Thanks for the Memoir

	If you have been noticing anything lately, you have probably noticed
that the strangest people seem to have talent for writing memoirs.  Since
I have never considered myself as being particularly strange I probably
suffer from a corresponding lack in talent along that line.  However, here
is a sneak preview of my memoirs.
	My father has figured out a very strange way to spend his spare time.
I have always maintained that the advent of the 40 hour week was really a
sinister occurrence, calculated to destroy the fabric of our civilization.
	My father uses his spare time to learn things.
	At the beginning of last summer he decided he was going to help me out
with my schoolwork.  Accordingly he took up the subject of electronics.  The
house was soon cluttered with elementary radio books: books on Electronics
for the Layman.  I think it was an accelerated course subtitled "Short
Circuits".
	In the next few weeks I became involved in lengthy explanations of the
finer points of Ohm's law.  Fortunately that was the whole extent of my
knowledge at the time and my father was left to flounder through capacitors
and resonant circuits in his own beguiling way.  Previous to electronics
he had been involved in a study of contemporary Greek.  A study, he assured
me, he had sadly neglected during his college days.  The transition to
electronics was hardly noticed by the rest of the family.  As far as my
mother and sister were concerned, he had gone from contemporary Greek to
even more-contemporary Greek.
	There was still the same collection of pencils, writing pens, graph
paper, notebooks--ad infinitum, and in the midst of this my father, with that
look of calm and patient scholarship, signifying diligent application to
the subject.  Meant, no doubt, to be a good example for me during the school
year.  I must confess, the only time I was able to simulate his look of
rapturous attention to the subject at hand, was when Dagmar first appeared
on our television screen.
	Electronics, however, soon went the way of all the other subjects.
It was supplanted by, of all things, the study of shorthand!  My father
decided it was a good thing to know shorthand.  We all quickly agreed as
the bill for writing pads and notebooks, at our house, is tremendous.
	This new topic took the pressure off me and shifted it to another
member of my father's illustrious crew of consulting professors, my mother.
She had been an expert bookkeeper at one time... I won't say what time...
my mother may have spies in the audience.
	Well, the schoolyear started and one night I turned to father with
outstretched sliderule and a trusting look- and asked for a little help
with a very ticklish capacitor problem.  I must admit he had built up a very
impressive vocabulary in his few months of electronics study.  He could
talk Ignitrons, and Thyratrons, and half and full wave rectifiers- but he was
a little hazy on the difference between an anode and a cathode and a grid...
that was just something thrown in to confuse the issue altogether.
	My father informed me that he had never come across anything quite like
that capacitor problem before... but if he could just study the chapter
awhile... maybe...
	I snatched the book out of his hands.  I remembered just in time
that my father, a Liberal Arts student, had never taken up calculus before.
I wasn't going to go through that again!  Explaining how I^2R came from EI
was bad enough.  Imagine telling him how to sum up little bits of area!
	What good do my father's varied studies do him?  Well, if there's ever
a contest between New York Times crossword puzzle solvers I'll be glad to
manage him against all comers.  I even promise to refrain from standing behind
him with a fiendish look on my face and a pencil in my hand, ready to stab
out at the puzzle whenever I spot a familiar definition before he gets to it.
	Last week I was outclassed completely though.  When the Sunday Times
arrived, my father, with a flourish, pulled out a fountain pen.  I retired
from the field.  My biggest aides in solving those puzzles have been an
encyclopedia and a good eraser.
	I'm a bit nervous today.  My father has been wandering around the house
with a lost look on his face.  The time has come to select a new topic of
study.
	Curses on the 40 hour week.