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I am clearing out my parent’s house and since they were married almost 69 years (dad’s funeral was on their 69th anniversary earlier this month), and my dad was a pack rat, it’s pretty interesting.

I cleared out my den at home as a holding area. I’m not bringing home any of the furniture except for one antique wine chest and a couple of lamps, but the den is already half full with slides, photo albums, small boxes of memorabilia, etc.

Yesterday, I found my dad’s old cameras. I wasn’t aware until yesterday he had two old Brownies. I found the oldest one earlier, with which I took my first picture when I was 5.

I also threw out yesterday the following:

- About 25 empty prescription bottles with the labels removed
- A large box of McDonald’s plastic silverware
- Expired bags of flour, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, plant food
- Old Christmas candles with about a quarter inch of wax left
- 20 boxes of tea bags stored in the basement
- An old, moldy leather brief case (one of about 20 more that have to go)
- Boxes of empty slide holders
- Boxes of old Christmas cards that look like they were from the 60s
- Plastic containers for items that are long gone
- A plastic hard hat from the Henry Ford Museum
- Empty raisin bran boxes (?????)
- Old bottles of things from my dad’s bathroom that were not labeled
- A dead, useless electric shaver

Previously I had pitched a couple boxes of dried up rubber bands, daily calendar pages they kept for some unknown reason, blank planners from the last several years, petrified crackers, old stained Tupperware, expired food bars, 100 or so bottles of expired supplements, about 10 small flashlights my dad got free for making donations, solidified instant coffee, old flour and about 10 more bags of things I can’t remember.

I have not gotten to the paper or the electronic stuff yet, the cassette tapes, the old computer disks, the contents of his filing cabinets, and all the books. I donated all the clothing this week – took me about 10 trips to the car – I hope my dad didn’t have any money in his pockets because I didn’t check.

I took a peek in the attic yesterday and it doesn’t look too bad. There are some large boxes, but it’s not crammed full. I’ll wait until I have help to do that space.

I did find my first baby shoes in my mother’s dresser and a nice pin I bought her in Spain on one of her suits. Found the old white gloves I used to wear to church in the 50s and a fully-stocked Samsonite travel case in the closet.

This is very time-consuming, intensive, emotional work, but at least it’s not the house I grew up in – that would be more traumatic. I will, however, probably have a small melt-down when the piano goes out the door. I learned to play on that piano, but I just don’t have room for it. I’ll think about that later.

For now, I just have to take it one item at a time, like the stack of old 35 mm movies I found in the corner of the basement including “The Music Man”, along with about 200 record albums, some of which are 78s. I never knew someone could cram so much stuff in such a small house. Their living area was neat and clean, so you would never know the other areas of the house (mostly the basement) held so much unless you snooped around.

When this is over, I think I’ll do a major purge at home, although I don’t have nearly as much stuff – I do purge every couple of years - I don’t want my kids shaking their heads when they clean out my house eventually, thinking “What the heck is this and why the heck did she keep it?”

How many times have you said “OK, I’m serious about this now?” I was thinking about that earlier. I have said that so many times about the usual – diet, exercise, that project I keep putting off…

When I was growing up, the first thing I wanted to be was an architect. When I got older and realized there was a lot of math involved, that one went out the window. Then I wanted to be a geologist. Have you ever seen the math formula for the Richter scale? I found out in junior high and high school I had a knack for learning foreign languages, and since there were no math formulas involved, that was the path I took.

Now “I’m getting serious” about photography. I’ve been serious about it for a while – read all the “how to” books and worked with some professionals, and I do know what I’m doing, but I really want to learn the technical aspects as well as the esthetic and practical aspects, and that involves, well, math. How much light is lost depending on your lens length and your maximum or minimum aperture, corresponding shutter speed settings when you stop down or open up…Kelvin setting numbers for various ambient lighting conditions, etc. I can’t get away from the math.

My brain rebels. I want to make good art, but I don’t want to guess at it. Pixel counts, resolution, aspect ratio – my head hurts.

On the practical side, I always wanted a macro lens, but I knew I needed a tripod first. I bought a nice light-weight travel Slik that gets very low to the ground and has a reversible center post for macro shots. It wasn’t expensive and I love it. Yesterday, I took the plunge and ordered the macro lens. Now I want to spend time reading about the technical aspects of each lens and what I can do with it over and above the obvious. When I talk about the art of photography, I want to really know what I’m talking about, including the (shudder) math. Wish me luck.

