**Part 1** “Russell, last year you ruined the whole party. I’m going to be honest with you. Nobody wants a repeat of that this year.”
“Russell, last year you ruined the whole party. I’m going to be honest with you. Nobody wants a repeat of that this year.”
I still remember every word.
It was an afternoon in August. I was standing in my garage when my daughter-in-law called. Her voice was so calm I almost didn’t register what I had just been told.
She was talking about the crab feast.
The crab feast I had been putting on for thirty-four years.
Every year on the first Saturday after Labor Day, my backyard and the alley behind Kinship Road came alive. Long tables covered in brown paper. Crabs coming out of the pot still steaming. The sound of mallets on shell. People calling to each other. Laughter that carried on into the dark.
It was never just a meal. It had become part of what my family was.
So it never once crossed my mind that I would live to hear somebody tell me I was not welcome at a thing I built with my own two hands.
Then she said it.
“Don’t come this year. We’ve already decided we want it done properly.”
I didn’t answer her. I just stood there with one hand resting on the crab pot in the corner of the garage. And for the first time in thirty-four years, it looked to me like something that belonged to the past.
My name is Russell Gorsuch. Everybody’s called me Rusty since I was about nine, and it has nothing to do with my hair. It’s a Baltimore thing. I’m sixty-eight. Thirty-one years with the Baltimore City Fire Department, most of it at Engine 41. I retired in 2015 with two bad knees and a hearing aid in the right ear. For about twenty of those thirty-one years I was the house cook.
If you’ve never been around a firehouse, that’s a real job. You cook for eight to eleven grown adults on a shift, on a budget somebody collects in cash, and you do it around calls. You put a pan down at 4:40 and come back to it at 7:15. I fed men and women in that building thousands of times. I know exactly what forty pounds of chicken thighs looks like.
That’s who I am. That’s the whole thing. My love comes out of a pot. It has never once come out of my mouth.
My wife was Dolores. Dee. Forty-one years. She had polycystic kidney disease. She went on dialysis in 2010 and she was on it eleven years, three days a week. I drove her every time—Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays—to a center on Merritt Boulevard. I sat in that waiting room with a crossword for four hours. Then I drove her home and she slept the rest of the day. I did the math once and I wish I hadn’t. Around seventeen hundred round trips.
In August of 2021 she told me she was done. She had that right. She’d had it for years and she’d never used it. One morning she sat at that kitchen table and said, “Rusty, I’m not doing Thursday.”
She lived nine more days. She was clear for six of them. We talked more in those six days than we had in the previous six years, which tells you something about me that I’d rather not say out loud. I’m saying it anyway.
She died on the second of September, 2021. Four days before the crab feast.
First Saturday after Labor Day. Started in 1991. Half-bushels of number ones from a place on Eastern Avenue that’s been there since before I was born. Brown paper. Mallets. A milk crate with about two hundred crab knives that have been in that crate since Reagan. Corn. Sliced tomatoes from whoever’s got a garden going. A wash tub of ice with National Bohemian in it, and one six-pack of something fancy for my nephew who thinks he’s a beer guy. Sixty, seventy people. Neighbors. Guys from 41 and their wives. Dee’s sisters. Half of Kinship Road. Mr. Petraus from the corner, now ninety-one, who has come to thirty-one of them.
I steamed them myself.
My father-in-law Walt Blei built me a steamer in 1988 out of a beer keg. Cut the top. Welded in a false bottom. Made a rack that drops in on a chain. It sits on a propane jet burner in my garage with the door up. There’s no thermometer on it. You go by the sound the lid makes when it starts to chatter, and by the color coming up the rim, and by a smell at about the eleven-minute mark that tells you you’ve got ninety seconds.
Walt taught me on that pot in 1988 and 1989 and told me I was ruining crabs both years. He was right both years.
Thirty-four years I’ve run that pot.
My son Keith is forty-two. Sells software to hospital systems. Lives up in Timonium in a house with a yard you could land a plane on. He married Ainsley eleven years ago. She’s thirty-nine, works in communications for a hospital network, and she is the most competent person I have ever been in a room with.
I say that flatly. You’ll see why it matters.
