It’s Father’s Day, the day I remember my teenage grill rebellion against my dad | Opinion

Every Father’s Day I remember my father’s elaborate fire-worshipping ritual, otherwise known as outdoor grilling. On special occasions, Dad was always ready to shed his identity as a dentist and get in touch with his inner caveman. Like most men of his generation, Dad seldom cooked in the kitchen, but his reluctance to cook disappeared if it involved grilling meat outdoors.

For my father, grilling was a primal pleasure. He would have nothing to do with the then-newfangled gas grills. He wouldn’t even use lighter fluid. Like our Cro-Magnon ancestors, he would set kindling on fire, although he did use a match instead of flint. After the fire was burning steadily, he would add the charcoal briquettes. He always maintained that meat cooked any other way just didn’t taste as good.

As the eldest cave boy, I was the apprentice fire-maker. I gathered the kindling and helped Dad build the fire. He explained to me that the first step was to place a layer of wadded-up newspapers on the bottom of the grill. He then showed me how to arrange the kindling in a carefully constructed grid pattern.

When I asked him why he bothered to arrange the kindling that way, he said it helped the charcoal get started faster because the briquettes would get caught on his grid. This explanation didn’t make any sense to me, but I didn’t say anything. I knew that someday I would be in charge of making the fire, and I’d put Dad’s grid theory to the test.

I was 13 when my chance to be a solo fire-maker arrived. It was Father’s Day, and Dad decided to leave work early in honor of the occasion. As he often did, Dad called home before he left work. He and Mom discussed dinner plans, and they decided to have grilled steaks. In order to speed things up, Mom suggested that I get the fire going while he was driving home.

The drive took Dad about 40 minutes, which I thought was plenty of time to accomplish my mission. I scrounged up the kindling and wadded up the newspapers like a well-trained cave boy. Then I rebelled. When I placed the kindling in the grill, I deliberately avoided arranging the sticks in a grid pattern.

I had just put the charcoal on the fire when my father pulled into the driveway. He rushed over to the grill to inspect my work and was appalled when he saw that the charred sticks weren’t arranged in a grid. He found a garden tool designed to dig up dandelion roots and used it to push around the burning sticks in a futile effort to arrange them according to his method.

While he was brandishing his red-hot dandelion tool, I noticed that the charcoal briquettes were doing just fine. My error, I decided, was that I had taken too long to build the fire. For the rest of that summer, Dad and I battled over the grill. About once a week, Mom would tell me to get the fire going, and then I would rush to have it finished before Dad came home. Now that I was the heretical cave boy, I always refused to arrange the sticks in a grid, but I got to be so fast that the charcoal was usually ready for cooking before Dad could even pick up his dandelion tool. Still, he always made a point of inspecting my fire as soon as he got out of his car, and if the sticks were still burning, he would make a feeble effort to rearrange them to his liking.

The summer of my fiery rebellion was 57 years ago. However, every Father’s Day I remember my Dad and our shared love of grilling outdoors using charcoal. As my father always maintained, meat cooked any other way just doesn’t taste as good.