STRANGER THAN FICTION; IF YOU ATE OUT ON THE FOURTH, YOU'RE A COMMUNIST

If you're a red-blooded American, you spent at least part of yesterday sweating and red-faced, stinking of charred meat and nursing at least two burns on your hands.

If you ate out yesterday, you're a communist, pure and simple.

(Sorry about being so judgmental, but I'm pocketing a check from a major discount department store. It had a sale on gas grills yesterday. You might want to think about getting one.) There's something positively primeval about using summer holidays as an excuse to cook meat over an open flame. We might as well celebrate our independence by dancing around in loincloths and asking the moon goddess to grant us a fruitful harvest.

I wasn't always so bitter about the outdoor barbecue.

It was extremely popular in my family, so much so that Dad was expected to grill our meals, including breakfast, throughout the summer. He loved it.

The Other Half's father is the same way. We even bought him one of those overpriced barbecue sauce assortments for Christmas. I caught him doing shots of the honey-teriyaki flavor.

Barbecue is a religion for my father-in-law. He makes his annual winter pilgrimage to Florida and insists on barbecuing enough meat to feed a small country, maybe Luxembourg or Vatican City.

"You can eat the leftovers," he explains.

A few days later, after gorging ourselves on leftover pork steaks and putting on 10 or 15 pounds each, The Other Half and I enroll ourselves in Carnivores Anonymous and start a 12-step program to free ourselves from Jackaroo addiction.

The first step is throwing away the rest of the leftovers.

My father-in-law gave us a gargantuan charcoal grill as a gift three years ago. We only used it four or five times before selling it, because turns out it's MUCH easier to have HIM cook 50 pounds of meat.

Our first occasion to use it was a big barbecue with all our friends. It was raining, so we had to put the grill on the porch of our first-story apartment.

Do you know that you don't have to use a whole bag of charcoal briquettes and a half-container of lighter fluid to barbecue? We didn't know that. The result caused the underside of our upstairs neighbor's porch to become slightly blackened.

I can't believe we got our deposit back on that place.

The second time, older and wiser, we didn't use so many briquettes. Our guests became concerned when we served them pinkish chicken. Apparently, they'd heard of some disease named "salmonella" and forced me to cook the chicken further in the microwave.

Where was their sense of adventure? Of course, the used briquettes are a whole different manner. What do you do with them? It's tough to lift the grill and dump them into a trash can. And we didn't even have a trash can in the apartment.

Under cover of darkness, The Other Half and I would sneak the grill to a road behind our house and dump the ashes on the right of way.

If we ever got caught, we were going to explain that it was our aunt's dying wish for her ashes to be sprinkled on Fox Trail Road behind the Piney Woods Apartments.

I'm not sure how we'd explain the grill.

Of course, charcoal grills are pass these days. Gas grills are all the rage. Some even have little side burners.

It's ironic that Americans would come so far with their cooking technology, developing flat-top electric stoves, microwaves and convection ovens, only to go back to outdoor cooking over fires to celebrate national holidays.

But, despite the irony, I was at a friend's barbecue yesterday.

I'm no communist.

Heidi Nieland is a former Southeast Missourian staff writer living in Fort Lauderdale. Contact her at newsduo@herald.infi.net.