At the end of the day, the night before my brother got married, the men sat down for drinks. I was there, my uncle the pediatric cardiologist, my father the lawyer who emancipated the travel agents, and my other uncle the fortune 500 CFO. I was... feeling inferior. Representing my brother's wife- to-be, the gorgeous Hildegard, were Uncle Albert the farmer and her father the baker. The baker was an Albert, too. What is with the Germans? Why do all of them need to be Albert?
God bless the Germans, though. When her friends told Hildegard she shouldn't go out with an Irish kid from New York, she was mystified. We're both Catholics aren't we?
Albert the farmer didn't have an inferiority complex. Neither did Albert the father, he'd been Eisenhower's cook (the Kansas Germans all stuck together I guess), but Albert the father was a kind little man who didn't say much. When you get up at 4:30 in the morning everyday to bake bread, donuts and Stollen for the Osage City farmers, by night you're ready for bed, not talking. Albert the farmer didn't have that problem. He talked and talked. It made you wonder what he was growing. It was alleged, however, that he was the soybean king of Paola, Kansas.
Albert the farmer and Uncle CFO had a lot in common. They both survived full tours of combat missions in World War II as B-25 and B-24 pilots. You never heard them talk about it until that night. Albert the farmer had been very careful not to bomb POW camps.
Camaraderie didn't slow old Uncle Albert one bit, though, when he really got goin. Late into the night, he surveyed the table. A doctor! A lawyer! An accountant! Albert! It looks like you and me here are the only people who work for a livin.
