There was that moment that probably everyone remembers from school. A certain buzz would be going around the inexplicably empty classroom and then finally the word everyone was thinking would be said aloud: sub! What this meant was not always the same thing. There would either be the terrified youngish person who tried to enforce discipline in a lawless classroom and then give up, or the ridiculously strict older person who would try to follow the actual teacher’s notes and then give up. But then, there was that rarity: the sub who would just kind of do whatever he or she felt like doing and would, thus, entrance the entire class.
There was a sub I remember from elementary school who told us, a bunch of city kids, that there was a place “in Africa” where it was so quiet a person could say something in a whisper and you could hear it a mile away. The idea of this amazed me, and stayed with me for years and years, up through the time I got my bachelor’s degree in anthropology.
The same sub also played a game with us, in which she would have one kid leave the classroom for a minute. Then she would point out something to us in the classroom and have the kid come back in and guess what it was. Before the kid left the room, however, the sub would whisper into his or her ear some magic words that, since we were not in Africa, the rest of us could not hear. Then the sub would go around the room, pointing and saying, Is it this? Is it this? Is it that? Somehow the kid would always guess right, stunning us all into silence.
What you call a certain type of sandwich, you know, the kind that consists of long roll sliced down the middle and filled with all sorts of things, depends on where you grew up. Where I grew up, every single person I knew called them heroes. I was aware that there were other words for them (I remember coming across the word “grinder” in a story in high school and wondering how I had never heard of something so wonderful before), but I didn’t realize how precisely regional they were. A guy in my dad’s office was from Pennsylvania and called them hoagies. I thought this was an accident on his part.
I discovered at a certain point that no matter what you grew up calling them, you could always just refer to them as subs. The word sub, which is short, obviously, for submarine sandwich, seems to be the equivalent of the Midwestern accent perfected by newscasters. Every time I say it, however, I feel like I am betraying my roots.
Ultimately the truth I came to realize sometime this past winter in a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights is that the very best type of sub in the world is said this way: bahn mi.