Something outside today triggered some memories from when I was a child. I must have passed near a restaurant that started up their grill, and due to the smell in the air, my subconscious picked it up and went into the past. Smoke? Childhood? What sorts of memories? Burnt ones.

The first smoke memory was being awakened in the middle of the night and being told to get dressed. I might have been in second grade. We were living in New York City in a one of a series of multi-family row houses on the edge of Spanish Harlem. It had to have happened after I turned six as we didn’t live there very long after the fire. I don’t remember snow so it was either early fall or spring of the following year. I had started first grade shortly before my 5th birthday and we moved in the summer after 2nd grade and the fire.

Anyway, I was awakened and told we might have to go outside if the fire reached our building as more than one of the buildings were on fire. We were living in the 3rd or 4th building of the row. Luckily, the fire department stopped the fire on the roof of the building next door. The fright of being awakened and told about a fire left me with a lifelong habit of waking up around 2am and sniffing for fire. At age 77, I still do this. If I don’t smell smoke, I can go back to sleep.

If I do smell smoke, I have to find the source. When I was married, the smell of smoke, and a record playing the same track over and over meant my husband had fallen into a drunken sleep, usually with a lit cigarette between his fingers. I was fortunate most times to catch the cigarette before it burned a hole in the arm chair.

So back to burnt memories. My mother, at some point, became the world’s most distracted cook. She would put pots of food on the stove and walk away. We didn’t have smoke alarms in “the olden days,” so the smell of food burning was the signal that dinner would be served shortly. The char would get scraped off the meat or the skin peeled off the chicken and if we were lucky, whatever rice or vegetables that burnt wouldn’t be too crunchy or black. There was always gravy to cover the taste. The pots would be put to soak for a few hours and then scrubbed until the char was gone.

I was in college when I discovered that the yolks of hard boiled eggs weren’t supposed to be green and that you didn’t need a knife to cut scrambled eggs or pancakes. I also learned that meat didn’t need to be sawed apart and take a long time to chew. Another amazing thing was that mashed potatoes weren’t chunky grey and gravy wasn’t lumpy and chewy.

The college food tasted amazing. The other students would complain about the food, but I thought it was marvelous. They thought I was insane. Even the jello was great. It didn’t have a chewy thick skin on the bottom. None of the food was burned, even the mystery meat looked appetizing. I think the mystery meat was supposed to be a cutlet of some sort. It wasn’t burned so I ate it.

In all my years of cooking, I’ve only had one serious mishap. The stove in my first house had a burner that had a thermostat that could be set by degrees. I decided to make a corned beef brisket. Easy-peasey. Ah, no. I used my largest pot, filled it with water, put the brisket in the pot, set the thermostat to 170 degrees and went on a quick errand. I was gone less than an hour. I had done this more than once and when I would return, I would adjust the thermostat to finish cooking.

However, this time, the thermostat malfunctioned. I returned home and smoke was leaking out my windows. I ran inside and there was no water in the pot and my brisket was a three inch block of charcoal. I know you’re thinking I must have been gone longer than I thought. Nope. The flame which had bern just barely visible under the pot when I left was a roaring blaze surrounding the sides of the pot to about 2 inches high. If it hadn’t been the front burner, I might have lost the house.

I opened every window wide and put a fan facing in the back door and the other facing out the front to get rid of the smoke. The pot with the unsalvageable corned beef briquet was tossed outside to cool off and then disposed of. The other casualties of this mishap were my computer which had been running at the time, and my washing machine which died just before spinning out the last load of smokey laundry.

I really didn’t want to file an insurance claim, but did so for the computer to be repaired. The data was recovered and all was well. Lemon oil on the hard surfaces took care of the smell and most of the greasy soot. I’ve only ever made corned beef brisket in the slow cooker since.

This is the first year I haven’t sat around my fire pit. I usually have a wine cooler or two while I’m out there and when the two or three small pieces of wood burn down, I’m done for the night. But these days, I’m on various medications so having a drink is out of the question. It might not do any harm, but why take a chance. And drinking alone has actually lost its appeal.