Kevin

My uncle Kevin was a great many things to a great many people.  He was a husband, a father, a grandfather, a brother, an uncle, a cousin.  He was a chef, a baker, a businessman.  He was a writer, an artist, a musician.  He was a mentor and a teacher.  He was a Jeep owner and a weight lifter and a collector of old things.  He was a friend.

One of my earliest memories of Kevin is when I was 5 or 6, and I desperately wanted a toy telephone from the Rea and Derek drug store. I'd pestered everyone in the family to buy it for me, and Kevin said, “We'll see."  Now, as an adult, I have come to understand that "we'll see" really means "not likely" and I never did get that toy telephone.  But I am still grateful to Kevin for letting me down gently.  I think that's one of the things we all loved about Kevin - he was kind-hearted, even to pesky little kids.

Kevin was a thinker and a philosopher.  Earlier this year, he wrote on Facebook that "Intelligence, wealth, social standing, political affiliation - none of these define human worth."  But although he could be a serious man, he didn't take himself too seriously.  Once in a local restaurant where he was the chef and I waited tables, I lifted the lid on a dish from the kitchen to find an enormous fish head with a cigarette in its mouth and a sign asking "Got a light?"

Kevin made people feel special.  So many people commented online and in person that he made them welcome when they stopped in the bakery, and that his laugh could light up a room.  That he was a vital part of the area, and that he brightened the town with his presence.  That he was a backbone of the community.  And that feeling was mutual: Kevin said not long ago that while the bakery had given him and his family many things, the most important of these were the people who came through the door.

Kevin had a creative soul.  In high school said that "Everyone has to find art for himself, in any medium imagineable."  And so he created things - in just about every medium imagineable - in photographs of old cabins, in a stained glass window in his bedroom at his parents house, in a novel about working in kitchens, in magazine articles about local farmers and museums.  In a canvas that he used to clean his brushes and then later sold to his brother as a piece of abstract art, for an undisclosed sum.  And of course, he worked prolifically and proficiently in everyone's favourite medium, food, constantly experimenting and honing his skills, learning new techniques and inventing new edibles - peasant bread, and a cross between a ciabatta and a brioche. His bagels, which he resisted making at first as being too hard to get right, were truly the best I've had anywhere, ever.

Kevin was a mentor and a teacher.  Through the courses he taught at local trade and night schools, through his instructions to the people (including me) who worked with him in kitchens all over the Poconos, and to those who dropped by the back room of the Daily Bread, he opened countless minds to the joy of creating something greater than the sum of its parts - a fragrant pot of cassoulet warming a grey winter's afternoon, or a loaf of sourdough bringing a fragmented and distracted family back together at mealtimes. There is a beautiful photo of Kevin teaching his great-nephew Liam to form a loaf from a lump of dough which I think exemplifies this about him. 

He taught me a lot about cooking when I worked for him, and when the power went out and we peeled baby carrots by candlelight and cooked prime rib on a gas grill, he taught me about problem solving and about the value of honouring your commitments despite the circumstances.  Even as an adult, I'm struck by the number of recipes and techniques that he shared with me in our emails over the years, although because his recipes were industrial-sized, I learned that the quantities had to be adjusted slightly: 2 quarts of corn syrup and a gallon of Franks hot sauce cover a LOT of wings.

Kevin had vision - he saw the beauty in things that others didn’t; in rusty tubas and sea shells and mustard pumps and a Ouija board.  He preferred vinyl albums over digital CDs. He saw both the sentimental and functional value in a 90 year old Hobart mixer salvaged from the smouldering wreckage of the Pine Knob Inn, the first kitchen that he’d called his own.  He collected the things that he found beautiful or useful or both, and he cared for them and curated them in his unique way that created a feeling of warmth and a sense of place, of home.

Kevin dreamed big.  In 1979 he saw a cozy little dress shop with beautiful mullioned windows on route 390 and knew that it _wanted_ to be bakery; in fact he and Traci took to calling it "the bakery" even when it was just a derelict building. And he had the will to execute on his dreams; with hard work and sacrifice, he and Traci made that building into a bakery.  And they stuck with that dream, together, through fortune’s ups and downs; and together they made that bakery into something more than a building; they built it into an institution that made people in the community feel that they were home, whether they stopped in or not.  They made it place that gave people not just croissants and cream puffs, but joy.

While we may separately label Kevin based on what he was to each of us individually - father, husband, writer, baker - and he really was all of those things, ultimately those individual things don't really measure his worth, because he wasn’t a baker or an artist or even a father or a husband. He was Kevin.  He was human.  He was neither any less nor any more flawed and self-doubting than the rest of us. And like all of us, he was greater than the sum of his parts.

