DIM SUM AND MORE

BILL LEE, his wife Pauline, and their three sons (Peter, Kerwin and Rod) were fellow parishioners of ours at Wesley United Methodist Church in Palo Alto during our Stanford years.

Kerwin and Rod were particularly active members of the Methodist Youth Fellowship with which we were involved then (Peter was already away at college). After we moved to Ohio, Pauline would sometimes phone us “out of the blue” at totally unexpected times to catch up, and Bill's holiday card sketches were always clever images capturing events (significant and otherwise) taking place over the year just past.

Bill, a chemist, worked at SRI (Stanford Research Institute), one of the most prestigious organizations in the Bay Area, and would regale us with stories of his San Francisco Chinatown upbringing in the days prior to World War II. Another memorable anecdote recounted how he and Pauline came to be the first Chinese-American family to move into their Palo Alto neighborhood (where they resided in an iconic Eichler-designed house on California Avenue.) Bill -- a talented writer as well -- eventually compiled many of these stories into a self-published autobiography which appeared last year and which both Heidi and Lee thoroughly enjoyed reading.

A few years after Pauline died, Bill (now 89) reconnected with Rose, and the two of them moved in together and set up house in nearby Sunnyvale. We last visited Bill in 2006, shortly after Pauline had died, and had never met Rose (although we certainly heard a lot about her from Bill).

After a leisurely breakfast this morning and an eye-opening walk around the Stanford campus (so much new construction around, it took ten minutes or so to even encounter a familiar building!), ...

 

,,, we met Bill and Rose for dim sum at the Port of Call restaurant in Sunnyvale. The vast majority of lunch patrons were Chinese, always a good sign; and the variety of small plates we shared indeed proved delicious. Afterward we went back to their home for a longer visit (and some wonderful root beer floats and homemade cookies).

Catching up on Bill's three sons and getting to know Rose “up close and personal” proved a real treat.

Especially interesting was learning that the two grew up together in Chinatown – Bill was actually closer in age to Rose's older sister; but, from the very outset, she (Rose) had a crush on Bill. Moreover, after Bill returned from serving in the army during WWII, the two actually spent their respective honeymoons together (quite by chance) in the same location at the same time! After raising their two individual families and both losing their spouses, they reconnected in 2007 and have been together ever since. 

Now, if that's not a romantic movie plot, we don't know what could be!

Another surprise: David Schlager, the son of Bob (and Evelyn) Schlager, our senior minister while attending Wesley, is now the pastor at the Sunnyvale United Methodist Church that Bill and Rose currently attend! Dave was also in our MYF group and, when we moved East to Ohio, drove with us across country on his way to spend his Junior Year Abroad in Spain.

It really is a small world after all!

We left Bill and Rose in time to pick up ELIZABETH WOLF (our hostess here in Palo Alto) mid-afternoon at the San Francisco Airport upon her return from a Tauck tour to the Canadian Rockies.

But that, dear family, is a tale for another day...