So Part II isn’t really about the chess match, which is kind of a good thing because I’ve exhausted my expertise on the subject. This entry is more of a diversion to illustrate the greater story of life while working and living at the Shipyard. To wit: yesterday morning I woke up and intended to clean out the wine rack in our kitchen (a bottle of port fell and stained the off-white cabinetry). By the time I went to bed, I had all of the floors cleaned, the rest of the cabinets scrubbed down and I had made tiramisu, played some chess, and put together some lobster rolls. The wine rack was completely neglected.It should shock no one that Dad is a quick study in pretty much all things. He may say that his hearing is going (thank you decades of aircraft, table saws and cannon firing), but Dad can hear pretty well when he wants to. It’s like when I arrived back home and announced that I wanted to make some lobster rolls. Before I knew it, there was a bag of real deal lobster meat sitting in a brown bag on the counter. It hung out among the chess pieces, a Dremel tool and other Hallinan sundries; we now had another fantastic activity in the hopper.But the chess match served as a thread running through the winter hours. It was a wet Cape Cod day and truly a perfect time to be playing chess while staring out the window. The game plodded along without pretense, taking place in fits and starts. Mostly I’d drift in and out of the kitchen while Dad was seated in his usual barstool chair by the french doors. I’d glance at the board and ask him whose turn it was. “Yoz,” he’d say without looking up at what he was reading. I’d then do a quick sweep of the board and move a piece.

It was some time around noon that I had screwed my eyes on the board, telling myself that I should come up with a long-range plan to corner Dad’s king. As I was going over the potential moves in my head, suddenly my train of thought was interrupted.

“Hey uh…how bout those lobstah rolls?” Dad’s voice interrupted me from the other end of the table. To me, the old school Boston accent of my family is normal and as smooth as drawn butter– but for you, readers of the world, I feel as though I should spell it out properly. From the tone of his voice I could also tell that this was a directive disguised as a polite request.

“What,” I responded, looking at my watch. “You want one now?” 

“Yuh,” he answered simply.

So the game stopped again. I went to the fridge to gather the components.

For years I worked at a Falmouth seafood restaurant, but it was just about never that I actually ate a lobster roll. It was just too expensive, and for lunches I’d opt for a cod sandwich or a clam strip roll. It wasn’t until I started to earn a regular paycheck after college that I developed a taste for the lobster roll, even though it was and remains a relatively expensive lunchtime option.Last weekend I was up in the North End with my family and we ducked into a nearby restaurant after Regina Pizzeria had too many people waiting in line outside. As we sat in our new and unresearched dining establishment, I eyed the menu and noted that they had lobster rolls—complete with the dreaded “market price” listing next to it. “How much is your lobster roll?” I asked the waiter. “Twenty-nine dollars,” he answered. I closed the menu and handed it back to him. “I’ll have the warm spinach salad,” I responded before handing the menu back to him.I was always taught that lobsters got their culinary start because they’re consumed in New England by poor people living in what was known as “the Irish Riviera”— or what is better known as Scituate, Mass. It was the only catch that they could afford, and back then lobsters were known as “mud roaches”.  I can imagine that if any of those old guard Scituate folks had been with us in the North End last Monday, they would’ve flipped the table over at being told that a lobster roll was going for 29 bucks. No way, kid.I’m a bit of a lobster roll purist. For a perfect recipe, all you need is lobster meat mixed with a little bit of mayonnaise. For the roll, you take a regular hot dog bun, put some butter on each side and lightly fry it in a pan. When toasty you pop some lobster meat inside the bun and then perhaps sprinkle some paprika on the top. But since I’m home and we’ve got various kitchen staples to work with, we decided to do things a bit differently. Dad chopped up some fine celery (he knew I’d do a less than precision job of this part), before throwing some in with the meat, a touch of mayo, a bit of lemon juice and a tiny sprinkling of chili pepper. We had a lovely loaf of bread from the local French bakery, so we sliced into that before sticking some in a pan with lots of Dad’s homemade butter. Dad is a bit of a scientific miracle in that he has managed to live his life consuming the most calorific concoctions while still not looking like a fat bastard. While I slathered on loads of butter before dropping his bread pieces into the pan, he still retrieved the toasty pieces and heaped a big layer of mayonnaise on the bread before going for the lobster salad. Yucky.As for me, I did not inherit a fantastic metabolism that allows for an unbridled slathering of butter (also, I kinda hate mayonnaise). So I opted to put my bread in the toaster sans buerre and then took it out and scraped a half a garlic clove over the entire base layer before putting my sandwich together. To me, this was just as tasty if I wasn’t going to baseline hotdog bun route.So here’s my sandwich, and in no way do I claim that this is the authentic way to do things. I am indeed a New Englander though, so I really hate to waste things. We’d already had a gorgeous length of bread that was languishing on our counter for 2r hours, and there was no way I was going to let that stuff end up in the garbage. Lobster roll sandwich things were to be the mid-match fuel of the day.  I can’t say for sure that our lobster rolls would have tasted better than those 30 dollar jobs being hawked up in Boston’s North End- actually, screw that. Yes I can. We had fantastic sandwiches that were both fun to put together, and also a bit of work to get through. I think that we both actually ate lunch while hardly moving any pieces on the board. Our lobster meals were just too much of an all-consuming affair. So the game took another momentary halt.Tomorrow I’ll record the final moves of the game— or maybe I’ll just let you know how things ultimately turned out on the magic chess board. As it was, Dad and I had a post-lunch coma to recover from before I did a bit of work in stirring up some tiramisu. But we did finally finish the game. And before I forget about it completely and get caught up in something else, I will endeavor to report on those final moves soon. For now, I hope that this motivates you to spit at the audacity of  30 dollar sandwiches and go out to make your own eats. For me, the flavor is a taste of home—and what’s better, it also kept me from having to cobble together some coherent chess strategy against Dad. It was a win-win moment.