As I write my posts each day and I wonder what I’m going to write about tomorrow, there are all sorts of topics and ideas that jump into my head. I’ve written about a lot of St. Petersburg places and events, I’ve shown sunrises and sunsets, I’ve mentioned some history, and I have hundreds of ideas of other things to write about, so I don’t think I’m going to have any problems coming up with material. But I was reminding myself today, as I drove home and was thinking about a post, that one of my motivations in writing this blog is to give people who might not be St. Petersburg residents a picture, over time, of what it’s like to live here. To do that, I need to keep writing about the things that I already have in my head, but I think that I also need to give some more glimpses of the little snapshots of life that happen here and there around the city, the sorts of things that make St. Petersburg so easily feel like home to me.
So, with that thought in mind, I’ll keep my eyes open and keep my camera handy in the weeks and months to come. But it struck me that I already have a picture that I can show you that gives just such a glimpse into St. Petersburg life. This is a photograph that I took a few months ago, in my own neighborhood. I was out for a Saturday morning walk, just enjoying the beauty of the day and, honestly, thinking about what a nice neighborhood we live in. I reached an intersection and started to turn to the right, but, for some reason, I glanced to the left, and something caught my eye. I walked about a half a block and I saw what you see in the photo below!
I have to tell you that the reality was every bit as good as it looks. The grill was sitting in front of a house that had just been sold. The owners had been moving out over the previous couple of days. I suppose that they must have been moving into a condo, where they had no use for a grill. They could have tried to sell it, but instead, they stuck it out by the street with a ‘Free Grill’ sign on it! I felt a little bit like Opie walking through Mayberry. I happily interrupted my walk, wheeled it home, tested it out, and it worked perfectly. And still does. It’s a Weber charcoal grill, but it has a propane tank and an auto-igniter so that you just fill it with charcoal, then press the igniter button and it lights the charcoal automatically via a propane powered flame. When the coals are lit, you turn off the gas.
On my way home with it, there was a guy installing Verizon Fios who saw me wheeling it home and he saw the sign. He told me that he owned that exact same grill model and he loved it! I actually looked it up online when I got home, and it is a current model, still being sold today in stores for $300!
What’s the moral of this story? I certainly can’t tell you that there’s a free grill around every corner in St. Petersburg. But this is the sort of thing that allows a big, busy, modern city to still retain that homey, small town feeling. And this sort of neighborly kindness is not unique to my particular neighborhood. This is St. Petersburg…
