I have a feeling the morning routine is the same.
Father and son, meet at the shop, shoot the shit.
The father, getting up there in the years,
can’t really do any physical work anymore.
He’s got a good crew.
He and his son, probably with grandkids of his own,
talk about the old days, when Mom used to bake that good bread,
when those motherfuckers
didn’t put the kind of roof on that he wanted
as they watched the rain coming down outside.
There’s a certain unassuming nature about a man whose physical shell
has been humbled by the years.
But the salty vernacular keeps him sounding strong.
It’s a testament to the fighting spirit that’s still inside him.
The others will let you know that even his last name,
mellowed out after generations of nasally American accents,
still ends with a spirited “Camor-AH-TAH,” according to the Chief.
Not the ho-hum “Cam-orada” that it has become.
A new, unbroken-in-looking Navy Seals cap atop his head
looks like most Grandpa hats do.
Turns out, this one really was new.
A replacement, temporary perhaps, for the old Navy cap
that he used to wear after he heard that those three pirates
were taken out by Seals.
Loyalty is never-ending, for all brothers-in-arms, young, old or veteran.
An old Navy man himself,
“a mouth like a sailor” makes sense.
A portrait sits perched behind the counter,
a reflection of himself, in his prime, in Navy dress back in 1933.
A clerk told him that I was a chef.
The Chief got up to shake my hand,
his in a brown work glove.
He called me back behind the counter
to survey more photos.
Next to the portrait
was another photo,
a grandiose scene of medaled officers and a civilian woman in a pretty dress
gathered round a table
bedazzled with a roast ham, side dishes, and a multi-layered wedding cake.
“I made all that food,” the Chief told me.
He was a pastry chef for the Navy.
He not only made all the food for that wedding,
he made it all on the sub.
And he carried it all “up through the fucking hatch.”
Including the wedding cake.
I appreciated the enthusiasm he had for his job.
Not an easy thing, I’m sure, considering the working conditions
and the time.
“Have you ever seen a sub galley?” his son asked me.
“Just the one on the German boat at the Museum,” I said.
“That’s good enough, you got the idea,” they told me.
I had some perspective now.
He baked 30 pies a week in a tiny oven.
His son cracked a joke about not cooking beans on the sub.
“You know why,” he said with a grin.
The Chief set the story straight;
he cooked “plenty of fucking beans on that boat.”
He fished underwater
with a garbage can full of holes to trap the flounder—delicious.
He caught eels.
The clerk slipped in his 2 cents. “Shocking,” he said.
The crew didn’t quite know how to feel about eating eels,
but the Chief seared them really good so they had a nice crust,
and they all came running.
Photos of civilian days showed different battles
with sharks and a giant redfish in Florida.
Stories of a friend who moved from two subs,
surviving both torpedo attacks,
and still ended up getting killed.
And talk of a great job that he had as a pastry chef
at one of those big places in Chicago
that a young man like me only hears stories about.
He made cakes and pastries there,
but he also rolled out big sheets of pasta on a 4 x 8 table,
and with his pastry bag made thousands of raviolis at a time.
As I was checking out
he said, “Always hook the positive lead to the battery first,
otherwise you’ll burn it up.”
Something he learned on the sub.
I drove away,
past an old Italian bakery a few blocks down from the shop on the corner that still fires its oven with coal.
I envisioned the place and the fresh bread stacked up in the window
in shades of black and white.
I imagined a bunch of kids playing on the sidewalk, eating cookies.
One of them would grow up to be a Chief, I’m sure.
[...] The Chief [...]