I’ll never forget Uncle Leon’s last words to me. “Why buy Windows 7 on its own when you can buy an entire computer that qualifies for a free Windows 7 upgrade?”

He came from a time when people knew the value of 6GB of RAM, and worked and strived so that their kids could upgrade to 8GB. After a rough-and-tumble boyhood in the squalid tenements of the Lowest East Side, he dreamed all his life of a 640GB hard drive to stretch out in. His people weren’t the kind to get hung up on a brand name or a reputation; all that mattered was whether it worked. They’d never dismiss a one-year-old Pentium processor just because the brand name seems outdated. Only an idiot would do that. And idiots didn’t last long in Uncle Leon’s neighborhood.

Growing up, he couldn’t afford to turn up his nose at refurbished electronics – especially when he was assured that they qualified for the manufacturer’s free Windows 7 ugrade. Refurb or not, he took what they gave him and made the most of it, like a prison inmate cultivating psychedelic fungus on potato peels and apple cores.

It really puts my generation to shame. We complain when a desktop computer doesn’t have a DVI port. Well, which is worse: that or polio? You think Uncle Leon wasted one precious moment whining about a mediocre integrated graphics card? Hell, no. If he wanted better graphics, he didn’t wait around for somebody to hand them to him. He installed his own graphics card in the open PCI Express x16 slot and got on with life. It’s just one of the many reasons I try to emulate Uncle Leon in every aspect of my life.

Well, except how he was totally racist. Only toward Belgians, for reasons that were never made clear to me. But still.

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