It used to be that late night phone calls were always good things and I used to get so excited whenever the phone would ring anytime after 11p. You knew it was either Sonia who maybe wanted to make a late night donut run or Merk just because she knew I couldn’t get enough of her and she always lovingly obliged my neediness in those days. The ring of the phone would bring a charge of excitement, so much so that it would take all my self control not to run to the phone to answer it by the second ring. But times have changed. As we’ve all grown older, the ring of the phone in the wee hours usually means bad things. The news of my dad passing away while I was in college, word of my mom’s subsequent cancer, the passing of my great uncle and also my grandmother’s; all were delivered to me via a late night phone call. Well, last night the phone rang at 11:15 pm and I knew it couldn’t be good.

Sure enough, it was my sister calling to tell me that one of our favorite family members, our second uncle Richard, had passed away. Even though Richard’s side of the family all lived way out in NJ (first Rahway, then Edison), my family’s occasional trips out to visit them were things I always looked forward to. Unlike most family gatherings which I hated as a stoopid kid, trips out to Joisey always meant I was going to have a good time. For one thing, Richard’s side of the family all spoke English. Being a stubborn kid who refused to take Chinese school seriously, my Chinese always sucked and I hated family get togethers where I would struggle to understand and respond to questions from my non-English speaking relatives. Going to visit Uncle Richard meant I would be greeted by “Hey, Stevie Wonder!” which I guess was not exactly cool either, but still way better than “Ah-Bee!” which was the unfortunate common Chinese moniker for the youngest child in a family. It is I assume, short for bee-bee as in baby, you know, the baby of the family. As for Richard, my dad used to boisterously call him “Dickie!” which would of course always get a chuckle out of us kids. Once we got past our hellos, there were other little things to love about being there. For one thing, they actually let us kids drink good stuff like lemonade with dinner. At home we were never allowed to have anything besides water or soup. Even cooler, Richard was a sports fan so visiting him meant that I would actually have an adult I could rap about the Yankees with all day.

But there was something else about those trips to Jersey during my formative years that ended up having a great impact on the direction of my life. Uncle Richard was a smart guy; a chemical engineer, although back then I was too young to really understand what a chemical engineer was. Regardless, he was a smart guy with smart guy hobbies. He was a tinkerer with electronics and a ham radio enthusiast too. I always marvelled at his being able to communicate with other people in morse code thru that big old table of equipment. It was neat for sure, but what I was even more fascinated with was the thing next to the radio equipment; the thing with the keyboard and mini tv screen that could only display green text. Yes, this was the mid 70’s and there was no such thing as a home computer unless you were a hard core tech hobbiest, and that’s exactly what Richard was. He showed me how to use his self built pc and I was hooked. Mind you, there weren’t any glitzy games back then. All the software was completely text-based. Old time gamers today will know what I’m talking about- those text adventure games where you basically type in commands like “north” and it would respond with something like “You go north and come to the edge of a lake. There is a boat here”. Sure it sounds dull in comparison to what we have today, but back in a decade where most people had never even seen a real computer, for a kid like me, playing the text based Star Trek game was the coolest thing in the world. Those visits left an indelible impression on me. It instilled in me the curiosity and enjoyment of being able to control things on a screen by using nothing more than your mind and a keyboard. Without knowing it, Uncle Richard had started me on a path that I am still on today. And for that, and all my memories of him, I’m thankful. Rest in peace Uncle Richard.