Keith Middlemas

February 19, 1947 – July 1, 2025

Keith dedicated his life to craft, thought, and beauty. Over the course of his career, he laid more than 4,000 tons of stone by hand, each piece placed with care, precision, and quiet reverence. He believed in making things that would last forever, not for legacy, but for the endurance of the work itself.

Beyond stone, Keith was a gifted storyteller, an unshakable friend, and a lover of conversation in all its forms. He lived deep in the woods, far from the noise, but the life he built spoke volumes. Known for his wit, generosity, and unassuming brilliance, Keith could speak with anyone, and did, leaving no one a stranger.

Stone was his professional medium, but words were his quiet passion. The Book of Small Humor was the name he gave to a collection of autobiographical stories he carried with him throughout his life. Some he wrote in full, many he simply lived. But all of them bore his signature: dry wit, deep thought, and an unshakable reverence for what was true and what was right.

Below you'll find one of those stories, taken from that collection. If you'd like to read more, or add to its pages, please join us at the Cider Gallery in Lawrence, Kansas, on Saturday, September 13, at 3 p.m. for Keith's celebration of life, aptly titled The Book of Small Humor. There we will honor his life, in story, in memory, and in love.

‘New Mexico, 1971:

A Night in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains

I went to an outdoor bonfire with story-telling, recently, at such gatherings, I usually remain mum. To my surprise, I told of camping in the New Mexico mountains with my close pal, Paul, and finding a cave which we inhabited until dawn.

He was afraid of tight places, so sat up all night, tending a fire, smoking cigarettes, perched at the cave's high opening, pine silhouettes beyond, trout stream far below.

I crouched further into the darkness, locating up the left wall, a wee tunnel into which I crawled, dragging my unfurled sleeping bag behind me. Finally, the smooth bore became so tight I resigned myself to sleeping right there, absolute darkness all about. The ceiling was so close I had to compress my shoulders to turn over.

As I fell toward slumber, I kept sensing the tunnel air was buffeting around me, although there was no manmade mechanism to cause such a phenomenon. With a start, it came to me that bats were fluttering just past my face, deeper into some broader room, beyond. Had I set a grapefruit on my forehead, it might've been pinned to the vault. I dwelt upon this for a time, said ‘How about that!!’, and went to sleep.

I had built a three room cabin in a more southerly chain of dry mountains, and Paul was determined to purchase the place since I was returning to Kansas University for a seventeen hour, Intensive Spanish course.

Shortly after our cave campout, he discovered he could not raise the money. He, my great friend, was too embarrassed to admit his situation, so he suddenly, completely vanished. The cabin was easy to sell, but I lost that familiar haunt and one of my best friends within the passage of a few days.

As I related the tail end of my story to the couples surrounding our double set of fires, I admitted aloud, ‘And I never saw him again….’ Even as I thought upon him, the simple joy of our young friendship and how he had vanished forever, my voice cracked, and I had to struggle to keep that cloud of sadness from exposing me as an unmanly sap.

There is an emotional frailty in me, triggered by sentimental affection or lost kinship, which precludes me from holding forth, aloud. I'm given to falling into sudden doldrums when someone's last portrait springs into the continuous and vivid movie, ever running just behind my eyes.

Thus, I must adhere to the written word, as I do now, banging away at the truth from behind closed doors, defended from the view of others. ‘Stick with the written word, Keith. Send dry pages out so only you know you might have been born, stronger.’

My friend, Paul Nesbitt of Albuquerque: 'We are old men now. Where are you?'’