Middle-aged
men in summer have one thing on their minds: barbecue grills. Women
in bathing suits are no match for a man's thrill at firing up his
barbecue grill. The primal instincts of the hunter-gatherer can only
find fulfillment in the sizzle and pop of a flank steak lined with
the grid of the grill after each flip of the grill-master. The smoke
rises as the warrior-king sends smoke signals into the sky to
indicate another conquest as imagined in a bygone primal century.
I
recently had trouble with my grill, which would only heat up to about
200 degrees even though I had tried two full propane tanks, neither
of which would work. This bout of grill impotence was unnerving
because men measure their summer manhood by their barbecue-ability.
It lasted about two months over summer and even stretched into
September. Time after time I returned to the house with half-cooked
morsels of meat as I was unable to finish the job. I took the grill
apart, cleaned it, and put it back together. No change. One day in
the Spring, it had seemed to work properly for a few minutes, only to
return to halfway heating. Men would come over and try to fix my
grill, but you don't really want another man showing you up in your
own garage on your own grill. But no one could fix it. My self-esteem
dropped precipitously as I envisioned a summer of hamburgers cooked
indoors in the kitchen, a ruinous thought. It was like the Bible
story
of Sisera, whom the text points out was killed by a woman.
(The rationale apparently is that a man should be only be killed by
another man in battle, not a woman.) And a man should be cooking the
meat on the grill in the summer, not a woman in the kitchen. In the
summer, a man is supposed to be outside, listening to the ballgame on
the radio, sweating big drops of perspiration in travail over
t-bones. This is a middle-aged man's summer glory since he can no
longer show off a golden tan and six-pack abs after middle age wreaks
havoc on his hair and body. But a middle-aged man can be inspired by
a fired-up grill.
A
fellow Christian minister showed me a whole new level of barbecuing
competence last summer. He used a charcoal grill, the ultimate test
of a grilling warrior who must rely on skill and patience to bring
the coals to just the right temperature for grilling instead of
relying on the newest technology in gas grilling to light up. The
charcoal heating-up process normally takes about half an hour and a
number of sprays of charcoal lighter fluid. But this mighty barbecue
warrior bishop took grilling to a whole new level when he pulled out
a small propane tank with a blow torch attached to it. He lit the
blow torch and went to working, scorching, torching and pummeling the
coals into white-hot submission. Within two minutes, he had
blow-torched the coals to a state of red-hot readiness. This was
extreme barbecuing and machismo rolled into one, a man mastering the
elements: earth, wind, and fire subdued by a middle-aged barbecue
bishop in an ordinary suburban backyard in Teaneck, New Jersey.
“Youth is wasted on the young,” but middle age is not wasted when a man
masters his universe in backyard barbecue brilliance. I believe I saw the Bishop of Barbecue that day.