Some of you may know that my name is Troy. I want to tell you about a little story about how I tortured myself, pretty much. I moved to Berkeley, one of the most diverse cities in the world, and one of the best cities to live in. All my cousins moved down the street, and they said they were going to Malcolm X Elementary, and I was like, I want to go with all my cousins. My mom called the school district and they said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, your son, he lives on Carleton. He needs to go to Oxford.” I never heard anything about Oxford, and I did not want to go. So, my mom was like, “OK, I want you to go to school with your cousins, so I want you to like torture some kid at Oxford and kinda get suspended or something.” So, I’m sitting down in class, and I’m sitting on this end, and Ms. Walberg, her class, she had squares like this so all the students are facing each other. I remember seeing this boy, and I was like, “I got him.” This boy with braces and curly hair, I’m about to get him. So, I walked up to him, and I was like, I swear, literally I said, “White boy!” And he responded, he was like, “Black boy.” I was so, I was so…I was in shock. I’m like the new kid and he’s not even scared of me. And he like, had his people. He had Leib and Paris. Those were his two boys. They were always with each other. And I was like, all right, so it gets even crazier. So, they always talked in class about, you know, how good they were in sports. And I was like, OK, all right, I’m raw, so when it gets to lunch, we’ll see. When you step on the field with Kyle, Leib or Paris, you better be prepared because I stepped out there, me and my friends, and for a whole couple of months we lost every baseball game, every kickball game, every game we ever played. We actually made a map one day. Every day, we didn’t focus on our work, we said, this is what we’re going to do to beat them today at lunch. And eventually, me and Kyle started being friends because I left my friends and played on their team instead of my own. Literally, I’m serious.
One day I was going to my best friend, Devin’s house. He was on Derby and I was walking down and I saw Kyle’s stepmother outside. I said, “Kyle you live here?” He said, ya. So, from that point on, we would go over, play basketball, do things, hang out. When I heard about Kyle’s passing, my mother came into my room. She knocked on the door and she said, “Do you know a sixteen year old, Kyle Strang?” And I knew she was talking about him. I just literally ran to the closet. My mom has a box of all her children’s stuff, and I ripped open my box and threw everything out just to get to the Oxford fifth grade yearbook. I opened it, and my mom looked and she just said, “I’m so sorry.” I just went into my room and closed the door. I was just completely in shock. It didn’t hit me until about last night. I knew I had to wake up early this morning to get here, because I knew it was going to be packed. I already knew. I was in shock, I think we are all in shock because no matter how much you knew Kyle or how much you knew of him, each one of us has a piece of him. Whether it’s Craig’s co-worker at work who said, I seen Kyle, that cute little boy come in there all the time. No matter what you know about him, we all have a piece of him and it comes together as a whole. I think we all feel him in here but we can’t see him or touch him. Literally, what helps me is that I feel that God puts our body, and our body is our shell to get used to the earthly environment, so his spirit most definitely is not gone, it is still here, and will forever be here. I love the family, I love all you guys, I love Kyle to death. I will never forget him. He was one of the funniest kids ever. And what helped me, I looked in the back of the yearbook, because we all had to write a note about what we remember in the fifth grade about being at Oxford and Kyle’s said, “I will be remembered for playing baseball well and for being very gracious.” So, that is what I remember most about Kyle. I love you. Thank you.
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