Tribute to The Ace: I was thinking the other day about what it would take to make me feel that my life was pretty much OK, despite all the apparent failures and let-downs. After a while, I concluded that if you can find your own style and inner-most visions, even if they are not terribly popular, even if they never made you rich or famous or important, you will feel OK about life if you stick with them.

This reminded me of the following quote: “First be true to yourself, then you cannot be untrue to anyone else”. Admittedly, this is a paraphrase of the original Shakespeare line. But you get the idea. The first half of the quote sounds like a typical 1990s free-enterprise slogan, right up there with “the one with the most toys wins”. But the second part puts it into context. This isn’t about greed. It’s about personal authenticity. All of us are unique creatures living in a very socially oriented environment, and we all have to decide to what degree we are going to follow our own inner callings and to what degree we are going to follow the crowd. We can’t just do as each and every one of us would please. But still, if a person decides to base all of her or his major life decisions upon the judgement of others, they lose something very precious, i.e. their authenticity.

I could be wrong about this, but authenticity seems in short supply these days. There seems to be so much pressure, however unspoken, to go along with the crowd. On the surface, there seems to be enormous diversity in opinion, fashion, lifestyle, career tracks, religious belief, etc. here in America. And yet, when you look closer, diversity becomes mostly a function of novelty. Thus, it’s refreshing when you meet someone who over time learns to live life on their own most authentic terms, even if it hurts.

I had an uncle like that. My Uncle Bruno. He died about four years ago, and I helped to clean out his apartment and did the paperwork to settle his estate. It was while I was looking through one of his scrapbooks that I discovered the Shakespeare quote about being true to one’s self. I guess it was something he felt worth remembering, as he wrote it in bold letters on the inside cover page.

Uncle Bruno was a bachelor who grew up as the fourth child in a Polish immigrant family in a cold water flat in Dundee, an industrial section of Passaic, NJ. His parents (my grandparents) worked all their lives in the knitting mills and dyeing factories (with some interruption for layoffs and strikes during the Great Depression). Uncle Bruno was blessed with a good brain and a strong body, and after serving in the Merchant Marines and in the US Navy during WW2 he went to college on the GI Bill, the first member of my family to do so. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree and joined the world of education and cutting-edge technology (for the 50s and 60s, anyway). And he became something of a bon vivant, although a manly one. He used after-shave and smoked Luckys and lit them with a steel Zippo lighter. He drove a Pontiac, and vacationed annually in Florida. His friends called him “the Ace”. He had girlfriends and would hardly let a Friday or Saturday night pass without a visit to a nice restaurant and perhaps a dance club. He lifted weights and read books. Relative to the rest of my family he was on the cutting edge, a true man about town, the most worldly and sophisticated guy we had ever seen.

As kids, we admired Uncle Bruno’s coolness, and yet were a little afraid of him. He wasn’t always amused by our childishness. He would sometimes give us lectures about getting ourselves together, about the opportunities out there in the world for guys who learn a bit of sophistication and polish (Polish polish?). We would sometimes see him with his friends, total strangers to us.

Uncle Bruno was following his inner callings, and at the time they were being amply acknowledged and rewarded by the world. He was well received by everyone, including us kids (even if we had some reservations about him, we were bought off by his thoughtful Christmas gifts and birthday presents). You could tell that down inside, despite the worldliness and air of success, he was a sentimental guy. He still lived at home with his parents, and still went to mass at the same Catholic parish where his mother and father went after coming to the US around 1915 (from the “Oster Reich”, as western Poland was known under German occupation). He seldom missed the various Christmas gatherings and Communion parties and birthday celebrations that brought the family together.

Somewhere just past his mid-point in life, the sands of fortune changed for Uncle Bruno. His parents (my grandparents) got sick and needed a lot of care. Meanwhile, the aerospace firm where he was moving up the ranks had lost most of its defense and space contracts, due to the 1968 election of Richard Nixon (the firm was tied too closely to the Johnson Democrats). So, Uncle Bruno was soon unemployed and living off of his savings, taking care of his weakening parents full-time. The man who was at home ordering up a whiskey sour on a 707 flight to Miami was now a home care attendant, changing soiled undergarments and other such unpleasantries. Uncle Bruno was just not going to let his parents go to a nursing home, despite the 7 or 8 years of continuing sickness and weakness that they went through. His sentimental nature overcome his attractive worldly side, and he paid the price.

Because of Uncle Bruno, my grandparents died at home with a fair amount of dignity. But after it was over, there was no going back to the days of glory. Uncle Bruno was diagnosed with diabetes, and his body never regained its youthful vigor and strength. He got back into the working world thanks to an opening in the State Transportation Department, but it was not on the level of importance and responsibility as before, being mostly testing and technical work (versus engineering design). His days of travel and fashionable socializing were coming to an end. He took up with a woman from a troubled family, and offered himself as a resource and mentor to them, especially to her children and grandchildren. His nurturing side, the side we only glimpsed at when I was a child, became the dominating theme in his life.

Uncle Bruno died at age 72, alone in a cold-water flat just a mile or so from where he grew up. Despite the wide range of social contacts that he once had, only about 12 people attended his funeral on a cold and snowy January morning (yes, at that same church in Passaic). That’s what his life was leading him toward, and that’s where he went without any sign of complaint. When he was young, strong and successful, he had lots of friends. When he was older, weaker and mostly devoted to a small family of ne’er do wells, people that I myself wrote off as a bunch of losers, he didn’t attract all that much interest anymore. I guess that’s the way life goes.

I saw Uncle Bruno around most of my life, and usually knew what he was up to, but was never all that close to him. I can’t say we ever had a heart-to-heart conversation, or even a personal conversation lasting more than a few sentences. I was able to help him with some legal problems in his last few years, and that was nice. But we never really connected. It was only after he died, when I had to go through his apartment and sift through his life’s accumulations, when I really got to know “Uncle Ace”. I saw his pictures, his camera equipment, his books, his records, his hobby stuff (guitars, model trains, electrical stuff, painting sets, etc.), his bills and his memories (he had kept every Christmas and birthday card he received since the early 1960s). I think that my brother and I managed to distribute his small estate (not quite worth $60,000) fairly, as he would have liked. He didn’t write a will, so I guess that he just trusted that we would wrap up his affairs in a neat and orderly fashion, as we mostly did.

Unto thine own self first be true. My uncle clearly stayed true to himself right up to the end. And in doing so, a lot of people were the better for it. Including myself, although ironically it was only after his death when Uncle Bruno got through to me. I remember during the clean-up noticing that Uncle Bruno had kept a traditional Catholic crucifix up above all the rubble in his apartment, high in a corner of the kitchen. I suppose that meant that he gave some regard to Christian notion of life after death. And why not. Perhaps the man who is most true to his real self need not let death get in the way.