My Uncle Al passed away peacefully at 11:15 Friday morning. His dear friend Karen was with him.
When I was a small child Uncle Al taught me to climb stairs foot-over-foot instead of stopping with both feet on each step. This was at the old house in Ossining.
One day he showed me how the three angles of any triangle add up to 180 degrees, by cutting corners from a piece of paper. Without being pushy, he always encouraged me to learn.
When I was in high school he got me a summer job programming the Apple II. If you know me, you know how that turned out.
We celebrated Uncle Al's 88th birthday in October with a gathering at his favorite restaurant in Chinatown.
Whenever I see something on the Web about Chinese food or history, my first reflex is to email it to Uncle Al. It will take a while for that reflex to fade. I will miss Uncle Al's infectious laugh and the running gag between us where he'd tease me about my endless appetite. I will always admire the devotion with which he cared for Aunt Kay in her final years.
I invite family and friends to share remembrances in the comments section below. If you'd like to share a photo you can email it to me at aglee@earthlink.net, and I will add it to this post along with any comment you would like to add.
I remember my Uncle Al fondly. Our lives came together exactly 31 years ago, at Thanksgiving 1980.
You see, my father grew up with many siblings in the Bronx, and went out to Minnesota for graduate school, and married a local girl. Although he took the family out to New York once to visit, I was very young (four) and don't remember it.
Also, my mother was an only child (her mother died in childbirth), so I grew up not knowing any aunts, uncles or cousins. That would change when I went off to college, in upstate NY.
That first year, 1980, my Uncle Al invited me down to the city (well, actually his condo in Yonkers) to celebrate Thanksgiving. So I boarded a chartered bus from Ithaca to Penn Station.
Imagine: a kid from Minneapolis arriving at the Penn Station of the 80s. The era of city bankruptcy was not in the best of conditions back then, and made quite an impression. Uncle Al and Aunt Kay picked me up and drove me back to Yonkers in the Volvo, built like a tank (which, if you knew how Aunt Kay drove, was a good thing; Uncle Al couldn't drive).
The Thanksgiving, the whole family came over for dinner. (Well, the majority that wasn't mad at the rest, but that's another story.) I still remember sitting with wide-eyed wonder as talked to each other just as they when they were kids. ("Albie did" this and "Tommy did" that and "Jimmie is" something or other.)
Then there was Chinatown. You have to remember, the Minneapolis my youth was an ethnic backwater. (Yes, it's positively cosmopolitan these days.) The number of chinese restaurants could be counted on one hand. Well, Uncle Al corrected that.
He taught me how to identify a good restaurant, that beer is good to cut the grease, and introduced me to Duck's feet (good), Chicken's feet (great), Sea Cucumbers (don't have much texture or flavor), thousand year old eggs (sometimes I like them and sometimes they're too strong), and jook (yum).
He took me to off-Broadway plays and the New York public library, they had an exhibition on the Chinese in America; that's where I first learned about the Chinese exclusionary laws.
But, most importantly, Uncle Al taught me about himself, Uncle Tom, Bob, Aunt Mary, Helen, cousin Margie, Andy (who's blog this is), Peter and John. These are the most lasting lessons my uncle gave me.
I will miss him very much.
My Dear Friend Albert Lee was a very unique man.I'm so happy he was a part of my life.I will miss him! Alee with Kay