RYNO HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

Hello friends of Ryan,

I want to thank you all for coming to Ryan’s memorial celebration on Saturday, April 22nd. I’m sure everyone there had a good time telling tales of Ryno. Had I not been the constant procrastinator, I may have written a speech that went something like this:

It’s best to start things at the beginning. Ryan and I are both from Cleveland, OH. However, we did not meet until 1996, when mutual friends Steve Udycz and Brian Lang came to visit me in Milwaukee the summer before my junior year at Marquette. Steve said that he also wanted to catch up with an old high school friend named Ryan. So we went over to Ryan’s apartment and had a couple of beers. I didn’t see Ryan again until later that summer at a Phish concert at Alpine Valley. Out of a kaleidoscopic sea of Volkswagen Microbuses and bong smoke, Ryan emerged at our tailgate party dazed, confused and in definite need of some adult refreshment. I gave him a couple beers, we chatted awhile and, as they say, the rest is history. All in all, Ryan was many things to me over the 10 years that I knew him: a classmate in several history classes, co-worker at Legal Action, roommate for six years, teammate on the Mutts softball team, drinking buddy and probably the closest thing to a brother that I’ll ever have.

Much has been said about Ryan’s generosity. He was an extremely generous person, almost (but not quite) to a fault. He would loan me money and give me months to pay him back, he bought his friends many a round of shots on a secretary’s salary, and he would shrug off killer hangovers to help anyone move some furniture (despite having a slipped disc in his back.) It has been said that you can judge a person by how he treats those who serve him/her. Ryan was, of course, an over-tipper who always treated those under him with respect. While going through old video of Ryan in preparation for the Memorial, I watched Ryan tip a cabbie $8 for driving us four blocks on a Wolski’s St. Patty’s Day Pub Crawl. “The King serves his men well.”

Then, of course, there was The Playhouse. Many of you were lucky enough to get tickets to this three and a half year long carnival of shenanigans. I, however, had a back stage pass. Many a good time was had and Ryan was often at top form in his home environment. Of course, the occasional load-bearing wall or garbage-picked couch took the brunt of the excessiveness that characterized this period of Ryan’s life. But hey, that’s what insurance was created for. Ryan was known as an entertaining fellow throughout the entire spectrum of sobriety through total inebriation. His humor was sometimes self-depreciating, and never PG rated. Whether he was stone cold sober or “seeing angels” (that’s how he referred to a black-out) he could put a smile on anyone’s face. The world is definitely a less amusing place without him.

His death was untimely, but perhaps it can be said that he spread generosity, happiness and joy to so many people, that he forgot to leave some for himself. His act can be viewed as extremely selfish, but for a man as generous as he was, he should be forgiven for thinking only of himself this one time.

--Brian