The story moved me because I can think of no greater privilege than to be able to have done what Thomas Keller did. Forget that he is the Master of the Universe in the world of high wire culinary skills. At the end of the day this was a about a kid doing, as my mom would say, for his dad, and forgivness.

And of course it reminded me of my own dad, who happened to choose to die in front of me on my watch at the hospital while my mom went home for a short break. And his once great and wide appetite was long gone. He had stopped eating anything at that point. But Guindle Fair Hamby, unlike Ed Keller, was not a guy that left the family. He was a provider, and loving, although at times as a kid that was hard to decipher. And having grown up in an orphanage during the Depression looking after two younger brothers, he had zero role models or skills for parenting two sons in a new world who would bat heads with him for years. He couldn’t fly a kite, ride a bike, he threw a baseball like a girl (sorry girls), and although he grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina, couldn’t bait a hook or shoot a gun. But he was the only one of six sons who went to college. Education rescued him from the mountains. Dad gifted us in ways it would take me years to understand. (I learned only very recently from my 84 year old mom that he hocked his wrist watch to buy my first bike.) For example, he told my brother Larry and I a couple hundred thousand times at least, “Don’t be one of the common herd!” when we wanted to join a crowd or have something they had. The Three Cardinal Rules, No Lying, No Cheating and No Stealing were tattooed on our foreheads. He was of a generation that could be emotionally distant to the point of wooden, patriarchal and morally starchy. He believed in discipline, politeness and asking permission. And one central thing he permitted me to do without asking was to feel free to cook.

But it took me a while to get that straight in my head. Like so many other things.

My earliest memories of food preparation in our house in Cincinnati, Ohio was pretty much a 1950’s cliche. Monday through Friday Mom was at the tiller of the kitchen and had it be an actual boat or ship we would have been in an SOS situation on numerous occasions. Weekends, Dad, who along with our neighbor John Choate had helped each other build more or less identical brick grills at the rear of our more or less identical little houses on Wexford Avenue would flame up burgers, brats and hot dogs, and when there was a little extra money steaks and pork barbecue. I still remember those T-Bone steaks. In those days there was still an inch of fat, or so it seemed untrimmed ready to sizzle. This was a cholesterol free zone. My memory is that John and Dad hadn’t done too good of a job venting the grills. Grilling usually involved volcanic plumes of smoke to compliment the Cincinnati Redlegs on the radio, and John and Dad with a bottle of local beer, a Weideman or Hudepohl or a Burger or Schoenling, all the while fighting to keep the flames under control.

But back then the charcoal was real.

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