Saying Goodbye with a Tear and a Smile
By Dan Driscoll
Contributing Writer

It is rare to become best friends with someone whose every-other opinion is the polar opposite of your own, but then again, Kyle Maginnis was as rare as they come.

I first met Kyle, who died Sunday, March 23, and his twin brother Vytas nearly ten years ago; I encountered the pair six or seven years after that, and then finally once more two years ago. That first time I met the Maginnis twins, when we were all about seven or eight years old, I made the mistake of getting in a dispute with one of them. Though our versions of the story differ-Kyle and Vytas claiming this never happened, I maintaining that it did, and I of course being right-this argument evolved into a bit of a scrap. As I recall, I had managed to pin Kyle or Vytas (in those early years I could never tell the two apart despite their fraternal nature) and was hitting him in the face when, out of nowhere, I felt a blow to my head and suddenly I was being tossed into the side of a soccer goal post. I never figured out with whom I had started that fight, but one thing is certain: it was most certainly the other Maginnis boy who ended it.

Needless to say, I avoided the Maginnis twins for the next several years, but it was inevitable our paths would cross again. I was invited to be a "guest player" for Kyle and Vytas's soccer team at a couple tournaments a year or two before we all started high school. I remember one instance during a game in which a player delivered a series of rather dirty tackles to Vytas's ankles. Although the referee whistled a foul on each of these, Kyle was apparently still not satisfied. So when that player jumped in the air to head the ball, Kyle-with a running start from his sweeper position-delivered a hit that resembled one of those ice hockey checks that sends a guy spiraling through the air. However, Kyle, with his trademark "Kyle's ball!" scream, somehow managed to get a piece of his head on the leather sphere as well and the ref never blew his whistle. There was no way Kyle was going to allow a hit on his brother go unpunished, but even more, he was clever enough to get his vengeance in a way that still played by the rules.

For the most part, I didn't see the Maginnis kids for most of my high school years, the exception being one soccer game between their school and my own in which Kyle dove and made a game-saving one-handed stop on the line to protect a tie (the fact that Kyle was technically not the goalkeeper was of little consequence to him, and to the great displeasure of my team, it didn't occur to the ref either).

Indeed, it wasn't until the day of my high school graduation that the Maginnis boys would become my friends for good. Though I had never known it, I had in fact passed the Maginnis house several times each day, and it was just five minutes from my own. So it was that as I drove by one day, I noticed someone running after my car, and when I reached the stop sign at the end of the block, that person tapped on my window.

"Hey!" said the smiling stranger.

There was an awkward pause for a moment, and I wondered aloud whether I might have left a coffee cup on my roof.

"No, it's your sticker. I'm going to Pomona next year."

We talked a bit after that and traded phone numbers. Of course, when Kyle called around 7:30 the following morning to see if I wanted to go to a movie that evening, I wondered who this kid was and what had I gotten myself into. As I would discover, hanging out with Kyle, Vytas, and all of their friends brought me into a world in which friendships were based on loyalty and good deeds rather than pretensions and peer-pressure. Indeed, if hadn't been for Kyle's tap on my window, I may never have gotten to know some of my closest friends today.

As luck would have it, Kyle and I were both planning to play soccer for Pomona-Pitzer that year, and so we agreed that we should train with each other that summer. By the time August rolled around, we had been fairly good about training six days a week, and in the process we played with groups ranging from over-the-hillers to high school kids to college players, not to mention one game with a pair of MLS starters. When a letter came in the mail from Coach Swartz that we needed to be able to do 200-straight pushups, I was in disbelief. Kyle, on the other hand, simply gave me one of his famously goofy grins, and said that anyone with a good plan can accomplish anything. I think I cut him off when he started into a Biblical passage that would serve as inspiration, but I admired his confidence and believed in him. Sure enough, when tryouts rolled around, for the first time in my life I managed to do 200-straight pushups next to Kyle's 225. We were both disappointed by the fact that Coach Swartz never carried out his threat of testing us that season, but being able to prove the achievement to ourselves may have been an even greater reward. That experience helped explain why Kyle thought graduating Summa Cum Laude was a very achievable goal. He honestly believed that everything was in his reach.

In little over a year and a half at Pomona College, Kyle established himself as one of the most diversely talented members of the student body. In addition to playing on the soccer team his freshman year, he was one of just a few first-year students selected to compete on the Claremont Colleges' ballroom team which last year won the national championship last year. This year, he was honored to be named a Writing Fellow. Just last fall, he appeared on the television trivia show WinTuition and won thousands of dollars in prizes. Even with so many varied activities, Kyle still managed to be named a Distinguished Scholar while attending mass daily at Claremont's Our Lady of the Assumption Church.

