My Uncle Joe left us this week.

It is shocking and still hard to believe. For so many reasons: I just saw him a few weeks ago. He was only 75. He is the first of my Dad’s siblings to go. I have always thought of them all as invincible so it doesn’t make any sense for Joe to be gone.

I had an amazing childhood, which was enriched because I always had extra family around. My Dad is the oldest of 11. Uncle Joe was the second oldest, and one of the uncles who farmed with my Dad. Growing up, he always lived next door, or just down the road, and was in our house every day. He was at every birthday party. Every Christmas. Every coffee break. Every celebration.

If I tracked him down in the barn as a kid, he’d give me a stick of juicy fruit gum. He once was a tobacco smoker, in a pipe! I wonder if that juicy fruit replaced the pipe?

He’d always have that special smile and twinkle I think he saved for all his nieces and nephews, and now their kids too.

He loved techy things – particularly data – data in multiple forms. He liked computers and all the things he could do with computers, but I don’t think he ever joined a social media network. He started with word processing and newsletter layouts in the early days of personal computing, and expanded from there. He loved collecting weather data. Learning how things work. Thinking of ways to help solve your problem.

He noticed things. He knew where all the baby kittens were hiding on the farm. He knew how many flower heads were on his sunflower plant that sprouted from the bird feeder. When I visited him last year and was impressed by his legendary sunflower plant (it had like a hundred flowers on it!) he collected and dried the seeds and mailed them to me so I could plant some too. (I did, but our season was too short and they haven’t bloomed yet.)

He drew a sketch for us a few years ago for something we should build that would make it easier to haul firewood logs out of the forest. He had thought it all out and sketched it on the spot so we could take it home and build it.

He wore a calculator watch, forever, decades after they were cool. And he always wore velcro shoes, even when they weren’t in style. Of course it didn’t dawn on me, until I was an adult, that he wore velcro shoes because he lost the fingers and part of his right hand in a farm accident when he was young, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy to tie a shoe lace if your fingers were only on one hand. I never thought of him as disabled in any way, because he seemed to be able to do anything anyone else could and I just didn’t know any different.

He had some cancer he’s been treating for the last few years. We had a nice long talk about it in his basement last year when I visited. He hadn’t seen a doctor for most of his life, but in the last few years, he had seen many, and was getting his every ailment treated. He was doing well and was kinda amazed how well science could patch him up. He didn’t look as good a few weeks ago when I saw him, and wasn’t as chatty, but I certainly didn’t think his time was going to be so limited.

He was a funny guy, in a more shy and reserved way, a bit like his Dad I suppose. He was a chuckler and a kidder! He didn’t need to be the center of attention, but was going to find some way to have you smiling.

He was also a total data pirate, but you didn’t hear that from me. He had a digital copy of just about every song in the universe. None of which he paid for. He found ways to get songs from many sources, like YouTube in modern times. Before that, he had a system rigged up to record music from the digital music channels on TV. When I visited him last year, while I was driving across the country and back, he gave me a USB stick for my truck to listen to, and a complimentary external hard drive with well over 20,000 songs on it, organized in pop and classical music folders. He added information to the file if the song was in the Billboard top charts, including what position they reached on the charts and in what years. He was so excited when his data harvesting got a new song to add to his collection! When he gave these to me last year, he said, you didn’t get these from me. Don’t travel with them. If you get caught, you found them in a parking lot.

Once he had the biggest multi-disc players you could imagine. Didn’t they hold like 300 CDs? And he had many of them. Name a song, he’d ask. Just name one, he’d plead, I have it! He had binders and spreadsheets for quick reference. When his parents were aging, he gave them a special stereo loaded with all their favourite genres of music.

A few years ago I got a big envelope in the mail from him. He had collected all the weather data for Dawson City. Like since the gold rush. Daily highs and lows. Printed and stored in protective sleeves, and also in spreadsheet form on a memory stick!

He didn’t travel much. Once his brother coaxed him to come to a cottage north of Parry Sound for a weekend. Fortunately, I was nearby and was there too! The only guy to arrive in the boat with a big old leather-like suitcase!

He liked to game. He liked to woodwork. He was one of my uncles that taught me how to play chess when I was probably 4 years old. He loved playing cribbage too, but I was never great at it.

After the dairy farm was retired, he bought a new house in Listowel and made it his own. He had a huge basement with game tables and fun things. Once, most of the basement was taken up by an entire huge train track and village! He installed a cherry hardwood floor on the main level, and custom-cut the 4 suits from a deck of cards into the baseboard of his basement.

Years ago, he scanned every one of his parents’ photo albums and gave a CD to everyone in the family with all their photos on it so all their memories could live on.

Last year he showed me something I had only heard of. As a young man, he joined a well-drilling crew and worked in Ontario’s far north fly-in communities, drilling water wells. Now I had heard he did this, but I didn’t know he had an entire photo album of it. He showed me every picture and told me all of the stories. I only wish I had the foresight to record it!

He never married, or had kids. Nope, he was all ours instead. It still feels like this must be a joke or a mistake and he isn’t really gone.

We’ll miss ya Uncle Joe. Say hi to everyone over there, would ya? ❤️

Joe Verkley – obituary