Bits

My favourite great uncle, aside from my grandfather’s brother Uncle Harold who joined us every Thanksgiving, was his oldest brother, Joe, who lived in Washington state with my great aunt from Japan whose name right now I would not even dare to try to spell. I can’t even make a guess at how you would spell it. The best approximation of how everyone pronounced it, at least, might be the posessive she (“she’s”) plus a certain milk derivative that a certain Little Miss Muffett sat on but the guy I am staying with actually surveyed people as to whether they knew what whey was and only people in the food industry had any idea. He said I was the first of 20 he surveyed who actually knew what it was but I could never forget because Little Miss Muffett ate that whey with cheese curds which are a main component of that delicious French Canadian dish, poutine. And I so often was with my grandfather in his kitchen, maybe my the sink, where to the right was the refrigerator which often contained cottage cheese, which my grandfather somehow liked and I could not understand it but that is always what I used to think of when I heard whey in that nursery rhyme which he often recited.

My great uncle Harold was probably the first one who made me fascinated with German, and who delighted in my interest in German which I always liked to share with him. He guarded German POWs in World War 2 and I have no idea but am so curious how he came to love this language that I am assuming he probably learned while serving in a war? I cannot imagine him telling stories about his time in the war.

It is hard to imagine though that he and my great aunt have anything to do with this deep desire to stufy German and Japanese. The war doesn’t have anything to do with it either, as far as I can tell, but studying Spanish, German, and Japanese together sounds beautiful and grounding and home.

I don’t know if I even met my great uncle Joe though through stories and what I heard of him he was made the most lovable of the bunch or that is how I imagined him, as a really friendly guy that I sometimes wished I could meet but like Alexandra’s Tía Rosaria in the Brooklyn Bruja’s series who only met her once, when she became her godmother, he was probably the family member I never saw who had the greatest impact in my life.

There were stories about Uncle Joe inventing a common electrical component before anyone else. The guy I’m staying with actually did invent a device that he says has been inserted into every hard drive since who knows when that doubles bit storage capacity and he holds who knows how many patents, it’s either like 25 or 200, but either way I can’t imagine anyone having the time to invent so many things. My grandfather talked to me for ages about being an inventor and I could not imagine what it would be like to meet someone who invented things and here I am living with someone like that. He doubled the number of bits in the world, he jokes, at the beginning of a talk he gave to the Concord Humanist Society. Here he is talking about the origins of the universe. (https://youtu.be/7UfaMrnwe08?si=-qEM2ikXe4LXxhYC)