Author: Charles Dickson (C3PO) Here is Vygis' BBQ grill, which still sits at our house two years after he passed away. It is hard to find a better example of the effect that Vygis had on peoples' everyday lives, and of all the vagrancies of his character, than this.
The grill arrived in mine and Lisa's lives sometime in the late 1990's when she and I were living at the Gilder-Murray house. Vygis called me up in a panic because he discovered that his Dad was throwing out the grill and he had to save it. I think we might have driven over to his parents' new house in Annapolis in the dark of night and picked it off of the curb. It was a grill that his family had used for years at the Highland house. One of its unique features was the rough repair his Dad had made to the front; the glass had broken in some way and Vygis' Dad had fashioned a patch for it out of sheet metal to Vygis' everlasting admiration. The grill arrived at the Gilder Murray house, and sat by the front stoop of the house. Lisa and I had a tradition of occasionally grilling with a charcoal grill we'd dug up from somewhere; now we switched to using this propane one. Vygis had many stated plans to fix the thing up after saddling us with it, but of course he never followed through with any of that. In an effort to make the grill usable for ourselves, I bought replacement parts for it: wire racks, a new burner, and replacement "lava" rocks for the inside to even out the heat because the old ones had turned to powder. Vygis was horrified by the replacements, but was consoled when I presented him with the old rusty parts which he promptly squirreled away in a box that moved from storage unit to storage unit until we eventually found the parts in his basement while cleaning out his house. The grill had one axle with large wheels on one end, and pathetic plastic casters on the other end which were broken by the time Vygis saved it from the trash. If you look down at the bottom of the photo you can see that those casters are still broken to this day. The igniter never worked. The little thermometer on the front is somewhat stuck on a middle indicator point, but it does move when the inside gets warm enough.
When we moved to Laurel, the grill came with us, and served us for many years while the deck that we were building off the back of our new house was slowly forming. Having the grill at our house provided the occasional excuse for Vygis to drop by and use it. He loved having a reputation for making steaks, and would occasionally drop by and cook one up, just for himself, no sharing. Lisa and I used the grill every summer for sprawling parties; Vygis would always get invited so that he could bring his own meats and do something up. As new homeowners, we made the amateur mistake of putting the grill to close to the house, melting the vinyl siding and forcing us to place cinderblocks as a permanent spacer between the grill and house and replace the siding. Eventually, a neighbor who was moving out gave us their incredibly nice grill, but we were forbidden to discard Vygis' of course. So our parties now had two grills which was actually pretty convenient since we could now have one for meat and one vegetarian only.
You'd think that when Vygis got his own house he would have finally taken this thing back, but he never got around to it. Part of the problem was that he was never happy in the new house, and probably felt that he was going to be moving out sometime soon, and it was just more convenient for him to continue coming to our house. Plus he had that (ironically awesome) fire pit behind his house, and did a lot of his grilling on that.
Now that I have kids I have a severe need to streamline my life, and will someday be cutting down the number of BBQ grills at my house to one. It will be the nicer one for obvious reasons. Anybody want to take on this black elephant?