Point of View: Grillin’ Tonight

I am dying, Egypt, dying — of the pollen and the ticks — but life, at least as I find it today, is wonderful, now that the sun is out and we’re in the trees’ embrace.

Our daughter from Temecula is with us, pregnat, as she used to say, and we’re grillin’ tonight. Wally, her husband, will teach us, and I will pay close attention inasmuch as outdoor cookery is generally considered a manly thing, a rite of passage that has come along quite late in my life.

Mary, who’s never forgotten the orange roughy I cooked outside for her mother and her in 1986, recently bought the grill — one fit for the middle class, not overly ornate — and, sparing me the trouble, bless her, put it together. I react viscerally when people tell me that all I have to do is “read the manual.” I don’t like manuals. I don’t like to follow instructions, especially when they accompany diagrams, and I also tend to dismiss as pettifogging any disputes as to rules, as when Mary accuses me of cheating in backgammon.

“You hold me in too high esteem,” I say. “I’m not clever enough to cheat.”

“Trust but verify,” she says.

“Trust but vilify,” I say.

I will make it up to her. I will become, with the bright, shiny utensils Johnna and Wally gave us, a man of parts when it comes to barbecuing — “barbe-a-cul-ing,” as a French wit once put it to me. I know it is something I should do, that I’m programmed to do. It goes way back, she says, to when we were hunters and gatherers and women nursed the children and tended the hearth and cooked the food and made and washed the clothes and kept things clean and. . . .

“Really, not much has changed,” she said, “except instead of spearing wildebeests, you’re whacking tennis balls.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout a thing,” I tell her. “Soon you’ll be saying, just like they do on WLNG, ‘And thank you, Jack, for charring.’ ”