![[Image]](images/BushmanLives-4.jpg)
“So, Harold, I see your weird friend got in again last night,” my father said at breakfast.
“What are your plans for the summer?” my mother asked Geets.
“I’m thinking of joining the navy, Mrs. Knishke,” Geets said.
“You’ll look cute in your uniform, Geets, dear,” my mother said.
“It’s a good idea. They’ll make a man of you,” my father said.
“Have another kipper, Geets, darling,” my mother said.
“Yum, kipper!” Geets said.
“Gut Yontiff,” my father said.
A kipper is a whole herring that has been split from tail to head, gutted, salted, and cold-smoked. It is a standard breakfast food in the Knishke household. If you have never tried a kipper, I suggest you keep it that way. It is like eating an oily fish made of rubber. I, of course, am used to them. English people eat them. And my family.
“I read in the paper that those bears were making a disturbance in the park again,” my mother said.
“Wolves, not bears,” my father said. “The only bears in Chicago play football.”
My parents read this paper that is thirty-two pages long and comes out once a week. It has stories the regular papers don’t carry—like about wolves in Lincoln Park. I love my parents, and accept them for the good kipper-eating people they are. Good, but completely insane. Just as an example, my father will not look at reruns on television, even if he did not see the program the first time.
“I did not pay three hundred and seventy-nine dollars for this fine television set to look at old shows,” he says.
And although we live in a high-rise apartment building, my mother refused to have an apartment on one of the upper floors, where we would have had a spectacular view. She said it would be too dangerous should any of us happen to fall out a window. So she picked an apartment on the sixth floor, even though I pointed out that a fall from that high would be just as fatal. Not to mention adults almost never accidentally fall out of windows.
Geets was still breakfasting with my parents when I left for my music lesson.