Hibachi Summer

          For a handful of summers the little grill sat rusting in the plantless, dark space beneath the deck. Angled into the muck like a scuppered boat, the tines of the grill still gripped bits of fossilized burger or a parchment of chicken skin even the skunks declined. 

          G— had only used it two or three times, delivering the carbonized breasts to the microwave to finish off their cold, rose-pink interiors. No taste of the barbeque sauce remained. 

          We'd tried the natural charcoal, loading it into the aluminum hopper with the little white squares of—something—that had to be painstakingly peeled open first. The coals raged then quickly transmogrified into a gray pile of ash like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

          Misery.

          This summer I fished it out as I do with things—with the past, with objects or instruments I haven't been able to master—eschewing the wire brush. I set my lead-free crystal wine glass down on the deck—it was still July, and I had written RELAPSE on my daily glucose chart with a long arrow drawn down to indicate intractability—and held a match to the acrid-smelling black pile inside. 

          I chose the old-school briquettes, ready for baptism with lighter fluid. Just the kind my mother and Jimmy used on the concrete-slab patio of her apartment on the other side of Route 422 from Port Kennedy—on the other side of eternity, now. I hear their murmurs without understanding the words. The intimacy of a mother's speech to a son born when she was 16—their collegiality, of which I was always so envious. She was 31 when she had me.

         By the time I could turn a perfectly tatooed swordfish steak onto a plate the sun had already started backing away down the driveway each night earlier. I couldn't see to pick fallen plums that, only a half hour earlier, had lain like purple Easter eggs in the high grass beneath the two trees.

          Sometime about two weeks before my birthday I had stopped wandering the garden with my glass of wine, stopped leaning on the deck rail with the glass placed thoughtfully beside me like a translucent sculpture, reflective and fragrant. Now, I left the pantomime of sunsets, the hummingbird's visits, to themselves. This time, sobriety came not hard-wrought or with incredulity but as a monotonous certainty—like the cooler nights themselves.

          The three tomato plants in pots on the deck had been given to me. I had dug no holes or opened any bags of mulch. I started my shopping too late, and the greenhouses were ghost towns. I swam only twice.

          But I sat on the little grass rises at the fronts of the yards on the block with McDuff and watched the trees and listened to the music from the pub way down the hill—at the foot of the street. He understood perfectly.

          We were having the identical experience.

          And I think my mother and Jimmy were just like that, grilling their stuffed pork chops. Jimmy would blow smoke rings, quietly into the late summer air, his face upturned, and my mother would push aside the screen door to go inside and mix another Old Fashioned. I hear that door tap shut, and open again, crooked in its track.

          So few words.

Of the New Year

          The Christmas cookies Gary left in the tin are like the kids not chosen for dodge ball, standing with large spaces between them on the shiney, echoey gym floor. Some of the cookies are monochromatic, boringly cakey, while others, shaped like an evergreen tree, are embalmed with green food dye.

          I snap each cadaver in half, my hand moving in a downward, circular criteria, like the lazy emptying of a wash bowl, to the last one—iced on the bottom as if it had been dragged in joint compound.

          Across the street the men are finally chipping two large branches that fell from an old tree that have lain across the neighbor's tiny front yard since fall. The noise is like a vacuum cleaner gone mad, or what I imagine is the sound an ocean liner makes as it pushes out to sea. It is what the word droning means.

          I return to the tin, my coffee still warm.

          If there is anything remotely the flavor of black walnuts, 2025 will be a good year. But there is only cinnamon and brown sugar and the taste of butter mixed with flour.

          My mind, left to itself as Gary naps upstairs, returns to the places I walked in my forties. All the different running shoes I've owned show up in the old pictures. I recognize them like the faces of old dogs, standing obediently on the ground, serving me well.

          All those hikes just to find the source of a brook or a forgotten root cellar in the woods. I saw copperheads sunning themselves on the top of a canal lock. I saw the old pillars of the capitol building stacked like junkyard cars. I found a full pack of cigarettes on a bench where someone left them—a New Year's resolution.

          The last, ugliest cookie has delightful chips of pink marzipan on top shaped like rose buds and a not-too-sweet flavor of—yes—(at least) English walnuts. It is kinder to my teeth than the others, and the rosebud candy defies identification: citrusy, foreign, like a forgotten taste—a taste of older Christmases. The icing flakes off innocuously from the bottom like wrapping paper.

          The dog, too, is asleep. All that sounds is the kitchen clock, ticking its first hours of the new year.

          The snow is gone.