Partner In Crime
By: Connor Lenahan
For someone crazy like myself, it’s important to have someone willing to join me in whatever general absurd situation I decide to take part in. There has been no one in this universe more willing to join me in this insane journey called life than Matt Gronsky, who today turns 20 years old.
Due to my bone condition, I need help with a few things. I need another set of hands to make sure that I can physically go the places I want to go and do the things I want to do. What makes Gronsky an incredible person is that he will help me with these things before I even ask. It’s not just a familiarity thing, as we’ve known each other for five years, but a mark of great character – he’s just a helpful, kind guy.
He is also similarly impulsive. He’s psychic on occasion. This mainly manifests itself when we are sitting in my basement at midnight and he asks “So is a Sheetz run going to happen or?” before I vocalize the exact same idea. Even better, he’s delightfully flexible to ideas. I could come up to him with the most vague of plans and if I promised it would be enjoyable or I promised snacks his response would be “Which car do we take?”
I could go on for millions of words about his sense of humor or the fact he’s probably one of the three or four smartest people I know of any age but he already know that. And I would break my fingers if I attempted to type them. But there are two definitive things about Matt that make him such an amazing part of my life.
I. The ease of our friendship. With most other people I know there is a moment of catching up when we come back home from college. It feels like we have to pick up from a previous stop. Gronsky is the polar opposite. He could move to Russia tomorrow for seven years and the day he came home (hopefully with a gigantic, Stroyan-esque beard) it would appear as though we had been apart a day. We just get along. We also just play off one another so well that the chemistry is undeniable. Like Jordan-Pippen, Montana-Rice, LeBron-Wade, and Turk-JD before us, we are the perfect tandem.
II. Help. Simply by living his life as the kind, wonderful man he is, Matt has done more good for the lives of our common group of friends and I than he would realize. His presence is more important than anyone. With the group of people we hang around with, he’s the only one that can be deemed emotionally or mentally stable. In fact, he’s stable in an almost unstable way. His normalcy seems weirder than the rest of the sociopathic symptoms our clique presents. A few of us have been working under the assumption that he is an alien for quite some time, but results are inconclusive.
His stability keeps us all from killing each other. His ability to help people also keeps our lives from falling apart. In my experience, having Matt as my wingman, and vice versa, has at least allowed me to live my life exponentially happier than if he was not a part of it. There are, sadly, things that I will never be capable of doing in life alone thanks to my condition. Matt’s accountability and kindness have allowed for the list of things I cannot do to be struck down to a select few that include “riding a dinosaur” and “being tall,” though I have been offered many a piggy back ride from the birthday boy.
I cannot state enough how great of a person he is. He is viewed as our brother in the eyes of my parents, brothers, and I. There’s no way he couldn’t be. It’s not exaggeration when I say he has spent more time in my own house than me in the past 4 months. It’s not even all that close a margin. Yet everyone views this as normal. That, oddly, is why Gronsky is incredible.
This is just a small way to pay tribute to one of the greatest people walking this Earth today. And because I like nothing more than throwing in references simply to make Matt laugh. I give you two questions.
Hey, remember Space Jam?
Also, wanna go to Dorsia on Friday?
Connor Lenahan (@ConnorLenahan) is a sophomore at Boston University, majoring in journalism.