It needs to get warm soon. I need to sit on my back porch, next to the grill. A beer in one hand and a book in the other. Or a baseball game on the radio. Birds twerping, the sound of the distance highway a dull buzz, like the quiet roar of the ocean. But mostly that barbecue, ribs and pork shoulder and burgers stuffed full of onions. Just thinking about it makes me hungry.
I’m sitting here at a kind of barbecue school. Mostly it’s a bunch of folks sitting around folding tables, watching a power point presentation on how to smoke meats. Across from me, turned to watch the slides, are two guys who couldn’t be more different. One of them I know. We’ll call him James—he went to MIT. He works for SpaceX. He’s got a wife who flips houses for a living. No kids. He’s maybe 32 years old.
Next to him, the other fella, I can only guess, but, early sixties? Gray pokes out from beneath his Mariners ball cap. His satin jacket is black, has a patch on the shoulder that reads “National Softball Championships, Las Vegas, 2014.” I got money that says he went there to watch his daughter play.
James is a friend of mine—we met in a coffee shop about 10 years ago. He was fresh out of school, working for Microsoft. It’s the same coffee shop where I met my future wife, and where he met his future wife. I guess that’s a Seattle thing, coffee shops and all.
The other guy, though, if I had to guess, gets into the Seattle city limits maybe twice a year. And even then it’s only the southern tip of Seattle. I’m not trying to stereotype, and I could be very wrong. But me, I’m from Wichita Kansas, originally, and you kind of get a knack for knowing your own. Graduate high school, maybe go to trade school, work in machine shop for twenty years, finally get promoted to management, kind of like retirement but the coffee’s not as good.
James, for what it’s worth, is taking notes. His got a yellow legal pad, and he’s writing down pretty much everything the guy giving the presentation says. Temperatures for different cuts of beef, how to caramelize with a hot skillet, tricks for making a marinade that isn’t too salty.
The other fella, the one in the soft ball jacket, just nods his head every few seconds, like he knows it all already. He probably does. I wonder why he’s here.
Me, I’m here to learn, sure, but also to eat. My wife signed us up for this class, because we’re going to eat what we cook. Of course, some recipes require more time than we’re going to be spending in the class, so there’s already meat on some of the grills. And the aromas in the smoke are making me drool.
I didn’t go to MIT, but I did go to college. I never worked in a machine shop, but I’ve gotten my hands dirty more than a few times. If James wanted to strike up a conversation about, I don’t know, quantum state bubbles drives to shave another three ounces off a booster rocket, I could listen. If this softball fella wanted to tell me about the time his daughter met fast-pitch ace Jenny Finch, I’d be interested.
But I think those conversations would have to happen on my back porch. With a beer in our hands, birds twerping overhead. On that grill, a couple of pounds of prime tip, smoking away, making us hungry, something we all have in common.