megan buchanan said...

i moved out to northern arizona with my daughter, grainne, last october and had not kept in close touch with sean, although a bell had been ringing in my head to call him for the past month or so.

like everyone else who knew him, i, too, have a handful of great sean stories, some heartbreakers and some sidesplitters. a few things: everytime i saw him, he asked when i was going to sell him my truck, a babyblue 1987 ford f150 with ridiculously low mileage. before i left, he and i completed a project i had dreamed about for years, something everyone else thought was silly, except for sean: mahogany rails on the truck. working in his backyard, sweating and cooling off with the hose in late summer pasadena heat, there was a hilarious 4th-grade underwear moment, both of us standing in the bed of the truck under a tree: i'll show you mine if you show me yours, he said. except sean wasn't wearing any. classic.

living out here in flagstaff now, there are gazillions of pickups but none have mahogany rails made by sean sullivan.

he and my daughter had a special connection. he made her a baton for her 9th birthday called the flying gwendolyn, a name they each called the other. when he was sick of pasadena meetings we would drive around and tell each other our secrets. i trusted him.

when i heard the news, i wailed and wrote a little song for him. my daughter and i have been mourning him by ourselves out here and would have been out for the memorial but it was her birthday and her party was on saturday.

his light was very bright. i was thinking how he never got to be an old man, but instead will be remembered always as the vital, radiant young man that we all love so so much. so here's the little song--

all of this is true:
i danced with you
in the lumberyard
last summer
my friend

swallowed by a river
on saturday
i'm full of sand
my friend

your hugs were like the sun
i wasn't done with you
your voice contained the sun
i wasn't done with you
dancing through the lumberyard
my friend

4:32 PM