In 1988, fresh out of undergraduate school and living in my first all-my-own apartment, I busied myself with many fine cooking tasks and other elements of domesticity.

One of these was a ritual saving of cooking fat in a ceramic bowl in my refrigerator. Saving grease was a ritual I'd learned from my mother, who poured bacon grease out of the pan and into a big can to use for later frying purposes.

Finally, one day I realized that the bowl was full, that I had never used any of it, and that it was bothersome having a large bowl full of congealed lard in my fridge, so with great ceremony, I picked it up, walked out of the apartment, down the hall, down the stairs, and out to the front stoop, where I upended it and deposited the bowl-shaped grease lump on the steps.

Did I mention that it was 3:00 a.m. when I did this? It made sense at the time.

The thing that really got to me, as the days and weeks passed, was that the lump did not simply melt and ooze away during the daytime heat. It maintained a nice bowl-like shape for some weeks until finally the accumulated investigations of passing hounds had reduced it to nothingness.

Years later, you could still go to 733 Progress Street, go up onto the stoop, and see a hideous circular blotch where my grease-lump once lay.