The grits made me gag near the end. The last spoonful was congealed and cold. My roommate Steve made the bowl of instant grits for me. I couldn’t get them right.

Grits aren’t what’s for breakfast at my house. We wake up too angry to eat. We spend the mornings moving from room to room avoiding each other.

When we do eat, it’s usually eggs fried brown on a cast iron skillet. I prefer the pancakes made from a recipe out an old grange cookbook kept in a zip lock bag because the pages were falling out.

Steve’s grits were good though, before they got cold. I hadn’t trusted him when he was putting in the pepper. Whoa, too much pepper, I said.

“Don’t worry. These grits will be fire,” Steve said. Fire is a good thing.

Now’s when I would usually talk about something real country again. Like dry chucks of maple wood cracking in an autumn fire. The wind rubbing my pitted face while I kill majestic animals and roast their meat over hot coals.

But this is about Steve’s grits. This time it’s about Steve altogether.

Steve’s from Penn Hills. His mother is a flight attendant. She brings him things like digital clocks from Japan you have shine against a wall to read.

While watching Snakes on a Plane, Steve was able to verify that yes a plane would in fact have olive oil on it. A woman used it to coat her mouth so she could suck out the poison.

Steve’s grandmother used to work at the VA. Now, she eats potato chips when she talks on the phone. He’s okay with that.

My dad sometimes eats carrots when he talks on the phone. I hate that. Which really made me think about how Steve could ever tolerate the sound of someone else chewing on the phone. Turns out he had been telling me exactly how all year.

“Chill,” Steve says.

Steve doesn’t have an opinion about vinyl-siding. Steve has a fake Christmas tree. He listens to rap music and likes to use margin from the tub. All things I once found morally offensive.

And right now I could say all that crap about diversity and how the arts enrich us all. I could talk about how I opened my mind and the whole world just turned to sunshine and milkshakes.

But it really does come down to chilling out. It comes right down to finishing that bowl of grits even though I was gagging. It’s the fact that part you hate is never the whole thing. Steve isn’t vinyl siding or fake Christmas trees. And he had nothing to do with those last few bites. Back when they were hot, those grits were fire.