A free posting on Medium

Evans’ Rag

Vol 3 Issue 43

To my surprise, a former schoolmate of Ryan’s replied to the offer of Dogs and Disturbance. She’d landed on the website somehow and got the connection to Ryan. There’s only one poem directly about Ryan in the book—Coming Back to Stoneybrae, though the entire book was shadowed by his memory while I wrote it.

I’d just like to say publicly how much it means to get her email. The night of Ryan’s chapel service held at Virginia Tech, I was touched by the friends of his I’d never met. She and I may have even spoken. As but a young boy, Ryan managed to so easily touch hearts. I can’t say if he ever understood people loved him as much as I saw that evening.

Ryan’s friends have grown into adults this many years later, and I hope life has treated them gently. It’s a sentiment I’ve included in the Medium piece this week about another young person struggling to find themselves.

Ryan’s cousin, the young girl with him in last week’s photo, is now raising a family. Ryan would have turned thirty-seven this year.