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.