Out of the mouths of babes

By Tony Bouza

Comes dribble. Drivel? Wisdom?
Maybe.

About three years ago Erica and I decided to take our 10-year-old grandchild on a train trip up and down the West Coast. We invited his 12-year-old cousin for companionship.

Tony loved buses, subways and all forms of public transport, having spent his life surveying Santa Monica from the back of an SUV. Now we booked a room that slept four (two upper singles and a lower double).

The train had an observation, a dining and a game car and made stops to allow a brief alighting and stretching. We went from L. A. to Seattle and then picked up a rental car, explored that charming city of waterfront, Space Needle and—a surprising attraction—shlock shops in which the tired boys clocked over 90 minutes before I dragged them out.

There were sequoia forests with trees thousands of years old, lumber towns and beaches strewn with carefully nature-polished trunks resembling mammoth toothpicks.

On the way back I noticed a tell-tale stillness and coaxed Ray-Ray, the cousin, to accompany me to the game car.

Ray-Ray is a sweet kid, battered by one of those miserable hands life can deal. His mother was mentally ill and his father unknown. He was being raised by his mother’s brother, but my son and his wife often took him for extended periods. In a very real sense he knew his presence—anywhere—was on an approval basis. He strove to please.

What happened?
“Tony thinks I kicked him and he’s teed off. I told him I was sorry.”
That seemed eminently curable, and I turned my attention to a boy about Ray-Ray’s age and drew him into our conversation.

The kid had just returned from a visit to his great grandfather’s house in Germany and was bursting with enthusiasm about it. He’d been impressed by a photo of a young man in uniform. The great grandfather had served in the Wehrmact.
Having read countless tomes on World War II, I was immediately curious—not about indelicacies—but about things the boy would be proud to revere. Since the Germans fought a war of screaming contrasts I wondered whether his great grandfather had fought in the clubby, Geneva Convention-civilized warfare (delicious and irresistible oxymoron) of the Western Front, where American and British gentlemanly rules of engagement applied, or the febrile, vengeful, insincerely restrain-ed nihilism of the Russian or Eastern Front.

That was the simple question: Who had his great grandfather fought?
“The Jews.”