Uncle Harold passed away knowing how much he was loved.
From the time he was a young boy, Uncle Harold adored reading. Like many of you, ¬Mom remembered that Uncle Harold was called “the little professor.” Along with latkes, which he adored (and chicken-soup, which he did not), Uncle Harold may have digested these two proverbs while growing up behind the Valentine Confectionary:“Let the wise hear and increase in learning.” And “An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.”
Mom fondly recalled Uncle Harold being sent to unpack a box of books for the store. A considerable time later, their father went looking for him: there he was sitting beside a nearly full box reading the top book with full concentration.
Uncle Harold was naturally attentive and meticulous. He excelled at maths and sciences and liked nothing better than to explore life’s scientific mysteries. Uncle Harold felt this poem by Edgar Allan Poe spoke directly to him.
“… in my childhood, …was drawn
from every depth of good and ill the mystery which binds me still:
from the torrent, or the fountain, from the red cliff of the mountain,
from the sun that round me rolled in its autumn tint of gold,
from the lightning in the sky as it passed me flying by,
from the thunder and the storm, and the cloud that took the form
when the rest of Heaven was blue of a demon in my view.”
The demon was a drive and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and explanation of the mysteries of the world. Predictably, this interest was a good platform for Uncle Harold’s future life as a meteorologist studying sun, torrential rain, thunder, lightning, storms and clouds. As a senior, Uncle Harold liked to read scientific journals and was still tantalized by life’s wonders.
When Uncle Harold was a young man, my brothers and I believed he was magical. As befitted a doting uncle, we thought he made the weather, just for us. Uncle Harold truly did once bring us a weather balloon and later a chemistry set as well as a box of science books and numerous other interesting items, perhaps in the hopes that we would learn to approach the world from a logical, rather than magical, understanding of the mysteries that so engaged him.
While still studying at University of British Columbia, Uncle Harold began working for the Federal Government in meteorology, living at air force bases across Canada and serving in places like Yellowknife, Moose Jaw, Trenton and numerous others, some of them very tiny. How many of you have heard of Uncle Harold’s colleague who sent away for an alligator to keep them company in the frozen north?
Uncle Harold was focussed, persistent and devoted to the tasks at hand. As a child of World War II, he kept a very accurate comprehensive map of the battlefronts in Europe which he adjusted daily to the appreciation of the customers in the store. He was their detailed visual media report. As an adult, Uncle Harold liked to tell a story of working on a specific detail at his desk on one base. Student pilots were taking off and landing but the noise didn’t disturb his concentration. In fact, when one pilot bailed out, his plane continued to circle and buzz the air force base, unmanned, until it ran out of fuel. As the story goes, after the plane set down, a colleague interrupted Uncle Harold’s intense concentration and mentioned the event. Uncle Harold took a lot of teasing for being too focussed to notice that the base was in uproar.
Many of the thirty-four years Uncle Harold worked for the Federal Government, he instructed pilots in his subject in order that they become safer in flight. These quotations from Caldicott, Mann, Bertin, and Adams might all have been written with Uncle Harold in mind: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth. Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, and patience. Teaching is leaving a vestige of one self in the development of another. And surely the student is a bank where you can deposit your most precious treasures.”
At Uncle Harold’s retirement from teaching and studying meteorology, his department recognized him for personifying the word “service.”
Uncle Harold enjoyed a very relaxed retirement of more than 30 years. One of his regular routines was to share a chat and coffee at A and W with his pals. Another was to swap ideas with a group of friends and then go to Costco for a hot-dog. Otherwise, according to Uncle Harold, the day was meant for reading books and articles, watching movies and television, listening to music, especially classical, …and resting. Can you hear him using his two favourite expressions from the first day of retirement onward: “I don’t sweat the small stuff” and “I’m not doing too badly,.... for an old man.”
Uncle Harold was always a very kind and generous man. He gave his time and his help. When foreign pilots were training at his air force bases, he quietly filled the mess magazine racks with magazines in their languages. He adored buying a friend a coffee, picking up the tab for a meal or laying in a huge supply of candy for everyone. He gave out articles, books and music. No one ever visited Uncle Harold in his home without being offered some item of his own; but, primarily, he offered his companionship. One of Uncle Harold’s favorite authors was Rudyard Kipling who wrote: “Life's all getting and giving, I've only myself to give.”
Uncle Harold: May the Lord bless you and keep you: May the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious unto you. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace." Amen.
I will close with a few lines which seems particularly apt: The generous will prosper; those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed.
