You know Saturdays are different. No rushing, rushing to catch the Metra and all that. Couples come in for a leisurely coffee, roll or bread, and reading the newspaper. Right next to Jake, for instance, two guys dug into the Trib and Sun-Times just as energetically as you please.

Janitor Emeritus, a regular, came about 8:30, stopping outside to gesticulate first at the window to his buddy with gray hair like Sam Beckett’s but no familiarity with the French language that Jake had noticed. Call him the Dubliner.

The D. gave way to the above-mentioned pair, for some reason. He had been inveighing against “big shots” to his interlocutor. Of this fellow he asked, “Who’s going to win the game tomorrow? It will be on all day.” The interlocutor, chiding: “You can watch it all day.” The D: “I hope the Giants win.”

Janitor E. shuffles up. In the Dubliner’s…

Fr. Dick gave Jake and his wife a start at 5 o’clock mass on Saturday the 20th, Inauguration Day, year of the Florida Recount.

“It’s over,” he said at the start of his sermon, begun after detaching the microphone from the lectern and whipping the cord free so he could leave the sanctuary and come toward us in the half-empty or half-full church depending on your rate of metabolism.

The Christmas season, thought Jake. So did his wife, she told him later. So would their twenty-something eldest child, if she had been there, he later learned.

No. Something else was over. Perhaps the Clinton presidency, which Jake had already celebrated in his usual quiet fashion — right fist shaken once, about eye level, silently. He did not expect to celebrate it again here, at holy mass.

Not a problem. Something was over that Fr. Dick never quite spelled out. His…