For Father's Day I was given this lovely new grill. I like to cook and love to grill even more, so this was a great present. Not pictured is the old grill, which had long outlasted any expectations of it. Most of its internal parts had been replaced multiple times. The side shelf had all but disintegrated. It was no longer capable of producing anything even vaguely resembling an even flame. And it had a tree dropped on it, cracking the metal hood. We had that grill about a decade.
As I was putting together the new grill, I started thinking about putting together the old grill and was suddenly struck by how massively my life had changed in between. My wife and I lived in Virginia at the time. I worked in finance and she was a teacher. We had no kids. And my parents were still a couple. Now I'm an aspiring screenwriter and my wife is a budget analyst. We live in New York. We have two boys. My parents are divorced and my mother has passed away.
In the present, the changes rarely seem major. Things shift little by little and then you look back and see that you are nowhere near where you were before. I don't have any sort of message in all this. I'm just kind of amazed by it all. And maybe even more amazed that a beat up old grill was somehow the marker for that change.
