Old So What

  Candidate Number One Yulie and I were friends. You could even say, best friends. She would cook hamburgers for us on Saturdays when her mother wasn’t home. They were really tasty and I think it may have been the only thing that Yulie knew how to cook. There used to be an expression:   Tall, Dark (meaning dark hair), and Handsome. Well, on Saturdays when her mother wasn’t home, this man would come by with his little boy, who I always found annoying. But that’s neither here nor there (another old expression). How he knew Yulie I’ve long forgotten.   I think he had started out as a friend of the family or of her mother’s. Anyway, he was short, dark of hair and, I thought, ugly. He looked as if he ought to go for a good scrub down and bathe in an astringent. He was married, but always kidded around, touching and flirting with Yulie, and to my dismay, she flirted right back. Yulie was, what we called in the 1950’s, well developed for her age. He treated her as...