There is a tiny restaurant on Anna Maria Island in the town of Bradenton, Florida. The place, The Rod and Reel (Rod's to the locals), is located at the end of a long wooden pier.  If you go there in the day time, you will be flanked by pelicans roosting on the pilings and fisherman hopefully casting their lines into the churning waters below.

In the restaurant you will sit on white, resin chairs, use paper napkins, and observe the cheesy, shiny plastic tablecloths. And you will dine on the most incredible seafood that you have ever had the pleasure of putting into your cake-hole. Try the grouper. Blackened, broiled with garlic, or pan-seared and coconut encrusted, it is the best stuff out of the sea ever. For dessert, have a slice of key lime pie that will make you pucker up and leave you craving more.

In this place, you will meet the headwaiter. He is the one in the baseball cap, Rod and Reel T-shirt, shorts and sneakers. His name is C.W. ( Clarence something-or-other.) You will also notice that C.W. tears around the place at 95 miles an hour in spite of the fact that he sports a sizable knee brace on his left leg. (Old high school football injury from back in the 1960’s.)

As he rattles off the day’s specials, he gives you his life history without hesitation. He works fifty weeks a year and takes his two week vacation time to travel to Indianapolis to visit his mother, who is in a nursing home. She has Alzheimer’s Disease, she has been in the home for four years, and she hasn’t spoken in two years.

C.W. went to a Catholic grade school as a boy, and remembers the nuns meting out corporal punishment without giving it a second thought – rapping knuckles with rulers, locking bad boys outside in the freezing cold without jackets for a half hour at a time while ordering the rest of the class to “Ignore him. He has to learn his lesson.”

C.W. smiles as he remembers these times and says, “And then, you’d get sent to Father Shraeder’s office, and when he got done paddling you, he’d call your mother so that SHE could deal with you all over again when you got home.”

When asked what he thought of the whole Catholic school experience, he shrugged and said, “Didn’t turn me into a serial killer or anything. Probably did me a lot of good.”

Today, however, C.W. is bitter because his mom is in such a bad way. “She was the salt of the earth,” he says ruefully. “Always doing things for others. Always taking up collections for the poor. Always saying the rosary for people she didn’t even know.” And now she has Alzheimer’s. “Doesn’t seem fair,” he says. “Makes you kind of wonder about God and all that stuff, know what I mean?”

C.W. went to college in Florida and got his degree in Education. “Taught for a year,” he reports. “Got out of it before I got sent to jail for murder.”

While in grad school, he realized that he could make a lot of money bar-tending, “About two hundred dollars a night!” So he quit school, and he has been working in restaurants ever since.

“And today, I own two properties, one is almost completely paid off,” he states with pride. “I’m doing well.”

C.W. cannot wait for Obamacare to take effect. “Gonna get my knee fixed. It’s been over forty years that I’ve been hobbling around with this damned brace. Could never afford to get it taken care of before. Way back when, it was gonna cost $23,000. Can’t imagine what it’ll cost now.”

Periodically, he stops his work to gaze out the large windows that look out onto Tampa Bay from the dining room. “Looks like that front is coming in,” he states, shaking his head. “Gonna get cold.”

During previous a visit to the restaurant, C.W. told me about watching a hurricane come across the waters as he was working. “The feeder bands came in a good hour before the gale itself,” he said. “It was kind of exciting.”

What’s  a feeder band? According to C.W., feeder bands are swirling bands of clouds that circle the perimeter of a hurricane and feed it with moisture.

“Yup. Gonna get cold again tonight. Don’t have any heat in my house. Just space heaters. I was afraid that my pipes were going to freeze last night, so I left all the faucets in the place dripping.”

After staring out at the weather for a few more moments, he suddenly clapped his hands together, looked over at us and said with a toothy smile that splits his face in half, “Okay kids! Time for dessert. Want a piece of the best key lime pie on the continent?”

. . . I love a good, real key lime pie!