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.