The Cook

Once a year, my father had a reason for me to skip church.

On the morning of the Grace Lutheran summer picnic, we did not put on church clothes. We did not sit in the pews. We got up early, loaded the car, and drove to Pamperin Park instead.

I was ecstatic.

It was already a good deal, going to a park instead of a sanctuary. But the better part was that we were going there to set up. We were the early people. We were the ones the picnic depended on. And the reason we were depended on was that my father, the quiet man with the steady factory job, was running the whole thing.

He was the head cook.

Years before any of this, before he was the paper mill man, he had been the head cook at the Royal Scot Supper Club in Green Bay. The supper-club years were mostly behind him by the time I was old enough to remember much of them, but the skills had not gone anywhere. They had only changed venues. Now, instead of feeding the Friday-night crowd at a supper club, he fed the congregation of Grace Lutheran Church once a summer at a public park.

He brought everything together.

He drove around to rental companies in town for the long folding tables. He picked up the big drink coolers — including, every year, one from McDonald’s that came with a free donation of whatever they had on tap, the sweating cardboard of a fountain syrup sitting beside the ice. He coordinated the games. He ordered the supplies. He thought about it for weeks.

But the magnificent part — the part that made me think he was the most impressive man in town — was the pig.

A whole pig.

He cooked a whole pig for a few hundred people.

I do not know where he got it. I do not know who delivered it. I only know that on the morning of the picnic, there was a pig at Pamperin Park, and my father was the man cooking it.

He cooked it slow over coals while the morning ran out. He worked with the same steady, undramatic competence that he brought to everything — to the dryformer machines, to the chimney, to the basement floor, to the firewood. He was not showing off. He was just doing the thing he knew how to do, in the open, where everyone in our church could see him doing it.

That was the part I quietly loved.

My father, for the rest of the year, was a man you had to know to notice. He did not speak loudly at coffee hour. He did not lead committees. He did not give testimony. His competence stayed mostly inside the buildings he had repaired.

But on picnic day he was the one with the cleaver.

He was visible.

He was the cook.

He ran the corn. He ran the potatoes. He ran the fixings. He ran the long buffet line of food for hundreds. He had been thinking about it for weeks, and now, in one summer afternoon, the thinking became dinner.

I helped.

Of course I helped. I was Dad’s helper for everything. I was small enough to be told what to do and old enough to actually do some of it. I carried things. I set up tables. I helped lay out the games — the potato sack race, the egg toss, the ring toss, all the cheerful slightly outdated rituals of a Midwestern church picnic in the eighties.

Which is how my father and I came to win the father-son ring toss.

We won, of course, because we had set it up.

We knew where the easy lanes were. We knew which posts leaned. We knew the angles. We had inside information. We competed in the father-son ring toss with all the careful neutrality of two people who had built the carnival and were now pretending to be guests at it.

And we won.

There was a trophy.

I felt a small flicker of guilt. We had cheated, in a way — the way two insiders cheat without quite meaning to. I knew it was not entirely fair. I knew everyone else had walked up cold and we had walked up with the blueprints.

But I also knew this:

I was on a team with my father.

We had won together.

We took the trophy home.

I thought he was so cool, cooking that pig.

I want to leave that sentence the way it is, because it is exactly the way a child sees a father who has done something visible and competent and generous. The grammar does not need to be improved. The feeling does not need to be revised. He cooked a pig in a park for hundreds of people. He won the ring toss with me. He was so cool.

He kept doing it for years.

And later, when our family started spending time at Central AG, he carried the tradition over. The pig roast became Keith’s contribution to whatever community he found himself inside. He could not preach a sermon. He could barely bring himself to speak in front of a group. But he could feed two hundred people one Saturday a year, and somehow, in our family’s understanding of how a man serves a community, that was the same thing.

It was his offering.

It was not the only one.

The other one came in winter, in a church basement — and it was the only time my mother and father became a public cooking team in front of an audience.

Grace Lutheran ran a Holiday Dinner Theater for the youth group every December. The teenagers performed. The adults paid for tickets and a meal. My parents volunteered to cook the meal.

This was not pig-on-a-spit work. This was supper-club work.

My father pulled out the Royal Scot–era classics — chicken and ribs, the kind of dinner-out fare that had once filled the Friday-night crowd at the supper club where my fifth birthday party had been held because he was working that night. He cooked the way the supper club had taught him to cook. My mother worked beside him, plating, organizing the line, keeping the rhythm. Together they ran a small restaurant for one night a year inside a fellowship hall.

The teenagers performed Christmas skits.

The adults ate a real dinner, served on real plates, prepared by two real cooks, in a church basement that for one night smelled like a supper club.

I remember thinking it was strange to see my parents working in tandem like a unit, like a small business, like a couple who had once worked together in the food world before any of us existed. I had never quite seen them like that. Their work, in our family, was mostly separate. He went to the factory. She taught school. They reunited at home.

But on Holiday Dinner Theater nights they were a team in white aprons, and the chicken came out hot, and the ribs were as good as any restaurant.

I did not realize at the time that what I was watching was the supper-club years briefly returning.

I think now that he liked it.

I think he liked, on those nights, the small return of a kitchen rhythm he had been good at long before I knew him.

He was a man who was not very good at speeches. He was very good at dinner.

He carried supper-club competence into church basements and parks and let it serve people who never thought to ask where he had learned it.

That was the cook.

That was my father.

I won a ring toss with him once.

I still have the trophy in my head.