Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker

 "It's not that I'm smart. It's that I stay with the questions much longer." Albert Einstein.

What memories do you have of your father?

My father was no ordinary man. He grew up in the city, but loved the country. He was small in stature, but backed down to no one. In 1943 he and a friend patted the side of the Liberty Bell in his home town of Philadelphia and then enlisted in the Marine Corps. He survived a battle in a place called "The Meat Grinder," among the many other places he fought. He came home from the war to work in the US Space Program, raise a family and retire.

He was Irish, the grandson of a man who moved his family from Donegal.  Consequently, he had something of the poet in him. He had committed to memory countless verses, which he could recite seemingly at will.

Lest one think they were some of the better known of Yeats, or Joyce... Usually, they were ribald limericks about a man from Nantucket, or a hermit named Dave. He had a sufficient repertoire that, while on guard duty after Japan surrendered, he would write them on the outsides of the vehicles he was supposed to be guarding without being repetitious. The company commander was unamused.

And then, there was the free verse poem about a legislator from Arkansas who took offense at how the name of his state was being pronounced. My dad would burst forth: "Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker you bald-headed old son of a bitch. I've been trying to get your goddamned attention for the last half hour..."

My mother, who grew up in a more refined part of Philly, was openly horrified at the things my father could recite. One, a Christmas poem based in a penitentiary, made her swear.

Out of curiosity, over many years, I tried to locate the source of my father's Arkansas poem. Even in the internet age, it eluded me. Then...

I purchased a book on Kindle recently, On the Warpath in the Pacific, the life story of Admiral Joseph James "Jocko" Clark. Born in Cherokee Nation in pre-statehood Oklahoma, Admiral Clark was the first Native American to graduate the US Naval Academy, in 1918. Navy was a bit rough around the edges, something the blue blood regular Navy officers tried to remedy. Jocko found himself caught up in a hazing scandal in which plebes were made to memorize and recite a poem called "Change the Name of Arkansas."

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Goddamn your ornery soul all to hell.

No wonder I could never find it. That is the most marginally re-printable sentence. That, and one suggesting that comparisons between Kansas and Arkansas is like comparing the "gentle oscillations of a little June bride to the frantic clutches of a Klondike whore."

I can hear the echoes of my mom... "Daaaaavvvve."

According to legend, and owing to the significant passage of time, the version recited by Naval Academy plebes was but one version, my father having access to a varient, perhaps one embraced solely in the Marine Corps. Whatever, over the course of fifty-six years knowing the man, his memory of the poem never wavered.

I miss the old guy, for no other reason than he could be obnoxious, he could be irritable, he could get under a person's skin. But, he was never dull. As we approach the tenth anniversary of his passing, I can only say that he was one of a kind.