For Ken Venhuizen (2)

For Ken Venhuizen, 1938-2024

(continued from yesterday)

How did they manage so many friends? I mean, if they spent ten years in Sioux Center, I’d be surprised. You might think the price of coming and going as regularly as they did would generate rootlessness, no place allowing time enough for relationships to mature.

Not so. Every person in this sanctuary knows that wasn’t true of Ken or Betty.

What’s worse, Ken was wild as a colt even when it was time time to be put out to pasture. He must have tired some time, but not in my presence. His fuse was ever lit, his outsize energy was a constant rumble. Even late at night he sat at our table with his juice cooking. One can only wonder what the Creator of Heaven and Earth does, as we speak, to keep him occupied.

Way back when, a young chiropractor came to town, a man named Hagen, a mover and a shaker who built a pretentious place on a hidden lane just off a busy Sioux Center street. Locals furrowed an eyebrow, but Ken heard the guy knew how to swat a tennis ball, and became, thereby, one of the best friends Dr. Hagen had in town.

Now me? Once upon a time he got me on a tennis court. I thought of myself as a fair-to-middlin’ athlete back then. Besides, tennis didn’t look so formidable. Get yourself a big paddle and swing away. We played, sort of. When we quit that afternoon, why he never pulled out a racquet again was embarrassingly obvious.

Our David must have been in first or second grade when Ken and I took our kids to Oak Grove, where, in a path, a rock was that spring rumbling slowly up toward the surface. Quite carefully, Ken worked the dirt from around the stone—lots of scratchy digging.

I’m happy to say that the Siouxland quartzite is still with us. It made it through the flood, so it’s not as shiny as it was once, but not as muddy either. It’s the stone that Ken dug up from the dust of a path through the prairie and just for little David.

These are just a few of our memories of your dad, Kim and Jim and Kam. I hope we didn’t take him away from you too often. That he loved you doesn’t need to be said, really. But what’s amazing to me is how many of the rest of us he loved too. It’s so good to be here today and be together, because your parents’ capacious hearts should be remembered.

“My friends are my estate,” Emily Dickenson once wrote, and we feel that. “My friends are my estate.”

We are where Ken and Betty lived, and for that we’re all very thankful.