Someone Else at the Graduation

This picture is taken at my father's graduation ceremony from Northwestern. The year is 1948 and my mother is 28.

I love the way the two of us, Jimmy and I, huddle around her, like she's the big oak in the forest and we're two timid little squirrels. Of course, my mom always had this appealing maternal quality of being stronger than anyone around her. For this we can thank her upbringing. Both her parents were from the west of Ireland, from remote farm areas which today we might call "backward". Their conception of childhood was, shall we say, abbreviated. As their oldest daughter, my mom was not only expected to do much of the shopping by the time she was seven, but to haggle with the butcher as well. Worse, if the cut of meat she brought home wasn't up to my grandmother's high standards, then back you go, Marie. "I used to be so embarrassed," my mom told me later, "I can still remember how flushed my face would get when I'd walk back in his shop holding this piece of meat which we hadn't re-wrapped properly and now it was dripping on the floor. I could barely get the words out, plus the butcher would always be mean and make me show him what was wrong with the piece. Make me feel like a crook is more like it."

But it didn't seem to faze my grandmother who, once a week or so, would hand my mom a pail and send her down to the local tavern where she was expected to fill the pail to the brim with beer - and not a drop less, Marie. Oh sure, sometimes, if it was dark out, my mom's little sister would be told to go along as well, apparently in the belief that two little girls were less of a temptation in the dark than one.

The most traumatic experience, however, occurred when my mom was in second grade. During her Easter vacation, she and her wild brother, Bill, were squeezed onto a crowded Chicago Avenue streetcar with instructions for the motorman to make sure these quasi-orphans reached County Hospital for a scheduled tonsillectomy. In my grandfather's defense, the motorman, like my grandfather, was from County Kerry, as were most of the motormen then, so it was almost like riding in the family car. Still and all, a thing like tonsillectomy being perpetrated sans parents - and without some 1920s version of Family Services raiding the household later - well, I must say, it's a testament to the wild and woolly proposition that was child-rearing back then.

Exhaustion

After the war, my father used the GI Bill to attend Northwestern at night. With one child already born and a second soon to follow, he was hungry for advancement beyond the dead-end job he'd returned to in credit and collections.

The picture here was taken on the day of his graduation. You may not notice it, but he's exhausted. Within months, he will contract pneumonia and be confined to a ward at Heinz Hospital for about three weeks.

All that strain, those endless nights in the Army, being mystified by Japanese particles, sight-reading Kanji under a single dim bulb. Then boom! the war ends, and he comes home to a budding family, plus forty hours a week at Spiegel, not to mention a huge course load at Northwestern, so intense, in fact, he manages to obtain his degree in little more than two years.

So look at those eyes a moment. They may be exhausted, even ready for quarantine ... but there's something else happening as well. The young man of promise has grown up. He is a student no more.

For more than fifty years, the books he used at NU sat on our book shelves, gathering dust next to one or two of his old Japanese textbooks. I think he was prouder of the shelves, which he made himself, than of the books. It was like he kept the books around as yellowing testimonials to something he didn't want to forget, but would never look at again. I was the only one who ever pulled them down. Their sturdy bindings touched me somehow, the old-fashioned red and blue cloth covers part of a world far removed from our suburban tract home, with our perfectly cut lawn and our sump-pump in the basement. One of the books from Northwestern was by a disciple of S.J. Hayakawa, a Semantics text that seemed to me (I was in high school by this time) the sort of mysterious esoterica about which Time magazine would gush and call "fascinating" and "provocative".

"Oh, it was pretty good," my dad said when I asked him about it, but his flat tone indicated that it was not "fascinating" or "provocative" in his mind, not the way Paul Richards managing style was "fascinating", say.

Over time, he came to strip himself of anything that wasn't essential to this post-war life he'd carved out. Make no mistake: he wasn't a poseur, an egghead pretending to fit in. He really loved being a suburban father, a Little League manager, an usher at church. Hey, he could dip and wield and make the collection basket dance like Baryshnikov. Eventually he would become president of the Holy Name society, captain of his bowling team, a man of parts and substance.

And yet there was this very different John once, a young man with a stratospheric IQ and a mastery of languages and a Phi Beta Kappa grade point. His sons never really knew this John. They only knew the easy chair John who quizzed them before a Latin test or built a desk out of orange crates and an old door. Amongst themselves, they sometimes marvelled at this other, earlier John, but no amount of wishing on their part would ever bring him back. Indeed this picture may well represent his last known sighting.

Saturday

So now I'm an old man and I'm trying to connect with the little boy sitting across from his father - not the one filling his mouth, no, the one pretending to get his father's clever witticism.

Yes, from the look of things, my father is in one of his silly moods, which means it's probably Saturday morning and he has time to smoke a second or third Chesterfield and look very Jack Kerouac, letting the cigarette dangle rakishly between his lips and his fingers. The dark shirt, I remember distinctly. It was his Saturday shirt and he always wore it with the sleeves rolled up to allow us a peek at his war wound, or so he called the ugly scar on his forearm - but later we figured out it couldn't be a war wound because he was never in the war part of The War.

No, in the Big Enchillada (his name, not mine), he was a Japanese translator. Not exactly Audie Murphy territory, but we were proud nonetheless. It was one of the legends of our childhood, how even though he'd never been to college, he tested so high that the Army enrolled him in this elite Japanese language program at the University of Michigan. 250 candidates started, and he was one of only 50 who lasted, cramming his nights away in a washroom stall because it was lights out in the barracks.

