Saying Goodbye and Remembering

jlheuer

March 8

A very dear,dear friend passed away yesterday. He was part of a deep and lasting friendship we have had with his wife and another couple for maybe 40 years. That friendship began with an eating group we formed, affectionately called the Foodies. I have posted before about the group so I won't repeat that here but at the end will give you a few links to some previous posts. We started with food around our own tables and Kenn, being a hunter, liked to serve us venison if he had been lucky that year. He also knew his way around the kitchen so I know that he and Pam shared in the preparation of their dinners, mostly. Right, Pam?

Dinners were lively, with discussions ranging from religion to hunting, from nature to politics,(a topic Kenn loved to talk about.) We discussed books, philosophy, art (So ,Curt, you're an artist, explain ...) and food. We would go on for hours. I miss this good talk. There was also a lot of laughter, a lot of eating and a lot of good wine.

As the years went by we added travel to our dining. It could just be a good restaurant here in Wisconsin. Or maybe in Bellingham, WA, where Kenn & Pam moved. Or on Orcas Island, or Whidbey Island or Lummi Island or at Friday Harbor on San Jose Island, when we gathered in Washington State.

Or in Berlin. Kenn and Curt were great for trying almost anything. Curt was a good one for finding something unusual on the menu and Kenn, inevitably would go along with him. I remember him frequently asking Curt what he was going to order. In Berlin, in an outdoor Vietnamese eatery, the two of them decided to order duck tongues and chicken feet. The rest of us just looked on.

We will remember and look back fondly at all those good times to with Kenn. His crazy sense of humor, how he loved people. By the time we all left a restaurant, he would have chatted up the waitress, the bartender and sometimes the cook. He knew their life story by the end of the evening. He was a hugger too. He loved the outdoors and though we teased him about spending a weekend in the woods "killing things", he was a responsible hunter and respectful of nature. And always on the lookout for the next adventure.