Is this your dad?

Happy Monday!! 

Do y'all want to hear about my weekend?  I hope so because I have nothing else in mind to talk about today.  That's not necessarily true, but there are a lot of things I can't talk about even though they're on my mind.

Friday night I did exciting, party animal kinds of stuff.  I went to Disco Kroger after work to buy groceries (and I did not try to steal them this time), got home and stayed up all the way until 10:30 doing laundry.  I know!  It's like I thought I was in my early 20s again with all of that craziness and wildness going on at my house on Friday night.

Atlanta has nicknames for all of our Kroger stores and Fay is a big fan of that fact.  She has a map of them and everything which she emailed to me once.  Sometimes I tag her on Facebook as being there with me just so she won't miss which Kroger I went to.  Disco Kroger used to be, wait for it, a disco!  But now it's a grocery store.  We also have Hipster Kroger/Emo Kroger near my house and I am so wild and crazy that I go there even though I'm not a hipster.  I also live not too far from Murder Kroger and you can guess why I don't want to do much shopping at that one.  I have never been to Lunatic Kroger but I probably would fit right in.

I'm sure some of you might remember that my dad passed away last August.  He was a professional photographer for about 40 or 50 years and my brother who lives here in Atlanta and I have been dealing with his photography equipment and an antique camera collection ever since.  We're selling some stuff, keeping some stuff, having stuff serviced to sell, etc. and it has been a giant pain in the patookus if I'm being honest.  We had to take about 50 antique cameras to a guy on Saturday and do y'all know what's fun?  Loading a whole bunch of boxes of cameras in your car, unloading a bunch of boxes of cameras from your car and carrying them into a camera store, loading the cameras back up and carrying a bunch of boxes of cameras back out to your car, and unloading a bunch of boxes of cameras out of your car when you get back home, that's what.  And this is the second time I've had to take them to this guy but luckily my brother was able to help me this time AND we got a parking spot right in front of his store as opposed to the time I did it by myself last fall and I had to park at the other end of the shopping center and do it.  That time sucked way worse.  Some of the antique cameras are those huge wooden ones with the leather bellows and they take up an entire box all by themselves so when I say it was a lot of boxes I'm not making that up.  And we have an antique aerial camera that must weigh 9,000 pounds.  Guess which box I happened to pick up?

After we got enough exercise for the next year, we went to my neighbors' house to watch college football which I do not give two hoots about.  And yet they watched 3 different games and I stayed there for 8 hours.  In 8 hours/3 football games I honest to goodness saw 4 plays and that was it.  Because thankfully there was another lady there who didn't give even one hoot about football so we talked about horrible dates we've been on, they talked about childbirth (which was when I watched football for a few minutes), and then a guy they knew showed up with an interesting new girlfriend situation so we discussed that for a while (she was 25 years older than him and my neighbor was suspicious that she was a transvestite - I was on the fence about the transvestite part but let's just say she was probably over 6 feet tall and there was nothing feminine about her).  And the lady who used to live next door to me came for a bit and I adore the crap out of her so we got to catch up.  And that is how you go to a football party for 8 hours and only see 4 plays or downs or whatever they are.  There also may have been 5 glasses of wine involved on my part and that's about 5 glasses more than I've drank in quite a while but since I live 3 houses away and don't have to drive I drank up.  At their house you normally have a choice of beer, wine, tap water or juice boxes and I don't trust drinking Atlanta tap water.  I had taken 3 bottles of water and my brother drank two of them and I had already drank the third because we were parched from all of the box toting we had done earlier.

But yesterday is when the weird stuff happened.

The first weird thing is that I didn't even have a hangover when I woke up.

The second weird thing had to do with my dad.  Do y'all remember last week when I was feeling kind of blah about September 11th and mentioned that my friend's father had passed away the night before?  What I didn't tell y'all is that the friend was the one who lived in my neighborhood growing up and told me my dad was dating her Aunt Martha Stewart a few years back.  Her dad and grandfather built most of the houses in our neighborhood, etc.  Anyway, her dad had been okay one day and then an accident of sorts happened and something happened during surgery from the accident and he never woke up and died a week later (it's not my place to tell all of the details of what happened).  My dad dropped dead of a heart attack.  We both lost our fathers completely unexpectedly and I think what has happened is that it has triggered me to finally start grieving my dad's death.  Yes, I know it's been a year, but right after my dad died we had to deal with his greedy wife and a whole bunch of stuff she did to us over the course of several months, my older brother and I spent every weekend for about 4 or 5 months cleaning out his house, then I fell and broke my wrist, I went through moving at my office, then my fake kids showed up, and I don't think I ever had any downtime to grieve and suddenly since her dad died last week I can hardly go 5 minutes without thinking about my dad.

Yesterday I was in the kitchen cooking all of my lunches and dinners for this week and my phone was sitting there on the counter.  It started beeping that I had a text message and I looked over and an old back and white photo of my dad when he was pretty young popped up on the screen. 

"Is this your dad?" the message asked.

It was my dad.

I had never seen this photo in my life but without question it was my dad from the 60s or 70s.  He was sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him with two cameras hanging around his neck.  There is another guy kneeling beside him with a cigar in his mouth.

When I opened the message up, I saw that it was from my friend who just lost her dad.  I wrote her back and told her it was definitely my dad but I had never seen the photo before and asked her where on earth she had found it.  She told me the lady across the street from my dad's house had them at a yard sale and her dad bought two albums from her along with some negatives they think are from my dad and took them to his house.  I asked her how long ago her dad had bought them.  She told me it was 3 weeks ago, only 1 week before his accident. 

My friend and her mom were looking through them yesterday and they both thought it was him and her mom said she'll save them for us.

The lady across the street is a drug addict.  Her husband is either still in prison or was at one time for being a dealer.  The day my dad died, she came over as I was getting out of the car and talked to me and some other people who were standing outside.  She walked up to me and held out her arms to hug me and said how sorry she was and how much she would miss my dad being there across the street from her.  I honestly didn't want to touch her because she was wearing a filthy dirty square dancing dress, flip flops and had scabs all over her arms and legs, but I hugged her anyway.  She was really sweet and that was honestly the first time I had ever talked to her even though she had lived across the street from our family home for the entire 33 years my dad owned it.  I hadn't talked to her before because when I still lived there before I went away to college and then went on with my life, her sons were known for shooting stray cats with BB guns if they came in their yard and I didn't want to know anyone who would do something like that.

The only thing my brother and I can figure is that she broke into my dad's house before we finished cleaning stuff out and stole that stuff.  There is no way my dad would have given her photo albums with personal pictures or any of his negatives.  They were friendly to each other as neighbors, but they were not friends.  Plus my dad was an organized hoarder.  He did not get rid of stuff.  Ever.  We found plane ticket stubs from the late 70s.  His car insurance bill for a car he owned in the 60s.  His gas and electric bills from the 60s.  Now we wonder what else she might have taken of my dad's that we will never know about or see again.

And I feel so sad.