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It’s a Thanksgiving dinner tradition in most families, where each person around the table shares something that they’re thankful for. Toward the top of just about everyone’s list are “family and friends.” We had a house rule where thankfulness for family and friends was taken as a given and we had to come up with something else.
But this Thanksgiving I’m going to go with that one anyway and say that I am thankful for the lives of a cousin and a friend both recently lost.
Kiel was my only older male cousin. His family moved around a lot and my family lived a couple states away, so we only saw each other once or twice a year. Usually during the summer at a cottage our grandparents had on a river near Lake Michigan. And always at Thanksgiving.
The time at the cottage was the most fun. We played frisbee and wiffleball. He was a pretty good magician and did a show for the family one year. To me, he was a trailblazer and larger than life. He was athletic. He worked on cars. (One Thanksgiving he told the story about swapping out the engine of an old car. He got pulled over and was ordered to put the keys on the dashboard. He didn’t need to turn off the ignition to do that. He just put the keys on the dashboard and the car kept running. The policeman told him again, and he showed him the keys. That led to the two of them talking cars for a while and he got let off with a warning.) One summer he piloted the Paddle Princess up and down the river by the cottage. He collected baseball cards first. He started driving first. He went off to college first. His was the model for all of my expectations of college. And now, he goes ahead in this way as well.
The Paddle Princess on the Platte River.
It seems appropriate, at least for me, that his obituary photo shows him with a canoe.
My favorite story about my cousin recounts the time that our grandmother asked him to teach me how to paddle a canoe. Dutifully, Kiel waded in the river (it was only three feet deep), pulling me in the canoe behind him up to his parents’ cottage a few hundred yards upstream. Then, he let me go and told me to get back home. I guess I made it back OK. I don’t remember any drama or trauma.
A few years later, it was my turn with my younger brother, Greg. We pushed out, and he called to me asking what he should do as he floated backwards toward the M-22 bridge. I told him to paddle and get back home, but the current was too strong and he ran aground on the bridge pier. My dad ended up having to come out in the motorboat and tow him back to the cottage. It was quite a spectacle.
The standard punishment while at the cottage was to sit at the end of the dock for some period of time, depending upon the seriousness of the infraction. I ended up being sentenced to an hour. I didn’t understand why I was in trouble, though. After all, that was how I was taught how to paddle a canoe. It was then, and only then, that I was told that Kiel had also gotten trouble for setting me adrift, and that he had to sit on the end of the dock for an hour. That would have been a really useful thing for me to have known. (Eventually Greg and I went back out, I gave him a more useful lesson, and we took the canoes out together frequently after that.)
Life took my cousin and me in different directions, and I only saw him very, very occasionally. I regret that. But I will always cherish the memories of times when our only concerns were finding a quarter for bubblegum ice cream at Miller’s, which game to play in the woods, and how many more minutes it would be before we could get back into the water after lunch.
Kiel died suddenly the morning of June 20, 2025.
His name was Kevin Braunsdorf, but nobody who knew him called him that. He always went by his initials, KSB. And he had more raw mental horsepower than just about anybody I’ve ever known. If something needed fixed or figured out, he was the one to call. He even fixed the problems you didn’t know you were going to have.
He installed electrical outlets with the ground holes pointing up because that’s the way they were designed to avoid accidental short circuits (although I have never known of anyone that dropped a piece of metal across the two prongs of a plug that was sticking partway out and zapped something).
He wrote comparison statements in C with the constant on the left side so that the variable didn’t get accidentally assigned if you forgot to use a second equal sign.
He was in the Operations area of FedEx, and I was in Analytics, so our paths rarely crossed. That was until the senior technical folks were consolidated under a single Vice President. One of our first projects together was an analysis of the sources of IT complexity. He had developed a model that related IT complexity to thermodynamics. We fleshed out the concept relative to the FedEx application estate, and discovered some interesting stuff along the way.
I would try to stop by his house whenever I was in Colorado Springs. He was very proud of his home electrical innovations. He had interesting ideas about solar power. And not surprisingly, his home network was very well secured. And we spent hours one evening laughing until we couldn’t breathe reading auto-correct fails to each other. He had a tremendous sense of humor, and a unique laugh I can still hear in my mind’s ear.
His eyesight was always bad. He used very large monitors long before we all used very large monitors. Eventually his vision was reduced to vague shapes. It wasn’t a surprise when he told me that he had a model of the building where he worked in his head, and that while he walked with a cane, he didn’t really always need it.
I wasn’t able to contact him during Covid or afterward. I later found out that his health had declined. I was no longer with FedEx, and was no longer on the mailing lists that received those types of company announcements. I learned that he had died about a year after it happened.
It’s trite, I know, but we all need to be reminded sometimes to cherish those we have with us when they are with us. This Thanksgiving, like all the rest but perhaps more so this year, I am thankful for family and friends, no matter where they are.
