Philip Lehman (He is Philip. I am Phil.) and I have traveled much of the world together first with iCarnegie and now with Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. What I remember most about traveling with Philip are the stories about his family. Paris France,

Philip and Carolyn Lehman

Santiago de Chile, Manchester England and points north, south, east and west – stories of his mother who always phoned on his birthday at the precise hour and minute of Philip’s birth, stories of his father, stories of his grandfather and stories of the siblings.  The Lehman’s are a New York, Jewish family in America since the mid 1800s. They are a baseball loving bunch who know with great certitude that in 1961 Mantle hit 54 homers and Maris 61. They are a smart bunch, mostly Harvard and Yale graduates with just the occasional Georgetown student. Philip and I drove to Washington DC and he made it known that we would have dinner with his niece, Carolyn. I was happy to agree. So here they are at dinner. I mostly watched a Penguins hockey playoff game and they mostly talked of the Lehman family – fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and school and travel. I really enjoyed the talk about Passover and the tradition of hiding matzah for the kids, just like our Easter egg hunt. It was just dinner. It was just family. It was just perfect, an uncle and his niece, clearly intertwined in each other’s lives. God was smiling and the pleasure was mine.