urbpan | 3:00 snapshot #694 (Reply)

This past Saturday we went to my dad's house and brought some furniture to the new place. We brought back an odd vertical thing which may have been an empty radio cabinet, an RCA console stereo (which I think we bought at a tag sale back in the 80s--I know I listened to records on it--it's probably from the early 70's), and a wooden trunk.

The trunk was packed full of old photos and various treasures from my Dad's life. His army dog tags were in there, and a box of coins his mother left him when she died when he was just 10. Pictures of him at various stages from college were mixed in with his many teacher of the year awards. There were at least two handmade congratulatory cards from me, one for when he got his PHD and one apparently made as a school assignment for father's day. There were menus from fancy restaurants that he and my mother went to on special occasions, and a photo of their landlord of their apartment in Stuttgart, in his Luftwaffe uniform. Teachers certificates of both my mother and father, dating back to 1958, laid on a pile with my brother's high school report cards. One package contained hundreds of tracings of minor Walt Disney characters, early indications of my dad's lifelong interest in comics and animation. (He still teaches a course called "Political Cartoons and American Film.")

Dad lingered on every photo of my mother, of which there were many. When she died a few years ago, he wanted to find certain photos of her for a memorial DVD to play at her wake. It turned out that many of the pictures he wanted were in this trunk, but he didn't know it. There were still hundreds of photos of her to choose from, so it didn't matter much. My dad was very happy to have come across the stuff in the trunk; it was intensely emotional, but we acted like the most important thing was to empty the trunk and to fit all the pieces of furniture into the cars. We got all the treasures into a plastic bin, which will probably protect them better, and which is transparent, so hopefully my dad will see it and remember to find the things he wants in it.

We muscled the furniture out of the basement with some difficulty, Alexis and I getting short with one another. In the daylight we could see that decades in the perennially flooding basement had encouraged some ugly molds, and we tried to wipe away yellow crusty spores. We managed to get all the pieces into the cars, with barely enough room for each dog in each car. I drove my dad's car and Alexis was in hers, leading us to the new house. I found following her to be incredibly frustrating. The emotions of the day were almost unbearable. Unpacking was marginally less infuriating than packing, and we headed to Flann's for an overdue meal and a necessary drink. It was a difficult day, but a day spent with people I love very much.