Of course, by the time this picture was taken, he'd forgotten it all. "Arigato", he could say, and he could count to ten (or was that in German?), but one thing he did remember was this incomprehensible little riddle he'd learned from an Army buddy. For some reason, he found it endlessly amusing. It went something like this:

"Do you know Joe Smith?"
"What's his name?"
"Who?"
"Joe Smith."
"Never heard of him."

Even today, I don't get the point, but whenever he was lost for something to say - and during those long Saturday breakfasts, White Sox minutiae did occasionally fail us - he'd pull it out and I'd pretend to get it and he'd tap my noggin and tell me what a sharp one I was.

How he got that scar on his forearm we never really learned. As soon as we'd determine one story was bogus, he'd come up with another. A top-secret Army experiment. An argument with a whiny Cub fan. He could never be serious for too long. That was my father's style.

Not to say there wasn't some sadness. The Army buddy died young. His name was Bill Burns and my father always said he was the sharpest guy in the program, which was high praise indeed. After the Army, Bill Burns went to work for Walter Reuther, writing newspaper columns for the UAW. But a few years after that, he suddenly became sick and died. What he died from, we never really learned. Whenever his name came up, my father would grow quiet, even becoming a little serious. All of which must have meant that this Bill Burns person was pretty amazing because my father and serious were not exactly soul mates.

Wisdom

My father was an accountant, a good one, we've been told. Every morning, he'd get up at 6, take the coffee left over from last night's dinner, place it in a little sauce pan with the flame turned up as high as possible, and then off he'd go to shave or whatever. Fifteen minutes later he'd return to a scalding caffeine crust that had to be scraped from the pan with a spoon. This and a piece of barely buttered toast was his breakfast. Talk about American heroes!

Then we wouldn't see him until the dusk was settling and he would pull up in his wide-bodied American sedan with the fins that could puncture a lung and his white shirt still crisp and glowing after nine hours of financials.

The first thing he'd want is the Daily News, which he'd peek at while he and my mom discussed their day. Then, if the weather was nice, he'd stand on the back porch and throw each of us popups. Tie or no tie, there was always something formal and instructive about these occasions. "Use two hands!" he'd yell as we camped underneath one of his high-arching tosses. Use two hands was my father's idea of the facts of life.

More Christmas

Exactly once each year, my mom permitted herself the luxury of a nap. That was on Christmas day. As for any momentous occasion, there was a strict protocol that had to be followed. After cleaning up the wrapping paper and repositioning the gifts under the tree, she'd tell her sons to go and play in the basement. Then she'd retire to the bedroom, with only her Salems and her Sun-Times for company.

And oh, what a sinkhole of iniquity that basement would become. My brother, Jimmy, was a rude, hefty boy with a fondness for hockey sticks and Chef Boyardee. Being that this was Christmas and there were no Stooges or Flintstones on TV to occupy his otherwise limited attention span, it was only a matter of time before he began wrapping his sweaty paws around my brother, Tom’s, brand-new Voit football. Imagine! On Christmas day, no less, our innocent, knotty-pine basement was turned into a post-Hobbesian world where might was king and the gangster glorified. If poor little Tom even hinted at telling mom, Jimmy’d sneer, "She’s sleeping, dope. You can’t bother her."

A few hours later, after Jimmy’s hockey stick privileges had been rescinded for another year, we’d go out back to play tackle football. Unfortunately, the yard was barely the length of a first down. The concept of a breakaway run reproduced the oldest of nightmares. Just when you thought you’d escaped your pursuers, you had to turn around and face them again. Not surprisingly, when Jimmy was carrying the ball, he'd giggle at this point and even his teammates would become fair game.

Memory of Christmas

More than anything, I remember my father swearing. He rarely swore otherwise, but on Christmas Eve, the pressure and confusion of assembling all those cheap Chinese toys reduced him to the exasperated equivalent of a tea kettle. He would be on the floor (and my father anywhere but his easy chair was a cause for concern) and the unassembled gas station would be laid out in front of him like a poster child for the cause of chaos. Already an hour would have passed, not to mention three beers consumed in angry haste, and he would be trying to unite two of Fisher-Price’s "interchangeable" components for the third or fourth time. This was usually when the explosion occurred.

"Marie, they think they’ve got me licked. Their best engineers - they’ve spent years perfecting their pre-threaded screws. I can hear ‘em. 'Hey, Joe, if we pre-thread AND we make the screw too small.' I’ll bet they’re toasting themselves, Marie - they’re awarding prizes and they’re toasting themselves -"

At some point in the diatribe, he would find a way to hold up the offending object, and between his round rotating torso, his canary yellow cardigan and his beet red face, the ludicrousness of the situation was practically complete.

"Once they fired a whole team of engineers, Marie, because a customer in Altoona managed to put a toy together - "

This would be followed by a series of coarse expressions, very rarely heard in our household, and then it would be my mother’s futile task to finish the assembly.

Shadows

I've always liked this picture. These are evening shadows descending the wall of our living room. The golden hued part is a reflection of a stained-glassed window. Very spectral, but very calming as well. Often, we sit on a couch in front of the stained-glass and watch the twilight flutter and trickle over everything. A certain poignance seems to stir itself, coloring our mood. We talk about our youth. Despite our son's skepticism, we had one, you know. The dog stretches out between us, only occasionally rousing himself. With frequent hand gestures, I try to describe the way my father used to fold and refold the paper when he was doing crosswords. Mary recounts a ride in her brother Bill's fancy convertible and how Bill refused, on pain of death, to let her wear her hair curlers. Suddenly the smoke alarm goes off. Something in the oven, long since forgotten, is reminding us of the present.