Bannon Williamson lived a romantic life and loved music, cycling and his two children, say family and friends.

In recent days Bannon Williamson often rode his bike out of Brookline, zipping along Colchester Street where the sharp turn as it becomes Carlton Street made him slow down.

At night, the streets free from traffic, it was a peaceful ride. And one that the experienced cyclist – who easily logged 300 miles a month in his out-and-back loops – would sometimes take on his way to the Esplanade. He’d go there on sleepless nights to sit on one of the wooden docks that juts into the river overlooking the skyline and think.

It’s possible that’s where he was coming from when something went wrong and he was fatally injured late Saturday, Nov. 26, or early Sunday morning.

“We don’t have the full picture of just what happened yet,” said Williamson’s good friend, Joe Deignan, days after the incident.

“He was waiting to hear back on a job. He had a second interview on Monday. Maybe he was sitting there and taking it in ... And if that’s the last sit he did in his life, then, OK.”

Deignan said he first met Williamson, his wife’s cousin, in 2009 at the old family farmhouse in Vermont. There were dogs, cats and colorful chickens everywhere – and an immediately likeable Williamson with his signature glasses and smile.

He wasn’t wearing a cape – as he was known to in his younger days to the embarrassment of his older sister – but there was something very honest about Williamson that Deignan took to immediately. He attempted to convince Deignan and his wife that Wi sports were fabulous.

It wasn’t until this past summer, amid a bit of a rough patch following a layoff in Vermont, did the father of 7-year-old Ella and 5-year-old Ronan move down to Brookline for a new perspective. That’s when Deignan said he found in Williamson a best friend like the kind you have when you’re a teenager.

The two cycled around Arlington and Boston talking about life. Deignan said although Williamson hadn’t been his usual ever-sunny self in July, by November he had turned a corner, was talking about moving to the other side of the river and was rediscovering a love for playing backgammon, reading, and listening to reggae. He seemed happy.

“I really like reggae, is that weird? Is that still a thing? Are you not supposed to like it anymore?,” Hilary Deignan, Williamson’s first cousin and Joe Deignan’s wife, remembers him saying recently, getting her to laugh.

“It sucks that he’s gone because we should have been friends ‘til we were old men,” said Joe Deignan.

Hilary described her cousin as an open, honest, mellow man who was also meticulous and driven. “So everything he does he excels at, cause he puts everything into it,” she said, from skateboarding to cycling to learning the saxophone, to perfecting an omelet to bowling.

Hilary Deignan remembered a squabble she and her cousin, who was two years older, had when they were in high school: She had gone bowling with him and a friend, but she had gotten to chatting with the friend at the alley and when they got home he made it clear he was not happy with her, she said.

“He said I wasn’t taking bowling seriously enough. He wouldn’t go bowling with me again,” she said.

That moment illustrated for her just how dedicated Williamson could be about something he put his mind to. “When he’s doing something that he’s doing. he’s doing it,” she said.

Just this past fall another cousin asked him if he wanted to run the Cambridge Half Marathon in November. Williamson, not a runner, was game. But no one expected him to pull off a pace close to 7 minutes per mile for what may have been his first half marathon, said Deignan.

But that was Williamson. And yet, even as he excelled at the things that interested him, he was modest about it, say friends.

This was the same man who as a boy insisted on wearing his superhero Underoos over his clothes. And the boy whose parents joked that wanted even his sandwiches cut just right, (read: pinwheels).

There was the one time as a boy on a visit to his father and stepmother, Carroll and Kate Williamson, in Brookline when she spotted he had a long thumbnail was getting ready to help him cut it.

She wasn’t allowed to: “You can’t cut that, that’s my LEGO nail,” he told her, she remembered, with a soft laugh.

“He was a fanciful kind of person and small things in life meant a lot to him. He was never big on making a lot of money or having a big house. And I was always glad for him that he had these passions. He loved to build things and fix things. He loved being outside,” said Kate.

Bannon had been staying with his father and stepmother the past few months, and Kate said she loved watching Bannon show his two young children around the Brookline haunts – like the Puppet Showplace Theater – that he enjoyed as a youngster. He had plans to take them to the Boston Science Museum, but was saving that and "The Nutcracker" for the winter, she said.

From a young man until they last saw him, he was a guy you’d always want at a family function or in the room. He had an easy way about him, was a good listener and had the right amount of wry humor and silliness to him.

“That’s why so many people will miss him so much; He was so easy to be around. He was so engaged and always eager and loving,” said Hilary.