CityView Magazine

10 | July/August 2019 M M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S Squash Casserole and Chemotherapy BY BILL MCFADYEN M y wife, Susanna, routinely suffers a great injustice while entertaining at our home. She goes through a mental list of potential guests. Once chosen, their attendance is confirmed, at which time my wife plans a menu representative of all the food groups with starters, main courses, side dishes and desserts. From about mid-day on the day of the event, she is thereaer engaged in preparation. Washing, mixing, measuring, slicing, baking, plating, pouring – all in a poetic, purposeful and perpetual motion. Meanwhile, I am at the office. Somewhere around an hour or two prior to the time the guests are expected to arrive, I drive home to accomplish my tasks for the dinner party. My wife at that point is usually into what I call "the Burn." It is that last crucial hour when excellence may possibly be achieved, but only if she performs in an efficient and competent manner from that moment to when the doorbell rings. I tiptoe during the Burn – it is an intense (almost frightening) scene. About the time the guests arrive, I generally have released the carbonation from a bottle of malt beverage and take drink orders for the newly arrived. en I head out to our over-priced charcoal grill designed to cook meat without the need of human interdiction. I put Kingsford briquettes into a chimney device, strike a match and light newspaper balled up at the bottom of the chimney. I sit outside on the hardscape's furniture to supervise the fire's catching on the charcoal and its subsequent burn to the top of the chimney. When that arduous task is accomplished, I dump the coals into a level mound, clean the grill, and deliver word to Wife that it is time to start the ribeyes. She delivers to my cooking station the marinated steaks in a pan. I dely remove each slab of meat and go about arranging them symmetrically over the fire. Eventually, they rest on a plate also provided by Susanna, centered in the midst of all the other choices she has prepared. Five minutes into the meal, the aforementioned injustice occurs. Someone at the table makes a guttural sound of pleasure while chewing a piece of meat, looks at me and says, "Bill, this meal is delicious!" Twenty-four years into this marriage, I know not to make eye contact with my wife. I ask my nearest tablemate for more squash casserole to show that my favorite thing is something Susanna prepared without my help. All the same, the misdemeanor against the Law of Etiquette had been committed, and I am judged as contributorily negligent. IN COLLEGE, I had a swell pal from Long Island, New York, with whom I undeniably and repetitively misbehaved for two of my four college years. We never hurt anyone. Our misbehavior could have been accurately characterized as a mostly harmless display of irresponsibility. Our actions almost always elicited our own uncontrollable laughter. For instance, it was he who first demonstrated to me that a standard light bulb would perfectly disappear when flushed down the toilets of our dormitory's third floor. I cannot explain why that was so funny, but I remember vividly my peals of laughter 35 years later. He and Jeff and I played a very poor version of intramural flickerball – a somewhat void-of-rules version of flag football. We would gather in Jeff 's room and crank Foghat's "Slow Ride" as our version of the theme to "Rocky." We loved the deep tracks of rock and roll and called up Queen's "Stone Cold Crazy" as our contest-winning air guitar song in the very first Phi Delta eta Air Guitar Contest in 1982 (a party which I have heard still rages on at Davidson College). My swell pal excelled in his role as Freddie Mercury. He went on to law school while I finished undergrad. We went about our lives for the next twenty-five years with only

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