Speaking of History: Brought forward from 2019
I don't think short-order cooks often get called "legendary."
I got a history of NH diners book for Christmas, and there is a short chapter on Spider. It's fun to watch someone hopping around to get the work done, and doing it accurately, whistling as he goes.
He had been a boxer when he was younger, and you can see it in his movements.
Relatedly, there is Vinnie's Pizzaria in Concord, NH. Vinnie was also a boxer when younger, and fairly successful. The walls are covered with photos of old boxers with Vinnie, autographed by them, plus pictures and newspaper articles about Vinnie's own matches. The place is also cluttered with politicians up here for the presidential primary every four years, all of them trying to show they are a man of the people. I don't recall the female candidates giving it a try, but they probably should have. There are more women running this time around, but I haven't been by the place in two years, even though it's right down the street from work. I should make the effort, though we don't digest pizza like we used to - she because of wheat, I because of cheese.
Great looking place, though.
You can see the boxer in the nervous energy. His motor is too fast even for the work he's doing, which has become nothing but muscle memory. The whistling isn't an attempt to create music, but just snippets of the music in his head, flashing past like everything else.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you can see he's perfectly comfortable working in a confined space. Everything he needs is exactly where he's placed it for decades. He doesn't have to think about it. Even so, it's still more crowded than the boxing ring, but I bet the ring trained him to work behind a counter. He can do a lot within the space he's allowed himself.
I have a son who works like that, at a car detailing shop for BMW in Norway. He wore a device for a while and was consistently over 20,000 steps a day. Short ones, with lots of pivots and switches, but hitting 30,000 wasn't that unusual for him.
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