The Apron That Stopped Me Losing My Tongs

My name is Curtis Boone. I spent twenty-two years with the fire department in the Wilmington, North Carolina area before I retired, and every October for the last six years I've hosted a cookout for the guys off my old shift. We call it the muster, an old firehouse word for when the crew gets called together, and it's the one Saturday a year my old crew stands around my grill trading stories that get taller every time we tell them.

The muster is also the one day a year I embarrass myself the most. Last year, about a week before the muster, Donna got tired of watching it happen and handed me a black Will Well apron, nine dollars and change off Amazon, with two deep pockets sewn into the front. With that many people in the yard, I'm constantly setting my tongs down to shake a hand, pour a drink, or check on the ribs, and then I can't find them again. One year four different guys were searching the grass around my grill for a pair of stainless tongs while a rack of ribs sat there getting cold.

I laughed when I opened the package. Twenty-two years on the job and my wife had to buy me pockets. I put it on the morning of the muster mostly to keep her happy, tucked my tongs in the left pocket and my thermometer in the right, and didn't think much more about it until the yard filled up. Guys from my old shift started rolling in around eleven, half a dozen retired firefighters standing around swapping stories about fires that get bigger every year we tell them.

By early afternoon I had a brisket going low and slow, corn on one side of the grill, and close to fifteen people standing in my yard, several of them former captains who don't miss a thing. Normally that's exactly when I'd lose track of my tools, shaking hands, refilling somebody's cup, pointing out Frank's dog running loose next door. This time, every time I reached for my tongs, they were sitting in that front pocket exactly where I'd put them.

Twenty-two years of pulling gear off a truck taught me that equipment you can't find is equipment you don't have. It took a nine-dollar apron to finally teach my own backyard that lesson.

About two hours in, one of the old captains, a guy named Sutton who ran a ladder truck for thirty years, caught me pulling my thermometer out of the pocket and needled me about it. He said in thirty years he'd never once seen me carry a tool on my person that wasn't strapped to a truck. I told him retirement does strange things to a man, and pointed out that unlike him, I hadn't lost a single tool all afternoon, which for the muster was practically a record.

What actually surprised me wasn't the pockets holding my tools, it was how much less I had to think about where anything was. I wasn't scanning the grass every few minutes or asking somebody if they'd seen my tongs. I was just standing at the grill, part of the conversation, the way I used to stand around a firehouse kitchen table between calls. Donna noticed it too. She told me later that was the first muster in six years she didn't watch me wander off mid-sentence looking for something I'd set down.

By the time the last few guys headed out that evening, my apron had barbecue sauce down the front, a grease smudge near the pocket, and both pockets still holding exactly what I'd put in them that morning. Sutton asked where I got it on his way out the gate. I told him to ask my wife, she's the one who finally solved a problem I'd been living with since before he and I ever worked a shift together.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you asked me straight out whether a nine-dollar apron is worth buying, I'd tell you it isn't really about the apron itself. It's about not having your afternoon interrupted every time you set a tool down to shake a hand or check on the food. I spent six years of musters losing tongs in the grass and thermometers in the flower bed before Donna finally put a stop to it with two deep pockets and a strip of cotton and polyester. I've worn the Will Well apron through a full season since, and it still does the one job I actually need it to do, keep my tools exactly where I left them so I can be at my own cookout instead of hunting around it. That's really the whole story. Just a guy who used to lose his tongs in front of a yard full of firefighters, and finally doesn't anymore.