The pawn-sacrifice gambit being unsafe for the moment, we contented ourselve with chatting about the menu. I never could fathom why diners content themselves with comments about the menus along the lines of the sole looks good tonight. I am totally incapable of visualizing the sole looking good on any night, no matter how hard I try. I surmise that it is just to make conversation flow, a filler and nothing more.
"The pasta is prepared Neapolitan style," said Joe. "I doubt if it would match what my grandmother taught me to make when I was about nine but I'm going to give it a shot so stay tuned."
When the pasta was served, we were treated to entertaining tidbits about his pasta proclivities. I had no trouble imagining Joe's grandmother reminding him to put a little more oil in the pot to keep the pasta from clumping. I could clearly see nine year-old Joe standing on chair, lips pursed, gingerly spooning in a generous helping of freshly pressed olive oil.
On that first evening at sea, I don't remember what the pasta tasted like because I had not ordered it and the group had not coalesced into a gang where one would be offered a nibble. On that first evening, those of us who had given the pasta course a miss were no less fascinated by Joe's pasta saga. In fact, so enchanted was I by Joe's contribuition to pasta that I vowed to order whatever delight Joe recommended. On the following evening, most of us partook of the pasta course.
By the third evening, we had learned that Joe had been blessed with two Old-Country grandmothers, who had obviously doted on him and passed on their lore. Joe's head was crammed with pasta trivia. Joe's stories were not pedantic in nature as you may have surmised. On subsequent evenings, there was nary a notion of oh not another damned pasta lecture.
Speaking for myself, when dinnertime rolled around, I had two thoughts. The first was being at sea did engender an appetite. The second was an anticipation of what Joe would serve up for us. Joe was skillful at conjuring up fresh ingredients for each and every pasta rendition. His presentation were fully as masterful as the chef's creations. His stories never became stale nor tiresome. They never degenerated to the level of penguin fatigue suggested by the anecdote of the little girl who dutifully thanked her grandmother for a Christmans present of a book about penguins ingenously revealing that she had learned more about penguins than she had ever intended to.
In turn we had inadvertently learned more about pasta that any of us had ever thought we would, not that we had set out to learn anything. Of course letting things happen is the best way to learn the important lessons of life. Joe's remarks never fell into the category of hardship, for he always left us hungry for more.
Besides gently enlightening us, Joe had an additional endearing quality. It was one that was especially appreciated by the chocoholics among us. Before leaving the table, Joe would order Chocolate Decadence for dessert or the like. Joe was thoughtful. Joe allowed others their little sins and acknowledged his own. He would excuse himself to go out on deck to have a smoke and that was the last we saw of him until the following evening. It was a mystery what he did with himself during the day for not once did we bump into him on the sun deck or anywhere else.
Joe was generous. Joe was slim. We were gluttinous. We were pudgy. Joe accepted us as we were. We accepted Joe, as we knew him but there was little about Joe that we did know. Heck we knew more about his grandmothers than we did about Joe. About our fellow travellers, we knew the usual. Frank, for example, was an ex-rodeo roughrider who had made enough at the game to buy himself an Alberta ranch. I could envision him coming out of the chute astride a mean bull, one hand aloft holding the fixings and deftly twirling them into
a smoke that he saved for after the scramble to the fence. Atop the top rail, scraping a kitchen match against his heel, he would look out across the rodeo grounds with nonchalance that would have made John Wayne, in his prime look like a wimp. Frank's wife, Karen, worked at a school board office somewhere in rural Alberta. Frank, the cowboy champion, was now a plumber turned building inspector. Their three grown children, you have already met.