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Let’s hear it for the fun uncles
At my 1st birthday party, I was given my first car. It was a Shellcore Turbo race car with blue, red and orange stripes and black vinyl paneling along the seat backs. Seeing that it's the only gift from this era that I or anyone else who was there remembers, it must have stood out conspicuously among the more traditional toddler birthday gift fare. It certainly must have elicited a passionate response from me, because for months after that fateful day, my butt was firmly pasted to that seat — and I was cruising the carpeted floor of my parents' mid-1980’s condo like an F1 racer.
The giver of this much-loved gift was a much-loved man named Rick Fentin: a mensch of the first order, and, in my admittedly biased estimation, the greatest uncle who ever lived. A true funcle.
Perhaps you are familiar with this portmanteau, “funcle.” It’s used to describe a particular beloved uncle, one with that sturdy blend of fun, good-natured mischief of the PG-13 (and occasionally R-rated) variety, a pocket full of well-worn jokes and a capacity for loving their nieces and nephews unconditionally.
My Uncle Rick was so much the embodiment of the term that when he would use it to describe himself (which he did frequently and proudly), people who were unfamiliar with the title thought he had created it. And while I was destined to outgrow the race car, my uncle’s influence would grow from there, his presence in my life its own incredible gift. Rick had fans everywhere he went because he shared love with everyone he encountered. His writing group, the Arlington Council on Aging where he volunteered for many years, the local senior center where every Thanksgiving he would give out turkeys. To everyone he met, he spread a little bit of magic.
When his sister was going through a rough patch in her life, she received an unexpected letter from Rick about walking in the woods and naming his favorite birds after her, because “they make you smile whenever you’re around them.” When one of his best friends was battling depression, Rick organized a regular ping pong meet-up made up of his temple men’s group (which he helped form in the 1980s, way before men talking about their feelings together was prevalent).
Rick was a lifelong basketball player. A long-running joke of his was describing a litany of Lebron James-like hoops records he claimed to hold at the central Massachusetts summer camp he attended in the 1950s — all of which were as difficult to refute as they were to confirm. One of his brothers likes to paraphrase Bill Walton’s famous quote about Larry Bird to describe what it was like to be wherever Rick was — “it was an honor just to be on the same court as him.” He was that special.
All of this made it particularly heartbreaking that while Uncle Rick was at my own son’s 1st birthday party, he wasn’t at his second last month. He died last summer from complications after a cardiac arrest.
As we looked at each other and out at the audience, where Rick had stood proudly for years and years, I felt him up there with me.
The last time I saw him was at my band’s performance at the Green River Festival in Greenfield, Massachusetts, last June. As we set up, he ambled to the front of the stage and gave me a big smile and fist bump, marveling at the crowd of a thousand-plus gathering to see us, at how far we’d come since a group of songwriters from the Berkshires and I organized a barnstorming tour across Massachusetts back in 2014. He’d been one of a few dozen people at our fledgling performances a decade earlier.
For as long as I’d been going up on stage, my uncle had been there. He and my aunt were among the first people lined up for my autograph after my first performance as a silent donkey in an elementary school production of Pinocchio, and for years after that he was always a beaming presence in the crowd at musical performances, from middle school to high school, college and beyond.
I cannot divine what the deceased want from us. It always strikes me as a little self-serving when people say things like, so-and-so wouldn’t have wanted you to miss your trip to Spain on their behalf. It always feels like the person who passed, conveniently, wants the living to do whatever they wanted to do in the first place. But I did know, when my band had a weekend run of outdoor summer concert series across the northeast scheduled a few days after my uncle’s passing, that he would want me to go on with them.
Rick was my biggest fan, but then, he was a lot of people’s biggest fan. For so many of his nieces and nephews, he’d been there since the beginning, at our shows, ball games, recitals and Bar or Bat Mitzvahs. No drama, no big presentation, just there, cheering you on, loving seeing his loved ones do things they loved.
Each evening as we played, the sky filled with the most vibrant blues and yellows and the sun radiated through the clouds. All around me I felt my uncle’s presence. During the encore on our last night, my bandmates invited my wife Meaghan and our son up on stage, during a song called “Fall Into Place,” written by my bandmate, the great Berkshires songwriter Chris Merenda, about how everything in our lives falls into place when we lead with love. As we looked at each other and out at the audience, where Rick had stood proudly for years and years, I felt him up there with me.
That night, the show came to a triumphant end, the band loaded up and we all went home. A few days later, I checked my phone, realizing I had never looked back at my last texts with my uncle. Waiting for me was a text from a few months earlier, after another concert, one more message from Rick to let me know he’s still right here.
“Absolutely loved the concert,” it read. “Can’t wait for you, Meaghan and Sir to be on the stage together. Love, Funckle.”
