I cant remember his exact explanation of his tattoo, but that tattoo was the most unique and personal one I've ever seen!
For those who havent seen it- it's the indian shooting a star that was on the wrapper of tootsie roll pops a while back. He described the feeling of delight he got just seeing that on a lollipop- such a simple thing giving him so much joy. He said he hoped to always see life that way- with the little things giving such joy- and he never wanted to forget that feeling.
He's amazing. I just cant stop thinking about him. Prayers and Love to all.

Flip flops and playing kickball in bare feet...and still kicking it farther than anyone else on the team.

I just remembered a trip Wyatt and I made to IHOP the summer before last for all-you-can-eat fried shrimp. We GORGED ourselves.

When I first got to know Wyatt, shortly after he moved to DC and joined Forum One I played a joke on him to make him think that I was a friend of the vendor at Kings Dominion from whom he had mischievously pilfered a bag of cotton candy and who then chased Wyatt all around the park.

It took some fairly expert tactics to overcome Wyatt's skepticism, but I didn't back down and maintained an air of earnest indignation so that eventually he became less skeptical. After getting my roommate in on the act at my birthday party he seemed genuinely contrite and apologetic. It was hard work pulling it off, but he appreciated the humor of it and completely rolled with all our teasing.

When I eventually took a trip to Kings Dominion myself that summer I made sure to buy a big tub of cotton candy for Wyatt. He was so delighted when I dropped it on his desk his whole face lit up: you would think I had just dropped a chest full off treasure before him. He had eaten the whole tub by the end of the day!

After that whenever Wyatt seemed bored or out-of-sorts I would pick up a bag of cotton candy from the 7-11 to cheer him up, and it never failed.

When Wyatt wrote Ginger from the Peace Corps asking her to send him some candy she told me that the postage cost more than the candy, so I suggested we send him cotton candy, joking that we could send a whole bail of the stuff to him for a couple of dollars. Once the thought was in my head I started thinking how I might deliver a bail of cotton candy to Africa, and even began to research it. I could just picture the look of delight and astonishment on his face. Unfortunately, I was too late.

Now, whenever I see cotton candy I automatically think of Wyatt.

When I came back from my trip back to England I brought back some traditional seaside 'lettered rock' candy from Cleethorpes for my co-workers at Forum One. As far as I know the only one's to try this were Wyatt and Ginger, who managed to consume it all in just over a week :-)

Lettered rock, is like a candy-cane, without the hook, that has the name of the seaside resort running all the way through it, so you can read it all the way down the candy as you eat it. Wyatt was totally fascinated by this and showed an almost academic fascination about how such wonder-of-wonders were made. He demanded to know the secrets of lettered rock candy!

After trying to describe the process as best I could I sent him this link:
[www.bbc.co.uk]

I'm sure that eventually Wyatt would have written the "Definitive Guide to Candy".

I gave Wyatt the tootsie roll pillow. It had been lying around my house for months when Wyatt found it, picked it up, and never let go. On our way out of the house, I told him he could have it - I think it was right afer Wyatt began getting rid of everything he owned, and I was inspired to do the same. We went out that night, and he brought it with us. He held onto it the whole time we were at the bar, and then took it home. You'd have thought I gave him a million dollars, and that very look on his face was priceless.

late one night in february, wyatt and i made a plan - a list of life goals, if you will - and the list is as follows (i still have this list scribbled on a piece of paper):

1.) rid ourselves of unnecessary things

we didnt get far - we didnt even get to #2 - but we thought it was a pretty good start. staying true to our pledge, we had a yard sale of sorts a few months before he left - the weekend after he had his wisdom teeth removed (really we just laid down a blanket on a street corner in mt pleasant) and we set out all of our old junk without prices on it. wyatt was a firm negotiator, but he did let a pair of shoes go for a bag of cherries, which we scarfed down. i was a bit of a pushover, but i did get 2$ for a sombrero in mt pleasant. and here i thought everyone there already had one...

we met a guy named charles who basically spent the entire afternoon with us. we couldnt quite figure him out, but he apparently figured us out pretty well. he kept telling me that wyatt was a good man, and he thought he should be a preacher. and he kept asking me to kiss him. maybe he just figured wyatt out pretty well. anyway, we ended up giving charles about 10$, the rest of the stuff that we couldnt sell (the plan was for him to stay and sell the rest and keep the $), then wyatt and i went to the delray dreamery for some ice cream. he bought a big tub of raspberry/buttermilk sorbet swirl and a sundae or milkshake and broke even on the day. minus the backpack, advil, and digital camera that was stolen.

