P equals MC Sad:(

I said last night I was "waiting on news about someone." I now have at least some of it. It was word of a passing of a life- a connection of mine that goes back as far as almost all in my life, and a friendship I was blessed to begin very early on:



That's from two summers ago, the first time I'd seen the man- who was by far my favorite teacher ever- since we last visited a few years after I graduated from high school.  And of all things, what he taught was physics. It was a combination of the mathematical and analytical stuff I was good at, but with plenty of spatial stuff mixed in that I needed help understanding- and I got it from him. 

Science was the one set of major courses I was not put on an honors track for, so when I got to tenth grade (ninth was junior high back then), I took bio, chem and finally physics with fewer of the uber-nerds I had in all my other classes.  The chemistry teacher was something of a lifer-teacher knucklehead, but for both biology in 10th grade and physics in 12th, I had younger, hipper and more understanding teachers who cared about both the material for its own sake and the learning going on among the kids stuck in the desks.

By senior year, our SATs were done, college applications were in, and we had genuine fun in his Regents-level physics course, with plenty of understanding of these laws of motion, waves and energy.  I did so well in his course, I decided to make physics my required science course at Cornell- and it was taught by a future Nobel laureate!  Man couldn't teach a lick, though, and I was done with it, and anything on the Bachelor of Science side of things, after that first year.  I did sit in occasionally on Carl  Sagan's Intro to Astronomy course, in a lecture hall I had a class in right afterward.  It was his last semester teaching undergrads, but he was always generous with his time and attention as students, not even his ::waves::, would queue up for questions and he'd sign autographs of his best-sellers. Dragons of Eden had just come out the previous year, and I grabbed a copy for him to autograph- not to me, but to this guy. I brought it back to East Meadow on spring break, and he thanked me but didn't realize for quite some time that Sagan had autographed it.  Because the science was more important than the signed-edition, and that was the kind of guy he was.



That's an earlier yearbook photo someone posted today, from 1969. His mug shot in mine, eight years later, wasn't much more flattering, but ours also included this candid of his on the bottom right of the page opposite the science faculty headshots:



The Einstein quote may have referenced a joke among his students- that he was "born on the day Einstein died." Probably inspired by him having the famous bicycle photo on the Room 227 classroom wall, it, in turn, referenced an older trope that Newton was born in Galileo's birth year. That's not quite true, and the connection of the two Alberts is even less so, as Einstein died in 1955, only four years before I was born, which would have made "Mr. P" quite the prodigy.

He went by many names with us- that abbreviated last name probably the most common, but among the staff of the high school's science fact-and-fiction magazine that he advised, his nickname homaged a then-popular NBA player:



All these years later, though, I got to just Call Him Al;)----

I didn't join the science magazine staff until the following year, my final, but there's an amazing amount of talent on that staff, some now among the ranks of authors, surgeons and musicians.  Many of them chimed in today, along with other past and present friends who spoke of how much he inspired them in their education journeys. "Gutted" was how one longtime friend responded to the news of Mr. P's passing.

Sometime in our final semester, Mr. P invited me and a small group of his students to his home for dinner and discussion. He and his wife Risa lived in Queens at the time. Our friend Ted piled about six of us into his father's ratty old sedan, and we followed the directions down the Long Island Expressway, onto Kissena Boulevard and into a faculty member's home- something that would probably get a teacher arrested today.  After my "visits home" stopped being frequent and eventually stopped being to "home," I lost touch with almost all contacts from those days except a couple of very close in-each-others'-wedding friends and a few neighbors and church members. Fortunately, social media's ascendance allowed reconnections, and through someone I forget who'd tracked him down, we became Facebook friends and, when I plotted my annual Citi Field pilgrimage in the late summer of 2019, I decided to invite him, Risa and both of his sons to join me under the lights for Mets against Cubs.

We lost the game, as my lifetime record would have shown as a probable outcome, but we did get to see Pete Alonso belt his 42nd home run, breaking the Mets' team record in the process. Months later, one of Al's sons sent me a laminated baseball card put out by Topps after the season to highlight that moment.  Al and I spent much of the game reminiscing about East Meadow days, remembering jokes from class, and wondering what became of this teacher or that student.  I headed back to my hotel for the evening, but met up with Al in a Suffolk County border diner the next day to talk about more things before I headed home.  We made plans to meet sometime in 2020, maybe again with the Mets.  That, sadly, never happened.

One of his sons confirmed the loss in a Facebook post we saw this morning. No word yet on cause or final days or future arrangements. In checking for his obituary, I did see a reminder of something he had told me back in 2019: his older brother Joe, who died in 2017, was a longtime Rochester resident and a Red Wings season ticket holder.  We went from understanding the force behind a fastball to witnessing a young Met hit one out of the park in their old Queens neighborhood.  I will always treasure the chance we had to reconnect.

Go in peace, Albert, and may the Force, which equals Mass times Acceleration, be with you always.