One year.
I’m having trouble figuring out how to address this day here. It feels like it’s both a huge deal, because it’s the Anniversary, and that it’s completely unimportant, because it’s just another day without Ian.
One year ago right now, 12:12pm cst, I was getting ready to leave work to go to his house, because Ian was such a creature of habit that if he’d decided to come in for a half day after his lunch, it would likely have been 12:12 when he arrived.
I keep sitting here thinking of things I wish I’d done differently… There are so many. But if wishes were fishes, we’d all have a fry… That Ian wouldn’t eat.
I’m wondering if those who read this can join in on this post. If you knew Ian, could you share some memory? Anything, really, I just know it makes me feel better when I hear other people talking about him too.
I miss him so much, it’s nice to hear about him, maybe things that I don’t think of as often, or didn’t know.
I’ll start. I remember a day when I told him about a singing group I’d heard, who had an incredibly deep bass singer. I made him listen to them, and told him how attractive I found that super deep bass. Later that night, we were watching a movie and cuddling on his couch. I was lying with my head on his chest, and he started humming, really low. I told him to be careful, that he’d start rivaling that bass, and he laughed and kept doing it.
He loved to please people.
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I remember dunking all the nieces and nephews in Fran ‘s pool. Ian was scrappy and tough to dunk.
My memories of Ian were mostly of when he was young. What I remember is that he was so sensitive. He had such a sense of empathy for others, such a kind person. The other thing that comes immediately to mind is much less deep-but it’s how much fun we had in Grandpa’s pool. We’d laugh till our sides hurt. Good times……
I remember the first time I met this fella. Me & my ex-wife wanted to play in a Rock Band competition and needed a bassist and a singer. We put out an ad in the Madison LiveJournal community and we got takers. We show up to the studio – I’m wearing a shiny red shirt with a rainbow bandanna around my head, my mustache shaved into a Fu Manchu. In he comes with his equipment – jeans so ripped up the front you can see his legs and his boxer shorts, cut off jean jacket, enormous jug of (maybe?) fake hootch, two toned hair. I knew immediately that we had found the right person. And things just clicked from there, and from that point forward for the next five years or so, he was a huge part of my life.
sometime in 2011 or early 2012, i did an all Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Mitch Ryder (and few similar voices) playlist, totally by chance, not knowing that y’alld be playing that day, and every single question/song he’d come up and try to guess which i would play next… and was about 90% on target. he totally understood how my musical brain works, and then he started to use that knowledge to guess how that made my trivia brain work (since i tend to do “theme runs” of questions…) and thus correctly guessed both the next question and the next answer based on correctly guessing the next song (which WASN’T a musical hint i should add) and then just silently handing me the answer to the NEXT question along with the current. and no, it wasn’t the free answer from the website, it was something pop-culturish and relevant at the time that i can’t remember right now… i was and remain thoroughly impressed
My freshman year in college (yeesh, almost 17 years ago), he and Bullseye (Rob), along with Maddie, were trying to get me to come out to some event with them on a Friday night. It was cold and raining, I had a horrid migraine, and I was the only one of them that wasn’t legal yet.
Ian was *excellent* at countering each and every bit of logic I had about why I should stay in and nurse my migraine and not go out, finally landing upon how the pancakes and syrup at the OHOP (not the chain, but Madison’s locally-owned Original House of Pancakes) could cure the worst hangovers known to humanity, so therefore, of COURSE they’d be similarly effective against a migraine, right?!
So while I had to stay in (because being upright was out of the question,) over the course of the rest of the night, I got a play-by-play about just how delicious his 3am pancake dinner-breakfast was, how wonderful they felt in his tummy, and how the secret was in how you passed on the bacon, and got sausage *patties* instead of links.
I called shenanigans on the sausage, and he later admitted that it was so he could have the bacon all to himself. But only if I didn’t need it to help me feel better. =)
It hurts just thinking about a world without Ian. I was the person that backed out of the rock band contest (due to an extreme case of pregnancy) that made it so James & KB sought out additions to their rock band lineup and that’s how they met Ian. He was funny and fun and always up for a good time and a super sensitive and good person who had a lot of sad things going on in his head. I miss him.
I never met anyone as dedicated to the deliciousness that is bacon as Ian. I admire him for that. I also remember how he used to twirl the ends of his mustache – usually when pondering a witty or ironic retort to something.
So many memories of Ina-boy from chubby little guy right up to bourbon (?) bbq’d peaches for a grownup dessert. One – I was visiting in Madison and Ian showed up loaded down with IPAs. He then proceeded to choke one down, insisting that he really liked it. Just wanting me to feel at home. He was like that right from the start.
And he grew to love them.
I’ve been chewing on which anecdote to post for a while, but this one seems to be the most “him”:
Ian was my “maid of honor” in my first wedding. He was, so far as I know, absolutely tickled by this gender bending event, and somewhat disappointed not to be wearing tulle.
Although he was a mutual friend of my ex and myself from before we knew each other, when we divorced, Ian and I lost touch, as often happens. We continued to interact on LiveJournal and elsewhere, but were no longer close.
(I’m getting to the story, I swear). A few years later, I was sent to a training class in Madison by my new job, and Ian leaped at the opportunity to get together, so we and Maddie met for a drink.
It had been years since I’d seen him but it was like no time at all had passed. He had an amazing way of doing that, making you feel like you were the most important person in the room, that spending time with you was what he wanted to be doing more than anything else.
That was the last time I saw him – probably 8 years ago now. And yet I know, if he were still here, I could send him an email right now, and he’d come drive 2 hours to hang out at midnight on a Wednesday. Ian, I hope wherever you are, you know how loved you are.