After Kennell died, Dan and I filled in as Resident Fellows for the remainder of the 2005–6 school year while the university searched for a permanent replacement for him. We joined the effort to pack up his belongings. The colleague in charge of this effort invited me to take anything that was meaningful to me. I went searching for the cookie pans.
They were in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, a stack of twelve of which I took four. Also under the sink, in the far back corner, there was a large object wrapped in newspaper. I crouched down, reached in and grabbed it, and stood up again holding it in my hands.
The mysterious package was wrapped in eight or ten sheets of newspaper, water-stained in one small spot but otherwise as crisp as the day it was published. What could it be, I wondered, this treasure wrapped with some care yet forgotten under the kitchen sink? To look further felt like prying. But the only person who would care about that was gone.
I pulled back the paper and let it fall to the floor and stood holding an unremarkable object: a medium-sized metal colander with two metal handles, painted reddish-orange flecked with tiny dots of white. I began to imagine that Kennell must have retired it from use when he updated his kitchen décor. Or maybe it was a gift he’d never liked, never used. He had always been particular that way. I decided to keep it and set it on the counter on top of the cookie pans. Then I bent and gathered the newspaper.
The masthead caught my eye. Then the headline. Then the date. A sound forced its way up and out of me, like the gulp of a drowning person or the gasp from sudden injury, such that Dan in the next room overheard and came around the corner to see if I was all right. He found me sitting on the floor, clutching the September 23, 1985, issue of the Stanford Daily—the issue that welcomed my freshman class to campus. I leaned my head back against the cabinet and felt God or Kennell or some existential purpose for all of this comforting me like a blanket.