As I said in one of my early blogs, I grew up always taking pictures with my siblings, esp. my oldest sister who was photography obsessed. My whole family has a different approach to taking pictures than most I think. The only person in my family who will shy away from having a picture taken is Mom, and she is almost comfortable with it too these days.
My oldest sister and i have a saying- "You know you had fun if you've got the pictures to prove it." And sometimes the best times we have are taking pictures. And long ago I scrawled a line in my little notebook and remembered it always- "..caught between life and documenting it." It seems sometimes we are more concerned with documenting the experience than experiencing it.
And why I am telling you this now will be aparent at the end of this post.
My dad picked me up at the airport when I got back from NY/NJ. A bit of backstory- I left Illinois in May, and hadn't seen him since then. He had come to Texas, to San Angelo, almost a month ago, to work with my uncle who lives there. Since San Angelo is pretty far from here, we still hadn't seen each other. He fell off of a little cliff down here and got hurt, and then couldn't leave until the doctor decided he didn't need to get the cut in his throat worked on. So then he fianally got to head towards home as I was coming back. He told my mom he didn't recognize me in the airport- I was still in photoshoot hair and makeup.
He was here for a night, and then a day, and then left the next morning. We went out to Mckinney, because the traffic in Dallas makes him discombobulated. He thinks its going to get me killed I think.
It was so cold that day we couldn't do much. We tried to walk around downtown Mckinney a bit, but whenever you came out from a place where a building blocked the wind, the wind was brutal. We went to the Mom and Popcorn Shop, and bought candy, which I probably shouldn't have had. But oh well. And then Dad said "Well, antique shops are used to people coming in and not buying anything," and so we decided to hang around the antique shops to keep warm.
We made fun of some of them for selling absolute crap, and we looked for poisonous ingredients on bottles of old food and medicine. The last one we went in we spent the most time in. it was huge, but unfortunately the top floor had such a low ceiling that dad couldn't come anywhere near standing up up there. (He's like 6'6" i think?)
They had a ton of really cool old sunglasses and some badass 70's shoes and such. We looked and looked at the sunglasses, but unfortunately all the ones with the really cool green lenses were prescription. But I did get some without green lenses.
Later we went to finish my Christmas shopping so he could bring all the gifts back with him.
The next morning I woke up and found that he was gone. I thought, "He didn't even say goodbye, that bastard." And that would have been par for the course with Dad. He seems to hate saying goodbye. He rarely even says it on the phone. I've always wondered if it goes back tohis tragic childhood, but that's another story.
I stood there slightly dumbfounded, looking for some evidence that he hadn't really left but there was none. I walked through the living room a few times, looking for something that wasn't there and it struck me sickeningly that I hadn't even taken any pictures. I woke Thom up and said, "i think my dad just up and left." "Are you fuckin' serious?" he said.
But it turned out not to be so. He'd just loaded everything in the old VW Fox and went for coffee. And when he came back, I did snap just two bad pictures in the living room, where i'm not even out of my pajamas. The real me. Not the character I play. A rarity in photos these days.
And it struck me, that it is not often that I am living so intently in the moment that I forget to document it. And I don't know what to make of that.
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