Some stories write themselves. Others require more time, reflection, numerous rewrites and painstaking edits.
The hardest are the ones in which the ending comes before the story is over, especially when the ending comes unexpectedly.
I’ve been trying to write this one for two weeks. I haven’t been able to write anything else during that time, because the world has lost a warm, funny and loving man, Carl Luning. And at Glover Gardens, we have lost a close friend. He was known in these pages as Carl the Roaster. His beautiful obituary is here.
Carl was born with a structurally anomalous heart and endured surgeries to repair it throughout his life. His actual ticker never matched the size and strength of his emotional heart, his soul heart.
That one was huge.
He adored his wife, Rose. He was enormously proud of AnaLisa, the strong, loving and fearless daughter they raised, and the grandchildren they were blessed with. He loved hard, with all his heart, the rest of his family, friends and colleagues. He made room for people.
Boyish, impish and charming, Carl was a born storyteller. He was also what I think of as a “plug and play” party guest. You could put him next to just about anyone and, within a few minutes, he would have found something interesting to talk about with them. And not just polite party chatter. Carl was genuinely interested in people. He remembered their names, their kids, their grandkids, their stories.
Last year, when The Grill-Meister and I traveled with Carl and Rose to Mendocino, they took us to two wineries they had loved on previous trips. Carl knew the owners and managers by name and remembered details about their families and things they had talked about years earlier. They remembered him, too.
Of course they did.
That was Carl.
The Pictures Tell a Story
Looking through the pictures I’ve gathered for this post, I’m struck by how long Carl and Rose have been woven into our lives. More than 15 years.
There’s a picture from the night our oldest son (my bonus son) and their daughter graduated from high school. We didn’t plan anything; we just happened to land at the same restaurant before the ceremony and were delighted to see each other.
There are pictures from parties at Glover Gardens taken by my Dad, who was an amazing amateur photographer. One of my favorites is Carl outside under the fairy lights. In another, he’s behind the bar at Thanksgiving mixing drinks, concentrating and serious. There’s a beautiful picture where Carl is in sharp focus, smiling, while Rose is behind him, slightly out of focus and looking like a fashion model.
Dad was just taking pictures of our friends at a party. I had no idea how precious those pictures would become.
We celebrated the big family milestones together, too, including our children’s weddings. At AnaLisa’s wedding, one of the pictures catches Carl and The Grill-Meister looking like the best of buddies, another shows all four of us together, and a candid captures Carl and Rose standing side by side during the reception, watching the festivities. As a lovely little bonus, AnaLisa’s wedding day was also our seventh wedding anniversary.
Carl and Rose were also the kind of friends who showed up when you needed them. In 2016, during a long and frightening hospitalization for my Dad, they decided The Grill-Meister and I needed some TLC and invited us over for a weeknight dinner. There were extra-long hugs, wine, a wonderful home-cooked meal and a couple of hours of eating, drinking, laughing and talking. At the time, I called it a wonderful, restorative, satisfying evening. It was.
There are pictures from Round Top chili cookoffs and the Cotton Gin Shrimp Boil in Burton. There’s Carl at our house talking to my mother-in-law, Riki. These are the kinds of pictures you take over the years without thinking very much about them: friends at parties, friends at community events, friends simply being part of your life.
There’s Carl with a birthday cake and lit candles at his 50th birthday party in the Texas Hill Country.
I catered that party, which also inspired a little Glover Gardens post called Sangria Still Life. Food, wine, friends, a celebration — very Carl.
There are a LOT of pictures of Carl eating, drinking, laughing, talking and generally having a really good time. That’s appropriate. Carl knew how to enjoy life. He savored his life.
Carl the Roaster (and Cook)
I don’t want to make it sound like Carl walked on water.
He didn’t.
He danced on coffee.
Let me explain. When The Grill-Meister and I first heard him talk about his longtime dream of owning a coffee shop, his eyes shone. He could wax poetic about coffee beans, roasting and what coffee ought to taste like.
Coffee was a PASSION.
And then he made the dream happen. Neon Moon Coffee opened in Burton, Texas, and Carl the Roaster came into his own.
At Neon Moon, his love for the java juice was evident. He exuded Carl-exuberance, looking like a barista and roaster model in his jeans, black T-shirt and hipster specs.
Of course Neon Moon found its way here onto these pages.
