Just when I thought things were getting back to normal after this the news came that despite the horrible economy we've found a buyer
for my parents' home — the house I basically grew up in.
Yesterday I got a call from the guy who's been the property manager since
we've been renting out the place. He'd loaded up his truck with boxes full of my
dad's papers, photographs, slides and records and was heading up to my house to
drop the stuff off.
Thank God my wife bit her tongue (the look on her face said to me "oh, no!
Not more stuff!")
I sat on the floor of my garage for about six hours from afternoon into the
night, poring over things I'd not seen in maybe 15-20 years. What an emotional
roller-coaster! Warm fuzzies, brought on by gazing at drawings from my
childhood, were pulled out from under me not unlike a cheap carpet when I came
across the copies of dad's emails to me regarding his cancer four years ago.
Yeah, he didn't trust his disc drive. He printed out everything and kept the
pages very neatly filed in folders organized by subject (and another set
organized chronologically).
I must've looked at a few thousand color slides before the eye-strain caused
a massive headache. Was it the Ketel One that caused the headache or
made it finally go away?
Some highlights of the things I found:
- photo proofs of studio shots taken of my brother and I when we were
very, very young that were used as Christmas cards (It appears that both I
and my brother struggled to remove the "Santa Claus" hats that were plopped
on our tiny heads for the shoot)
- amazing slides of the Vermont country-side ablaze with fall colors.
There's just nothing prettier than a Sugar Maple tree in all it's fall
glory.
- a pristine copy of my uncle Joe's hit record, It Is
Now Post Time.
- a zip-loc bag containing my mom's recipe cards, in her careful,
distinctive penmanship. I thought that when I couldn't find them in her
apartment in Los Angeles, they'd been lost forever. Thank God they weren't.
Whew. This is the first time I've penned anything for this site in years. I'm
saying to myself "now, that wasn't so bad, was it?" What have I been waiting
for? It's time to resume writing... 'cause if I don't I may just explode.
Love,
shaogo