilling and he said, “Well, I could grill,” you know what always came up, it’d be, “Yeah, you lit a tree on fire when you grilled.” And so those were always the things that, you know, a teenager and then an adult would remind their father of forever and ever and ever.
My mother kinda stopped grilling after that. She decided that maybe she should just cook in the house, and we didn’t grill very often after that. But my mother later decided that after we got married and had a house and a backyard and a grill and everything, my mother decided that when she wanted something grilled she would come over and get my husband to cook it for her, because she did not want my dad to do it and we all agreed on that, even my dad. He was not good at it. He was not good at cooking anything. Anyway, that was kind of, kind of a funny thing.