Read the heat
The weekend’s autumn weather was perfect, with sunny days and cool nights. Erin is still getting through Covid, so we had no social activities. After Oliver’s soccer game in Durham Friday afternoon—he was at right center back and he defended well in the j.v. team’s lopsided win—I snuck out for music at Cat’s Cradle Back Room.
Saturday was glorious and I had time on my hands. I took a cup of coffee and a book to the back deck and sat in one of the modern Adirondack chairs that my brother Matt had given us for a housewarming gift last year. The book was a new teen and young-adult novel by Michael Ruhlman: If You Can’t Take the Heat. It’s a story about an injured high school athlete in the suburbs of Cleveland in 1980. Young Theo Claverback meets a girl, he gets a job in the kitchen of a good restaurant, and he learns a few life lessons and cooking habits.
I loved this book!
I spent most of the day reading it, only taking breaks to refill my coffee and to put the legs on a bench I’ve been making from a slab of the white oak that came from the trees we milled in 2019. I had a ticket to another show at Cat’s Cradle but I read right up to show time, finishing the last page and then taking a quick shower and pulling on my boots.
During the lull between opening act (Dori Freeman) and headliner (The Wildmans), I thought about what I liked so much about Ruhlman’s story: its narrator’s voice made the story flow well, the kitchen scenes were more expansive and realistic than the enjoyable but frenetic scenes from The Bear, and all of those Cleveland references reminded me of my decade or so in Cleveland.
For example, the Shaker Lakes are a key location in the story and I first kissed Erin on a bench at the Shaker Lakes. Also, the restaurant where Theo gets to work is in a house on Larchmere Boulevard, and Erin and I lived for a year after Peace Corps seven buildings over from Larchmere. And in the Acknowledgements, Michael notes that three of the characters who work in the restaurant have the names of real people who worked with Michael in Sans Souci, a great restaurant that was in downtown Cleveland for the longest time. Erin and I were invited to attend a special dinner to celebrate the Sans Souci fifth anniversary in 1997—I was editor of Northern Ohio LIVE then, and Erin and I were getting ready to depart for Vanuatu—and I remember that Michael was working in the kitchen that night and we chatted on our way out.
Now that I’m done with If You Can’t Take the Heat, I’m hoping Erin and Oliver will read it soon. Oliver surprised me this week, opting to keep his gaming computer off so he could read to the end of Between the World and Me, a book he voluntarily chose for his English assignment. Oliver and his friends have started to cook together, so I suspect he’ll thoroughly enjoy the Ruhlman story, too.
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© Anton Zuiker