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really a question.
    â€œYes, your father. Do you have any idea what he’s done?”
    â€œNo, but it’s probably bad.”
    â€œJust ask him!”
    Later that evening I did, and this is the story he told:
    With Mr. Crafty’s paralysis came the slow but noticeable shrinkage of his left leg. For this reason, Mr. Crafty was in frequent need of having his left pant leg lifted.
    In the course of his many trips to the tailor, Mr. Crafty, while waiting for his pants, would (like my father) examine the photographs on the wall. After a particularly rough flu season, the tailor, noticing that Mr. Crafty had lost some weight, considerately offered Mr. Crafty a belt that somebody had left in the shop. The tailor assured Mr. Crafty that if he didn’t gain the weight back, the tailor would take in the waist.Mr. Crafty accepted the belt as his first on the road to a black belt, believing it to signal the beginning of his training in hapkido with the tailor as his master.
    Father and the fish tank incident had so angered the tailor that he was now refusing to provide services to anyone in the hotel. Mr. Crafty, with his leg shrinking, his pant leg lengthening, and his nonexistent lessons in hapkido suspended, was furious at Father.
    This, according to Father’s telling, led to a confrontation in the lobby in which Mr. Crafty accused my father of insulting Mr. Crafty’s “teacher.”
    At this point, Uber-Crafty, who had an irrational fondness for my father and had no idea that Mr. Crafty was in imagined training with the Korean, entered the conversation.
    As told by my father, the conversations with the Crafties went as follows:
    â€œYour ‘teacher’? Who could you possibly be talking about?”
    â€œThe man who has been training me in hapkido . . .”
    â€œTrained in what ? You’re barely toilet trained.”
    â€œIf you would shut your damn mouth, you’d learn of a great teacher. A teacher who was once the student of Choi Yong-sool and who, on Shinshu Mountain, received the wisdom of the most skilled and deadly of them all, Takeda Sokaku.”
    â€œNonsense!”
    â€œI now know hand-to-hand and use of all the weapons: jool bong, dan bong, joong bong  . . .”
    â€œAnd your bong, obviously.”
    â€œWhile you waste your morning sleeping, others of us are productive—out each day, first thing, making the country hum.”
    â€œHmm. For the last ten years, half of you has been paralyzed and the other half is the laziest person I know. I don’t believe you can even touch your waist, much less your toes. So tell me, who and where is this teacher of yours?”
    My father didn’t need to be told the answer.
    Anyone who had been as beaten and humiliated as my father had been by the tailor would never think to apologize. But not Father. Off he went to beg the tailor to take himself, Mr. Crafty, and all the others in the hotel back.
    That, sadly, was not the end of it, for each time that Father returned to the tailor in the following years, he would extract some bit of knowledge regarding pressure points. After a while, Father had assembled enough “lethal wisdom from the East” to believe that he could defend himself against any assault. Among the family of delusions housed in my father’s mind, this was the most dangerous.

A CRUSH
    ONE OF THE reasons I wanted to get to school early each day was that in the time before class, kids played or talked outside their lockers or met in the cafeteria for breakfast. It was when kids made friends, and that year, I wanted to make friends. I especially wanted to make friends with a particular boy that I had noticed on the playground.
    His name was Uhura. He had shiny, dark hair, green eyes, and was very pale and skinny. He was also short. It was the first time in my life that a boy seemed to like me.
    On top of this, he was the center of interest, amorous and otherwise, of all the