Rachelle seems to think that watching me fire up the barbeque is pretty much the height of entertainment. Oh, the hilarity! Sometimes, when I’m busy igniting the thing, I’ll look back and catch her face, beaming with delighted expectation, from the window.
A few years ago I had a little accident while lighting the barbeque, and I guess I’ve been a bit jittery around it ever since. I won’t go into the details of the incident except to say that it really sucked to lose my vintage Expo baseball hat to the flames, and that the barbeque may very well have been booby-trapped by the neighbours kids, as I have asserted from the very start.
At any rate, one of Rachelle’s favourite things to do—because she is so hilarious—is to perform an imitation of me igniting the barbeque. In this bit of theatre, she stands on one foot, and then leans toward the barbeque. Holding the lit igniter as far away from her body as possible, and with her other arm covering her face, she lunges at the barbeque in a mincing way, before leaping back and falling into a protective ball on the ground.
The other night, when our friends Stuart and Abdul were over for dinner, Rachelle asked me to go out and turn on the barbeque. Thinking nothing of it, I went out to perform the task. Just as I was completing my procedural practice routine and was about to commence the ignition process, I looked up and saw all three of them watching me from the window.
I guess I felt a little bit of performance anxiety, because I couldn’t get the igniter gun to light. As I started to shake it, a particularly grotesque squirrel leapt on to the barbeque, which caused me to shriek and instinctively assume a defensive posture. Curled into my protective ball, I kicked at where I thought the squirrel might be, accidentally knocking over the barbeque, thus spilling some propane, which managed to bleed into our neighbour’s pool. This really isn’t as big a deal as it might sound, as it was the kids of those neighbours, who I think booby-trapped the barbeque back a few years ago.
Justice, Michael Murray style.