To the editor:

My first meeting with Mac Kennedy was 34 years ago. He was visiting Gail Cool with his young son who was due to play with Gail Cool’s son. Gail was selling us a lot with a permit signed and delivered.

Mac and Merrill and I were immediate friends. It must have been his trustworthiness for in 10 years he was building our house on Eagle Harbor.

Nothing brings out intimacy more than the relationship between owner and contractor. We discovered soon that Mac was more than the eye beheld.  He was a fine contractor, but he also was a fine cook, a fine reader, a fine father and a fine husband.

Lives intermingle on Bainbridge so we intermingled. We met his wife, Susan Levy, and knew immediately she was as trustworthy as Mac.

Our friendships grew, intermingled as we were. Our admiration and love for the couple never faltered.

When I heard of his death, I recalled in a slow moving movie of the many times we had chatted, having stopped over the bananas at the T&C to chat about whatever was current in our lives, his son, how he loved his son, and his career, or what his beloved stepdaughter was up to and, of course what splendid Susan’s next project loomed.

The last time we met, he looked hardy though he had been “through the throughs,” as they say in Alabama. We discussed the books I had loaned him for one of his recoveries, then we discussed the future.

He confessed he had once taught bridge.

Bridge! My addiction!

We never sat across a bridge table, but in my imagination, that encounter will be sometime or somewhere.

That is how trustworthy Mac Kennedy was.

SALLY ROBISON

Bainbridge Island