He was talking about the fighters he'd flown in the Navy during World War II. His squadron was the first to fly Corsairs, and he spoke about their design, about their "gull wings."  The Corsair had a very powerful engine which turned a thirteen-foot propeller.  Since the propeller's diameter was so wide, he explained, the nose of the aircraft had to be higher off of the ground than the noses of other fighters, and that meant that the wings were going to be higher off the ground as well.

"So the problem was what to do about the landing gear, which had to be mounted under the wings," he said.  "The wheels still had to be able to touch the ground, of course, but the landing gear also had to be retractable.  But to be retractable, it couldn't be too bulky, or too long."  He took a sip of coffee, seeming to design the plane in his head as he spoke.  "So what they did, they built a wing which sloped downwards" -- delight in his eyes now, excitement, even -- "downwards, toward the ground, so the outer part of the wing was closer to the ground, and that's where they put the landing gear."

I asked him if the gull wings made it harder to handle the plane.

"Well, you know, once you got it up in the air, it was a smooth ride, wonderful.  And it could outrun anything around at that time.  But takeoffs were tricky.  And landings were very tricky, because you're landing this plane, you know, on an aircraft carrier, and with the Corsair, you had to land just right or they bounced around.  And if they bounced too many times, you wouldn't be able to slow down fast enough and you'd careen right off the front of the ship and into the ocean."  There was nothing macho about this talk.  These weren't war stories, really, from this man who, after the war, as a civilian, was a counselor at a summer camp for French war orphans and discovered there that he enjoyed teaching, which was what he did for most of his life.

Talk of outrunning other fighters turned to how they trained pilots in the Navy to recognize enemy aircraft: they flashed silhouettes of enemy planes in front of you for a fraction of a second, and you had to get to the point where you could identify the plane after having seen it just for that very brief period of time.

"The one fellow who was our instructor, he'd flash a plane up on a screen in front of us -- just for a fraction of a second -- and ask us to identify it, and then he'd flash another and we'd have to identify that one, and then another and another... and then he'd flash a slide of a naked woman!  And there'd be an awkward silence in the classroom and then he'd laugh and then we'd relax, and then he'd show us some more planes."  And he smiled at the memory, and his wife laughed, and my parents and I laughed.

He laughed, and took a bite out of a piece of pastry, and thought for a moment.

"There was this fellow, an instructor.  He'd flash a plane up on a screen -- just a fraction of a second, he'd have it up there -- and then ask us to identify it.  And then he'd flash another up there, and another, and then he'd flash a picture of a woman, a naked woman!  Then there'd be silence, nervous silence.  And then he'd laugh and we'd relax and then he'd show us a bunch of other planes."  And he smiled at the memory, and his wife laughed, and my parents and I laughed, and his memories of his time sixty-five years ago as a fighter pilot were so vivid, and it was alright with me that he couldn't remember what had happened during the foggy period before he'd had a bite of his pastry.