It was not until the end of our freshman year that Kyle began to make sense to me. For a long time, his deep religious convictions and unflexing Catholic principles would perplex me (despite my own background at a Catholic high school, Kyle is the only kid I have ever met who tried to debate religious philosophy on bus rides to-and-from soccer games), and at times I wondered if he was too zealous to be taken seriously. Sometimes I wondered if Kyle was self-centered, for he was almost never on time for anything and there were times when he didn't seem to respect other people's belongings, for so many things he "borrowed"-the quotation marks being necessary because he didn't always ask permission when he used other people's things-ended up broken. Despite all that, I never once grew mad at him, and which made the least sense to me of all.

Near the end of that freshman year, I was at dinner with Kyle and a large group of people, and as I sat quietly at the table, I had an epiphany of sorts. Suddenly, my unusual friend made perfect sense.

First, while for many religion is a weekend hobby whose symbols people boast with just a little more pride than one has for their favorite team, for Kyle, one's faith was not only a definition of how to live life, it was one's life. Kyle loved God so much that he considered becoming a priest or a numerary (though he also mentioned wanting a family with 12 kids, so clearly there was a conflict of interest). Sure, he knew temptation like everyone else, but unlike everyone else, Kyle's faith in God was so strong that his faith in himself was able to withstand the inevitable pressures that a secular world provides against a Christian life. Kyle wasn't zealous, he was just in love. With God, life, and all the possibilities in between.

Kyle wasn't self-centered, and he wasn't careless either. He was just oblivious. The reason he was late for everything was because he was always so busy doing so many things, and on top of those things he always tried to make room for one more job, hobby, or friend. It was impossible to juggle everything perfectly, but Kyle was determined to try, even if the cycle lost its shape every so often. As for his borrowing habits, from the bikes he broke to the movies and books he lost, not to mention the food-considering he was a Writing Fellow, I never did comprehend how Kyle believed that one could digest another's food and still call it "borrowing"-the great irony was that Kyle actually made every effort to keep track of things that he borrowed and return them as they were. The problem was, for all his talents, keeping track of stuff and not breaking it was Kyle's Achilles' heel. With that in mind, it suddenly made sense why, after the most painful experience of my Pomona career-riding a bike that Kyle had used the day before up a hill, having the seat fall off without my noticing, then sitting back down quickly, etc.-I still couldn't get upset at him when he told me "Oh yeah, I think I broke the seat yesterday. Sorry I forgot to mention it." A common joke while riding with Kyle was "Kyle, stop sign!" He would always ask "Where?," to which I would respond "10 yards back!" In the last few days, even that made sense to me. He never said anything about being color-blind, but considering Kyle wanted to be friends with everyone no matter how different or difficult they could be, it makes sense that a person who didn't focus on the red in one's personality probably couldn't see the red in a stop sign either.

This past summer, Kyle and Vytas made a trip to our friend's beach house. To Vytas's great chagrin, Kyle realized during the 3-hour drive out that he had made plans to go bowling the next evening and insisted that he couldn't cancel. Since Kyle's parents had taken him off their insurance a few months earlier, Vytas would be forced to drive Kyle home. We all thought this was crazy, but while Kyle may not have been good about being on time, he always made sure to get there eventually. Even if it was just to go bowling. That didn't give the brothers too much time to stay at the beach, but it was still enough Kyle to deliver one of his most memorable lines.

Shortly before Kyle and Vytas planned to drive back home, our host's new girlfriend came by unannounced and sat in a chair next to Kyle. True to his usual form, Kyle peppered the hungover girl with a barrage of inquiries that included serious questions about what she wanted to do with her life (the girl was 17) and how she perceived God, as well as what her lucky number was and did she ever read Spot Goes to School as a kid. The confused girl excused herself and left in the middle of all this with the impression that Kyle was gay and in a cult. As the girl walked out the gate, Kyle turned to my brother and, in his best effort at a whisper, announced to anyone in a 2 mile radius, "Man, that girl was really AWKWARD!"

No Kyle, you were really awkward. And that's why we loved you. Because in a world that tends to highlight the worst elements in life, you were one of those unusual people who always found a reason to bring out a big goofy smile.

From you, so many others and I learned to smile too.