“This is where it goes,” said Dale Reinholt, 51, of a spot he selected once, on a Tuesday, for reasons he can no longer fully reconstruct.
FAIRBORN, OH—Standing watch over a gas grill positioned on the northeast corner of his concrete patio, area dad Dale Reinholt, 51, a regional facilities coordinator, spent much of the Fourth of July on Saturday defending the grill placement he arrived at in the summer of 2019 as though the location had been passed down to him through generations.
Reinholt, who chose the spot on a single unremarkable afternoon seven years ago, now describes it to relatives as fixed, correct, and beyond the reach of debate.
The Grill Placement Question
The matter surfaced shortly after 2 p.m., when Reinholt’s sister-in-law suggested moving the grill roughly four feet to the left, closer to the deck stairs and the table where people were actually sitting. Reinholt declined. He then explained, at length, why the current position was the only defensible one.
“This is where it goes,” Reinholt said, one hand on the lid. “You’ve got your wind coming off the fence there, you’ve got your clearance from the siding, you’ve got your sightline to the yard. I worked all this out. This is the spot.”
Pressed on when exactly he worked it out, Reinholt paused. “Would’ve been the first summer we had the place. 2019. I stood right here and I knew.” He added that he could not recall what the wind had been doing that day, whether he had measured anything, or why the four feet to the left had been ruled out, but affirmed that the reasoning had been sound at the time and required no revisiting.
A Position Beyond Review
Family members confirmed the placement has never once moved. Reinholt’s wife, Karen, noted that the grill sits far enough from the seating area that whoever cooks spends the gathering alone, shuttling plates across the patio in both directions.
“Every year somebody says maybe put it closer,” Karen Reinholt said. “And every year Dale explains that it can’t be moved. He talks about it like his father set it there. His father has never been to this house.”
Reinholt maintains that the spot reflects hard-won knowledge, and that any adjustment would discard it. The instinct to enshrine a choice rather than revisit it has been visible at higher levels of American life this summer. He referred more than once to “the way we’ve always done it,” a tradition now in its seventh observance.
A neighbor, Curt Ferris, 58, said he had heard the explanation over the fence on multiple occasions and remained unclear on its substance. “He told me it’s about the wind,” Ferris said. “I’ve stood in that yard. There’s no wind. It’s a fence and a slab. But he believes it, so.” Ferris trailed off and returned to his own yard, where his grill sits directly beside his table.
As the afternoon wound down, Reinholt surveyed the patio with evident satisfaction and delivered a foil-wrapped tray of burgers to the table twelve feet away, one trip of several. Asked whether he might reconsider the arrangement next year, he said he would not, on the grounds that the placement was settled long ago by a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
He then declined to say who that man had been.
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