tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60399122011-12-18T10:52:58.772-05:00Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comBlogger131100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1113179342028521112005-04-10T19:26:00.000-05:002005-04-10T19:29:02.026-05:00

Our farmClear Creek Elementary and Oxford Lion's Park (where I played Little League, on the second field from the left)Grace United Methodist Church in Tiffin (NW corner of the intersection (viewed on highest magnification)). Across Highway 6 to the south is Clear Creek High School, where I changed buses twice every school day for six years.

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1070058402222933232003-11-28T17:26:00.000-05:002006-03-06T11:43:58.180-05:00

[most of this stuff probably fits after first grade or after second grade, but I wanted to get it down.]Mom used to lock us out of the house. Now, I don't blame her at all. I think she should have locked us out more.Ryan has a great routine about this, when he goes to the door and asks for a drink of water and Mom says 'Use the hose!'.We used the hose a lot. We got our drinks outside.We relieved

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1069303534890107502003-11-19T23:45:00.000-05:002006-03-06T11:38:02.556-05:00

We went back to church after we moved to the farm. My parents had left the Catholic Church in disgust. Dad would put a bumper sticker that said 'I survived Catholic School' on his van. When Dad asked his priest to marry him and Mom in their church, the priest complained that Dad hadn't been to church in a long time. Dad said 'Then treat it like a mixed marriage. She's Catholic.' Dad didn't tell

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1069181390786912332003-11-18T13:49:00.000-05:002004-05-19T18:47:24.060-05:00

There were two great unrealized loves of my childhood. The first was Kellie Grace. I fell in love with Kellie right away in the first grade. I think everyone thought she was cute or wished they could 'go' with her. But I know I loved her more deeply than anyone else did. It's not possible that any other boy outstripped my love for her. I was already sensitive to girls by first grade. In

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1069299124476362952003-11-17T22:32:00.001-05:002008-05-13T11:30:27.410-05:00

Chad Colony was the boy who I wanted to be my best friend. I think sometimes I even got close to being his best friend. Chad was the most popular boy in our class. Normally, I don’t think I could have rated so highly. However, I had some things working for me: 1. We lived less than a mile away from each other and, consequently, 2. We rode the same bus. (I mention these as two separate factors

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1068869785695384332003-11-14T23:16:00.000-05:002006-03-06T11:33:33.426-05:00

I liked Crystal Gayle's 'Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue', and 'Talking In Your Sleep'.We were huge Statler Brothers and Oak Ridge Boys fans. I think we went to see the Statler Brothers at the Waterloo Cattle Congress one year.Dolly Parton: I can remember many of these songs back to age 4 or 5 in the Tiffin house: 'Coat of Many Colors', 'Jolene', 'I Will Always Love You', 'Love is Like a

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1068698590414222282003-11-12T23:43:00.000-05:002006-03-06T11:31:58.720-05:00

I spent a lot of my childhood riding the bus. It had to have been at least an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon every day.One thing I got on the bus was a lot of exposure to country music. That's what my my bus drivers in rural Iowa always listened to. My folks listened to it too: KHAK (K-Hawk) from Cedar Rapids. To this day I can sing almost any country song released between 1978

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1068583771955348322003-11-11T15:56:00.000-05:002003-11-11T16:24:06.766-05:00

The thing I most remember about my first day of first grade is losing my seat. I found a classroom with a list with my name on it and sat down in a desk. Then panic set in. What if that wasn't my name? I got up and looked at the list again. There were two 'Sean's on it (the other Sean in my class was Sean Cahill). I don't remember how much I knew about last names, but I must have been pretty

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1068516886755040232003-11-10T21:14:00.000-05:002003-11-10T21:21:00.613-05:00

I neglected to mention, chronicling the ways we almost killed ourselves, the times I actually got hurt. It was never anything serious and, to this day, I've never broken a bone (that I know of). Once I fell out of a tree in the west grove. I was less than ten feet off the ground. The kicker this time was I fell into the barbed wire of the fence, threading my leg between the three strands of

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-106839006149301482003-11-09T10:01:00.000-05:002006-03-06T11:28:13.363-05:00

Ryan was still a baby when we moved to the farm, less than a year old. Erin, the only girl, was three. Kyle was five and I was six. There were four of us in under six years. During my Kindergarten year Dad drove trucks over the road sometimes, gone some nights. I still don't know how Mom did it.We were very close to Mom's family, Grandma and Grandpa Suchomel and Mom's sisters, Deann and Barb. We

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1068217601488663792003-11-09T09:21:00.000-05:002003-11-09T09:21:06.006-05:00

Our first outside play that I can remember was 'Star Wars'. Mom and Dad took us to see it at the Coralville Drive-In when it came out in 1977. I was five. As I remember it, I was usually Luke and Kyle was usually Han (at an age when Luke still seemed the more desirable role). The Millenium Falcon was the bed of Dad's truck, when it was there. We'd tuck down against the sides of the truck,

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1068217517659640312003-11-07T10:05:00.000-05:002003-11-10T21:28:54.370-05:00

We moved to the farm when I was six, after kindergarten. My dad had been moving around from one job to another my whole life, trying to find something he wanted to do. He finally settled on moving back to the family farm and farming with his dad. He kept at it for the rest of my growing up years, and we lived there on the farm. The farm was an amazing place to grow up. It's equally amazing that

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6039912.post-1068071226846413942003-11-05T17:27:00.000-05:002003-11-05T17:28:58.196-05:00

I listened to 'An American Childhood' by Annie Dillard on tape recently and adored it. I'll admit I couldn't get through 'A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek' (too filled with naturalistic data for a theorist like me). But I loved 'Holy the Firm'. Now I'm inspired to write my own autobiography. And I've decided to do the first (only?) draft in installments in this separate weblog. It doesn't matter if

Sean Meadehttps://profiles.google.com/106451706826453819276noreply@blogger.com