On a Chicago porch, a life unfolds out of order. SAM, an Italian American patriarch, spends his mornings the same way he always has: shirtless, tan as hell, working through the first of his forty daily cigarettes while his grandson ELMER fetches the paper. But the porch holds more than one morning. In snippets spanning four decades, we watch Elmer grow up on Sam's porch – five years old and jumping into his lap, eleven and hearing his first war story, seventeen and absorbing his grudge against a brother he won't name, twenty-eight and bringing him coffee and a newspaper.
Sam is cheap, stubborn, and closed off, showing love more through rules and rituals – a sauce that needs more basil, a door that must stay shut – than through anything he'll say out loud. When Elmer returns to the porch to find it empty, a group of neighborhood strangers stops by expecting to find Sam there, as they have for years.
They tell Elmer a version of his grandfather he never saw: not just a difficult old man, but a beloved legend of the neighborhood – The Tannest Man on the South Side of Chicago.