So, if those labels don’t define his worth, what DOES?  Maybe human worth is measured by how much we love, and by how much we are loved. And we loved Kevin: for showing compassion.  For being kind-hearted.  For helping us to grow.  For being unafraid to see and think and believe and behave differently from others.  For dreaming big and for realizing some of those dreams.  For loving us.

We may define him according to the roles we knew him in, but we must measure his human worth - anyone’s worth - in love’s currency.  And on that basis, Kevin’s worth truly is immeasurable.

Beauty

I've been on holiday this week in Ocean City, New Jersey with Michele's family.  Her parents have been hiring a holiday house in OC for the past 15 years, and it's been wonderful to watch our kids reunite with their cousins each year, and to see them all growing up.  The eldest will be off to university next year, no idea where that time went.  The long sandy days on the beach, and the simmering nights on the boardwalk will surely be things they remember about their grandparents in years to come.

In recent years, I've taken to getting up early - around 5, but sometimes earlier - to stretch, walk on the beach, maybe take a dip before anyone else is in.  These solitary moments give me time to reflect, clear my head, and appreciate the beauty around me.  I've clogged my Instagram feed with an assortment of clouds, flowers, sand, and birds - basically anything that at least at the time makes me feel positive and happy.

One thing I am really finding difficult to see the beauty in, though, is the horseshoe crab.

I mean really, this has got to be among the ugliest creatures alive.  It's not even a crab; it's a relative of the spider.  Its anatomy has been largely unchanged over that past half a billion years. It's got 9 eyes and blue blood.  Its shell has a set of pointed spines that resemble two rows of teeth.  Its tail looks as if it could put a hole in your foot the size of a nickle.  If one is looking for evidence that life on earth was seeded by aliens, one could do worse than to consider this horror, (along with pretty much anything that finds its way into your camper van in Australia).

It's a protected species here in New Jersey, not for its own intrinsic value, but because some other endangered species feeds on its eggs. Now that's a second class citizen if ever there was one.

And yet, these repulsive creatures are gentle, giving things.  They don't sting or bite.  They exist mainly as a food source for other animals.  Their blood produces an agent that is used to ensure that bacteria hasn't contaminated intravenous drugs during production.  Without it, turtles and birds would go hungry on their migratory journeys, and pharmaceuticals would kill people.

So it seems that you really can't judge a book by its cover, or the value of a creature by its appearance.  Consider that the next time you encounter something repulsive.

Moments

We have a collection of watches that, over the years, have stopped working. Some were inexpensive and a few weren’t, but they all stopped for the same reason: their batteries ran out. Power failure will get us all in the end.  I brought them to a watch repair shop up on the Strand that seems to have been there since the days of George V; now they’re all alive and ticking.

Their sudden transplantation from just before whatever moment they almost saw, straight into July 31 2019, 3:45 pm, made me think of this blog and the last moment I touched it, back in 2013.

Some of the words that were transplanted across that gap seem strange to me.  They're someone else’s stories, written in someone else’s words.  I honestly don’t remember who it was that showed me their third nipple, nor when, nor where.  But others seemed just as familiar to me today as they did in those moments when I wrote them.

So that got me wondering: if we could preserve a moment - a child’s birth, a first kiss, any moment of pure joy whatever its origin - would we recognise it when we looked back on it in later years? Would it feel just as it did when we first experienced it, or would it seem unfamiliar, like someone else's memory?

I went for a curry with my friend Richard tonight, to a restaurant near Canary Wharf where we used to work. I realized that I’ve been visiting the Tale of India since my first trip to London in 1999. It’s changed some over the years - a bit of new paint, an updated menu about 8 years ago - but some of the same people have been there all along. They always remember me and greet me as a regular, even though I haven’t worked in the Wharf since before my last post here, and although I now only visit maybe once or twice a year.  Every time I go, though, it’s like I never left. I'm part of its story, and it's part of mine.

If we could preserve a moment forever, leave it untouched and ready to be examined on demand, should we?  Wouldn't that distance it from us, make it strange and unrecognizable?  And would we preserve only the good ones?  What about the awful ones - don't they bear revisiting and examination too, as a catalyst for growth?  Maybe our moments - whether of sublime joy or of abject despair or anything in between - shouldn’t be preserved at all.  Maybe we should carry them around with us instead, not as baggage, but as an integral part of ourselves; each one an atom that, when taken together, make us who we are.  

Maybe it’s from all those joyful, painful moments that we’re really constructed, and maybe it's only by consciously embracing them, by integrating them rather than keeping them as separate things, that we can experience them continuously.