I have never owned a grill or used a grill. I’ve hated grills my whole life, to me, they are symbols of the suburban life I dreaded since childhood, and where I found myself living after my daughter Emma was born. My discomfort with the suburbs – the uniformity, the lawn-and-college obsessions, the soccer-and-lesson insanity,  the helicopter moms-and-dads- was so great it sparked my eventual move to the country, and was a major factor in the collapse of my 35-year-old marriage.

This morning, I went to the Ace Hardware store and talked to Bryan, who I trust completely and he recommended a $210 Weber propane grill with a cart. I still can’t believe this happened. My daughter is largely responsible.

Last night, I was talking with my daughter, we were discussing baby things I could buy for her on her new baby registry, she needs just about everything. It was Father’s Day, not a day I celebrate much and she was mulling possible gifts for me, I think. She asked me if I had a grill, and I said no, never, I didn’t want a grill. I was not one of those grill people, I said.

My mind raced through all those suburban images of men – always men – standing in their yards with aprons on and hands on their hips, usually sipping a bourbon or a beer while their wives sat and chatted and their kids chased after Golden Retrievers, who never seemed to mind..

Not me, not a grill, I said,  nothing about it was me. I think I inherited this from my mother, this strong sense of what was and wasn’t me. She had a dread of ordinariness, she never wanted to be ordinary, just like everyone else, it was a mortal sin for her.  She dressed  her own way, shopped her own way, lived her own way.

And she wasn’t ordinary, she was nothing like everyone else. I think this was my dread of the grill. I was not about to be out there on the lawn with a smoldering degree, just like every other man in the universe.

“Why would you suggest that?,” I said to Emma, thinking once again that she didn’t really know me, or she would never have suggested it.  A projection, I was sure. But she held her ground. “I can just see you with one, I can picture it,” she said. Emma is due to have a baby in August, and this seems to be drawing us closer, I can feel it. I’m not sure why. And I cannot imagine how this led to her thinking of me and a grill.

But after I got off the phone shaking my head and mumbling about the grill, I felt this odd feeling, a twitching inside of me. “Emma was right,” I said to Maria. “I do think I would like having a grill.”

She pursed her lips at me, and said, “great, I’m not going to be using it.” This is true, what I said about suburban symbols for me is even more true of my wife, she is not what you would call domestic. When I’m not around she has taco chips and salsa for dinner, if that.

Emma was right. I did want a grill, I could picture myself standing in the yard, my colorful apron on, the dogs sitting lazily near me, the donkeys and the pony braying softly at me, trying to inspire a treat with guilt and guile. I love cooking, I do almost all of the cooking in our home, and all of the shopping. Maria is a good cook, but I can tell she is done serving men in that way, it just isn’t going to happen. She is free of it, and does not plan to ever return. If I want to eat well, I can damn well go out and buy the food and cook it. So be it.

You will never find Maria pushing her shopping cart in a supermarket.

My new life has transformed me, I am very attached to our house, we could not afford to hire people to fix it up, so we did it ourselves, and all that scraping and painting and digging gave me a personal connection and intimacy that I never had with a home before. My blood and sweat is in this house. In our marriage, I am the domestic.

I do things I would never do all the time: wear colored socks, have a lot of sex, dig holes for trees, love zucchini, scrape wallpaper, paint walls, water gardens, walk in the deep woods, kiss a horse on the nose each morning.

Maria hates to shop or spend time cooking – too much time away from her art – and she has no intention of spending too much time on elaborate repairs. This nurturing is a big nurturing part of me, and it has always wanted to come out. It did come out with my daughter, but it often was hidden.

The animals see it, but not too many people do. I guess Emma did.

Maria is the artist, she loves to paint things, re-arrange things. I love caring for her, as I loved caring for Emma. We fit well together.

Is there anything sacred about cooking in the kitchen on hot days, heating up the oven and stinking up the house? Is there anything evil about a grill? My whole life, I have lived outside of the ordinary, and by now, I am so far outside of it that there is no danger of  ever being subsumed by it. Perhaps it is safe now to get a grill, I have my life, no one will take it from me again.

For that matter, why am I so hard on the suburbs? It wasn’t the life I wanted, but we were same and comfortable there,  I wrote a half-dozen books there. My daughter lived happily there and went to Yale from there, and I became a writer there and started on my hero journey. I hate to speak poorly of my life now, and I should not talk the past either. Life is what you make of it, I can’t blame the suburbs or grills for my troubles.

It sounds like whining to me.

So I got an inexpensive propane grill, and a cart to pull it on.  I saw $700 models, and $1000 models, I saw grills that looked like the control panel of the Starship Enterprise.

I actually liked the cheapest one the best.

Tonight, for the first time in my life (I might have watched some chicken or fish once on a Cape Cod grill) I am planning to cook a meal on my new grill, which I assembled after some hurried trips to see Bryan at the hardware store for assembly and propane connection guidance.

Bryan is very patient with me, he speaks to me slowly as if I were a child with some special disorder and always repeats him carefully, wishing, I think, that Maria was there to hear what he said. When I tried to buy an axe, he said he needed to know if Maria knew about it before he would let me have it.

The menu? Grass-fed beef, some zucchini. Later in the week, ground turkey, then fish.

It is often healthy, I have found, to try to do the things I said I would never do, to be pulled out of my pre-conceptions, absolutes, prejudices and entrenched positions. It is especially important as I begin to be old, and it has not escaped me that many older people dread change and begin to close their minds up. That must never happen to me. I have time to do a lot of things I would never do, and I mean to do them, thoughtfully and one at a time.

Tonight, a new chapter, the next adventure. The grill is a landmark passage for my life, a turning point.  I will be out grilling supper on a hot afternoon, celebrating my own Summer Solstice. How remarkable that people can see things in you that you can not see for yourself.