You know Lauren P., he was SO proud of that pillow! I was at home on the couch when he brought it home for the first time.

He left it out on the porch and "introduced" it to me. I smiled and thought it was so fitting given the story of his tootsie roll wrapper tatoo.

You made his MONTH with that pillow!

one night last january i went back down to DC for a dinner party at the harvard house. After dinner Wyatt, max and I went to the neighborhood bar, the Raven for a few more drinks. Upon entering I spotted this really cute girl and began to chat her up. She invited me to sit at her booth, and i invited the boys along. I thought i was making pretty good progress with ol' girl, lots of smiling, a knee pat here and there. A little later into the night I noticed that wyatt and the girl kept having to pee at the same time. He was totally sneaking off to smooch the girl i was trying to talk to!! I was pissed. I busted his chops about it the rest of the night. From then on we instated a "dibs" rule when meeting new girls. it turned out that the girl was a really bad kisser, and not that fun to talk to, but she got Wyatt into the president's inaugural ball the next week.

Boo, I remember Wyatt telling me about your list. He thought it was a pretty good list with just that one thing on it.

Anyway, I've got another memory, Wyatt actually wrote about this one on my blog. We drove to the Ocean City beach one day and played in the waves and ordered a large pepperoni pizza and ate it in the sand on top of a boogie board.

Last summer Wyatt and I went to a swimming pool in Arlington together (I had taken a day off work and he had already quit). It was Allison's birthday so we called her together and sang "Happy Birthday" into her voicemail from the pool. I spent most of the afternoon suntanning and Wyatt spent most of the afternoon splash bombing the lifeguard in the diving pool.

Also last summer, after he quit his job but before he went back to South Dakota, Wyatt biked into the city to hang out with me after work one day. It was UNGODLY hot. We walked over to Dupont Circle and as we were about to cross New York Avenue, this Indian woman walked right out into traffic. I screamed my head off, just a blood-curdling shriek, with no words, to get her to stop. She turned and saw this cab about to hit her and jumped back onto the curb. She thanked Wyatt and I up and down, "You saved my life, I'm only in town for a conference, I didn't even think to look!" Other people came up to us to make sure everyone was OK because of the screaming, but all was well! We walked her to her hotel and continued on to the Dupont Circle fountain. We sat down at the edge and people watched. I rolled my jeans up cos it was so hot. Then we went into CVS to get some iced tea and swedish fish. The song "Sundown" by Gordon Lightfoot was playing in the store. We looked around a bit in Kramerbooks and teased the pretentious people under our breath. Then I went home and Wyatt biked over to some friends in Rosslyn to make sushi.

In October of 04, I was having this terrible itch to get something pierced or tattoo'd. I worked in a pretty conservative office, making me rethink getting something pierced, and my family was less than thrilled when I came out with my first tattoo... Wyatt and I discussed it for a while, until one Sunday night in October at about 8:30 p.m, I couldn't take it anymore. We had been listening to music in his room and went down to consult Nancy about the possibility of my nose getting pierced. We pulled out the yellow pages and called until we found a place staying open until 9 that night and then SPED there in the Celebrity. I was feeling like a badass until I caught a glimpse of the 2 guys behind the counter, both wearing so much ink and metal that they were barely visible beneath it all. We made the last minute choice of piercing the right side, and in less than 5 minutes it was over. Wyatt was quick to assure me over...and over... and over again when I would be panicking about my office firing me that "Relax! The nose piercing is cute! Trust me...I've seen bad ones". Funny that I was trusting someone who frequently wore flip flops and the same clothes to work two days in a row, but as usual, I believed him.

i distinctly remember wyatt and boo's "yard sale of sorts." it was about 342 degrees Fahrenheit and the slab of concrete that wyatt had set up shop on was not in the shade. he called me that morning as he was hauling things into the city - this was after the death of the celebrity - so he was dragging giant suitcases and bags of crap on the metro. i think he might have even made 2 trips, changing lines, and then walking the 5 blocks from the metro. this kid was vehemently determined to rid himself of unnessesary things. of course, the other side of the coin was that he had an absurd amount of unnessesary things. my housemate joey, who wyatt dubbed "the viper," got a great teal hoody from him that day and i think joey had to convince him to accept money for it.

on a tangent - the first time wyatt met joey he immediately decided he needed a nickname and that "the viper" (with the obligatory two-fingered fang-like hand motion - you gotta do it every time) was it. as per usual, wyatt had made an instant friend.