Carl’s enthusiasm in the kitchen wasn’t limited to coffee. He could cook. Really cook. He could grill and smoke meat beautifully, and he was a very good baker. One Thanksgiving he brought a fabulous homemade pie to our house, and during COVID he tortured us by sending pictures of other baking triumphs.
He loved my Zippy spice mixes and used to send texts and pictures of things he had made with them.
At one point he wanted to sell the spices at Neon Moon Coffee, but I wasn’t set up with whatever permit I would have needed to do that, so it never happened.
During COVID, Carl posted photos of these gorgeous charcuterie spreads he made for himself and Rose. I wrote about them here because they made me long for the time when we could all gather around a table again.
I ended that post with an invitation to Carl: “You can pick the wine.” I’m so grateful that we did, in fact, get to gather again once COVID restrictions were lifted. Many times.
Wine for No Reason
Carl was pretty serious about wine, too.
The Grill-Meister started a group years ago called Wine for No Reason, and Carl and Rose were inaugural members. The concept was simple: you don’t need a reason to open a good bottle of wine with people you like.
We took that philosophy seriously. Our Wine for No Reason gatherings took place all over Houston and the surrounding area, and we traveled together to New Orleans and Temecula, CA.
Pictures of us traveling together include one of my favorites of the four of us during a 2016 trip to Fredericksburg on Valentine’s Day weekend. It was a perfect trip, from start to finish, and I think we visited more wineries than I can count on one hand.
In Temecula, Carl, Rose and I even went up in a hot-air balloon together. I treasure these pictures!
Mendocino Memories
Last September, Carl and Rose invited us to join them in Mendocino. The trip began on my birthday, September 10, and we had a glorious few days. I wrote part of that story last fall in White Picket Fences and Wild Ravens: A Birthday in Mendocino.
There were wineries and restaurants and gorgeous scenery, but some of my favorite memories are from the Airbnb, sitting outside in the cool California seaside air beside a roaring fire. We drank wine and told stories. We talked about our children and grandchildren, Wine for No Reason and old adventures.
We had one of those tabletop games with question prompts designed to get people talking, and boy, did it work. We talked about the past and the future, our relationships and what we still wanted to do. We even talked about what we meant to each other.
What a gift that conversation is now.
I meant to write the rest of the Mendocino travelogue, to highlight the wineries and what a fab time we had at them. But I was busy. Really, really busy. Work, and then retirement, and travel, and grandchildren, and just everyday life. I thought there was plenty of time.
There wasn’t.
Carl’s life ended before all the stories were told.
That is the sentence I’ve been trying not to write.
More Stories
The Grill-Meister and I were blessed to have one last dinner with Carl and Rose.
It was their first dinner out after a frightening summer of medical problems, and we had a fabulous time. We ate, talked and laughed. We heard the story of everything that had happened and talked about our kids and grandkids, my retirement, The Grill-Meister’s new job and things we hoped to do together.
It was just dinner.
But it’s no longer “just dinner”. Now it’s a treasure. I wish we had taken a picture. But the picture in my mind is from our table nestled in the front window of the restaurant: Carl getting out of the Uber first, smiling and extending his arm to Rose, and then the two of them walking slowly to the front door, hand in hand, laughing.
That’s all I’m going to say here about Carl’s last day, because his death isn’t the story.
The pictures I’ve posted tell part of Carl’s story, the part we were privileged to share, going back to 2011 when we became friends. Carl enjoyed the heck out of his life, and that’s what I see over and over: joy, connection, food, wine, music, friends, family, stories.
This is only our Carl story, of course. So many of you — family members, friends and colleagues — have your own pictures, memories and Carl stories to tell. If you knew and loved Carl, I’d be honored if you added one of yours in the comments below. Funny, sweet, serious, silly, profound, everyday happenings: they’re all part of the story of who Carl was.
There should have been more time. More trips, more dinners, more fabulous things coming off the smoker, more wine, more coffee, more silly jokes. More grandchildren sitting on those long legs and learning things from their grandfather.
There should have been more stories.
But I keep coming back to Mendocino, four friends sitting outside by the fire in the cool California evening, talking about where we’d been, where we were going and what we meant to each other.
We didn’t know we were making a memory we would need so soon, would hold onto so hard. Thank God we made it.
Godspeed, Carl the Roaster.
You mattered. You were loved. And you will be remembered every time the stories start flowing around the table.
This remembrance is for everyone who loved Carl and is missing him now. These are the stories I can tell because they are the ones I was lucky enough to share with him. There are so many more. I hope to hear yours.
©️ Glover Gardens, 2026
