Marvellous Joe Uppling

What kind of memory trace will you leave behind in the people whom you have touched with your life? Let me tell you about marvellous Joe Uppling. I knew him only briefly and I have only a small store of hard facts to tell you. I met him shortly before the death of his wife and most of my knowledge was of Joe, as a widower, when he was trying to learn how to survive single after years of happy marriage. This was some forty years ago and time has blurred some of the lines of the story.

In my office I have a cross that Joe made for a parish fair at St. Chrysostom’s in Wollaston, Massachusetts so very long ago. His name is inscribed on the back. I was a young fumble fingered curate learning to play an arrhythmical guitar, and I confess that I am still fumble fingered. Joe was our parish organist and choirmaster and when the occasion demanded he was the organist for the Boston Pops. Hearing me muff my way through a badly played gospel number on the guitar, without wincing and with great kindness he gave me the only piece of musical advice suitable for my limited talents. What he said was, “If you don’t know it, fake it.” At my skill level then and now it was perfectly suitable advice.

The other thing I remember was Joe sharing a culinary misadventure. His beloved wife had died a year or so previously and Joe, as he began to recover, decided to bake cookies as his wife had so many times before. The recipe called for allspice, so Joe put in all spice, every spice in his spice rack. With laughter, even with joy he told my wife and I that the cookies were absolutely dreadful, then invited us to his house on that hump of land called Squantum. His place was bright, tidy, clean, with a wonderful view of Quincy Bay.

But these are only facts garbled by time and the passage of years. What remains is the clear reflection of a man who loved his wife and cared for us; a man with a certain self-deprecatory sense of humour, a man with joy in the midst of grief and loss, a creative man, a fine musician who was quite relaxed enough to put up with the inadequacy of a rank amateur and extend acceptance and a total lack of compulsion in his handling of the lack of musical skill of a fumble fingered curate.