One of the times I went with Wyatt to wing night at Hard Times, this old man drew caricatures of each of us on napkins. I had on my glasses, so mine was pretty bad, but Wyatt's was just awful, he looked like a 60 year old man! He was like, "Oh my God, Ginger, does my hair really look that receding?" Wyatt and that hair...

Wyatt and Kyla both came with me to buy my very first cell phone at the Pentagon City Mall Radio Shack. He had been pestering me for quite some time to get one. I got Verizon like he had so we could talk for free. That's all, I just remember them being with me every time I go by there.

i’m realizing now that i actually had the opportunity to hang out with wyatt in a number of different places. in addition to dc, i also spent some significant time with him in amsterdam, dublin, philly, and nyc. and it never seemed to matter what city we were in, wyatt had an uncanny knack for finding the weird, seedy, and fascinating bits of a city that weren’t on the map. i sometimes felt like the nagging mother-figure nudging him away from the window at the voodoo/magic store or whatever else it was he had discovered. now i think i probably would have been better off just following him into these places and watching the show – b/c it didn’t matter whether he was on a street corner in brooklyn or a local bar in amsterdam, it was always a show and it was always worth watching wyatt interact with strangers...

so this was on my mind quite a bit recently b/c i just got back from visiting my sister who is studying abroad in rome. i had an amazing time hanging with her, but i also got to meet some great italian folks. one of them let me borrow one of his bikes for the entire time i was there and i spent some time out at the abandoned chemical factory that they squatted and turned into a community center and bike repair shop.

and the whole time i was there i was thinking that these were the things wyatt would have found and this is the way he would have done rome. i just wish he could have been there. he was about the best travel companion you could ask for and i miss watching who he was in the world.

On one of the last nights I saw Wyatt we walked up to the playground by his old house in Virginia and swung on the swings for a while, just messing around and talking... The night was just calming, easy. I miss hanging out with him like that, doing nothing. I miss taking walks with him through his old neighborhood.

I was just looking through old emails and found one from Wyatt. He was doing a walk to raise money for the luekemia and lymphoma society in honor of his friend from college who had the disease. Here's the email in its entirety, and the link toward the bottom to his personal fundraising page still works if you want to see it:

All -

I'm going to bein the Light the Night Walk tomorrow night in Washington, DC. Here's a little background info from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's site for the walk:

"The Light The Night® Walk is The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's nationwide evening walk to raise awareness of blood cancers and funds for cures.

Participants carry illuminated balloons to celebrate and commemorate lives touched by cancer. Funds raised support the Society's mission: cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families."

My door-to-door earlier this week was less successful than I had hoped, so I've been reduced to shamelessly soliciting everyone I know for money for a good cause. Hope you don't mind. As a little background a friend of mine came down with non-Hodgkins lymphoma at age 22 and it shook me into reality and put a face on these diseases. I'm happy to say that he's back in good health now (it's gone into full remission), but it put a financial strain on him and his family. Events like this one in DC are making a difference to help families like his, and I'm proud to be a participant. Please respond or go to my donation page (http://www.active.com/donations/fundraise_public.cfm?key=unite) if you're interested in helping out. I could possibly even be coaxed into dancing, singing, or shaming myself in some other manner in the name of fundraising. Every little bit helps!

Specifics on donation:

I set up a page for online donation (though I can also pick up cash and check donations - just email me and let me know). The address is [www.active.com]. I unfortunately came onto the scene a little late in the game, but hope that my $1,000 goal isn't unrealistic.

Please donate online by clicking on my web site, and forward this on to anyone you think would be willing to help. Thanks for anything you can give as I scramble to do as much as I can in these final hours.

Thanks in advance,

Wyatt