Friend #45 - Sean

Sean was one of fourteen children born to his parents.  It was a crowded, chaotic household, but it was still filled with a lot of love.  When he was a kid, he used to collect bottles from his neighbors so he might be able to turn them in for enough money to buy candy.  It was a rather ingenious scheme until his mother got wind of it.  She grounded him saying that begging for bottles made the family look poor.  But they were poor.  There were a lot of mouths in the house to feed.  All of Sean’s clothes were hand-me-downs and he was grateful for the half of one drawer he was given to store his things in the bedroom he shared with his brothers.

After the stint with bottle collecting, Sean’s mother decided he was old enough to follow in the footsteps of his older brothers and allowed him to take on a paper route.  Sean used it, as his brothers had before him, to build relationships with the homeowners and to stake out a market he could milk for a lawn mowing business.  If competition ever moved into his territory, his older brothers, who were bigger than him, helped to intimidate the competition right out.  And Sean loved working!  It gave him the opportunity to buy things for himself like store-bought new clothes and a baseball glove, things that he’d never had before.  Sean had always wanted to play sports when he was in school but there was too much work and never enough money in the household for him to do it.

After high school, he enrolled in the army.  It was the only way he knew how to give himself a college education.  He actually spent his eighteenth birthday in Korea and by this twentieth birthday, he’d quickly risen through the army ranks.  He was smart…and he showed promise, but his time in Vietnam blemished his soul.  I guess it would scar anyone.  It was during this time in his life he picked up smoking because why not smoke when any moment could be your last?  And there were a lot of moments when he feared for his life, saw things decent human beings weren’t meant to see.  It was a moment by moment reel of reality so horrifying that he became resentful of the people who sent him there.  He wasn’t even sure the war he was fighting was for a just cause.  It was a war he protested when he came back…but he never forgot his brothers on the front lines.  In fact, he said any time he runs into a person who has given service to this country, he feels a kinship with them, a bond to protect them and theirs. 

He eventually returned home from the war and he met a woman whose childhood was very different from his own.  She came from a wealthy family.  She was college educated.  Sean said he believed she was smarter than he was.  Perhaps, that’s where he went wrong.  But he loved her.  The couple married and had four children together, each exactly four years apart.  He loved his children and really wanted to be a good father.  He took parenting classes when they were young and made sure his children had the opportunity to play sports while they were in school, an opportunity he never had. 

He was married to his wife for over twenty years.  Then one day he woke up and realized no one liked her.  She had grown increasingly condescending over the years and Sean was tired of always being in the middle.  They divorced and his wife married someone new exactly one month later.  It was just too much for Sean.  Everything in that area reminded him of the life he no longer had so he moved out to Phoenix to start again.  He got a job in medical sales.  He earned a master’s degree.  He was financially successful enough that he retired early.  Essentially, he recreated his life. 

Sean’s backyard is a garden of angel statues.  It brings him peace and comfort to sit among them.  In fact, they are so important he brought along a marble statue of an angel with him.  He pointed out the intricate grooves and details.  An artist somewhere once had to look at a slab of marble and see the angel within it.  That artist then had to carefully peel away the layers in order to create the masterpiece that sat before me.  Our lives are like that.  We are born blank slates and piece by piece we create our lives as we want them to be. 

Sean didn’t begin his life with a lot of advantages.  He credits the things he has achieved to hard work and education.  I imagine he wakes up every day determined to be a better person than he was the day before.  Of course, that doesn’t mean his life is without trial and tribulations but he often thinks back to his time in the military.  He thinks, “If I can make it through Vietnam and live through it, then surely I can make it through anything.”  Nothing scares him now.  He’s still a soldier.  The difference is he’s now a soldier of his own making.