My father's funeral is next Tuesday, May 8. My mother passed away last October 22. My parent's were married 68 years at the time of my mother's passing. That was really hard, watching my dad lose his companion. Now, after a major surgery and a month long struggle, my dad went to meet her.

What I think is a little serendipitous is the fact that May 8, the day of the funeral, will be their 69th anniversary. There's no way your could plan that. It just happened that way. My mother was 91 and my dad was 94, so I can't complain. Funny, they let him renew his driver's license by mail this year. I have a valid driver's license for my father in my wallet that's good until he's 98. Of course, he can go anywhere he wants now without spending the gas money.

My daughter and I were with him when he left. I'm glad I got to be there. I plan on documenting his life with my camera as I slowly clear out the house. I already have his Brownie camera (with which I took my first picture when I was 5), and his old Polaroid, his pocket knife he carried always for the past 60 years or so, and a few other odds and ends. Being from the depression generation, they really never threw anything out, so I'm sure there will be a lot of surprises in the clutter. In fact, they have a working retro refrigerator in the basement that's older than I am (I'm 61), and they still have the sales receipt. I think it's out of warranty....

Anyway, I'm sad, but also relieved that they were only apart for a little less than 6 months. Life is an adventure at every turn. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes it just is what it is...

I’m sad. My father is dying and up until today he has been as sharp as a tack. Today, he was starting to not make sense and at one point, he handed me some imaginary object to put in his safe. He said it was worth 5 grand. In any case, that reminded me to try and open his safe, which hasn’t been open for years and is probably empty. If there is anything in there at all, it’s a few coin proof sets that are worth face value. I couldn’t get it open. My daughter tried and she couldn’t get it open. I guess I’ll have to hire someone to open it, just in case the Hope Diamond is in there or something, but I highly doubt it. I can’t just chuck it without looking, of course.

At any rate, while we were down there in the basement trying to figure out the safe, we found a bunch of photo albums and scrap books he was keeping in the basement where it’s damp and musty. For a smart man, I really don’t know why he kept them down there. At any rate, I brought home the most elaborate and oldest album and I have been looking through it. There is a hand-written piece of paper in there with the descriptions of who’s in the album, but I think some of them have been shuffled around, and the handwriting, which doesn’t look like my dad’s, is kind of messy.

I recognize my grand parents, and with the help of this piece of paper, I recognize one great uncle and his wife, and my dad’s brother, who passed away about 20 years ago. All of these photos were taken between around 1890 and 1920, with the exception of one of my uncle that I think must have been taken around 1935. In any case, I’m going to carefully label any printed photos from now on with names and dates on the back so when my grandchildren are going through them 30 years from now, they know who it is they are looking at.

I found another piece of paper inside the front of the album. It’s the actual original newspaper obituary for my grandmother (my father’s mother) from 1919. She died of complications from pneumonia after contracting the Spanish flu in that famous epidemic of 1918-1919. It made me feel kind of old to realize my grandmother was born in 1885. It struck me odd that this obituary says she is interred in the “Norwegian Cemetery” in Springfield, South Dakota. I guess we Norwegians had our own separate burial ground back them.

If I ever feel like blowing 150 bucks, I’m going to register on Ancestry.com and try and trace some of my dad’s family, but they all emigrated to that huge Scandinavian population in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, and they all have very common Norwegian names, so it might be kind of hard to sift through all the Ole’s and the Arne’s to find my relatives, but I think it would be fun. Also, I’m supposedly descended from Ethan Allen on my father’s mother’s side, so it would be fun to trace that as well. Although I’ve read Ethan Allen was actually a worthless drunk and it was Benedict Arnold who saved the fort at Ticonderoga, but given Benedict’s reputation after the fact, they credited my great-great-great (how many?) grandfather with that undertaking, even though he was probably drunk on his ass at the time.

And my final thought in this blog is for anyone who saw the movie “Fargo” – the police chief and the car salesman (Francis McDormand and William H. Macy) had the dialect perfected. Whenever they said “Geeze” or “Don’t ya know” I thought “My God, they’re channeling my uncle Arne!”

I am preparing for my second parent to make the transition. This is very hard. Logistically, emotionally and financially hard.

I'm not complaining. I have it better than a lot of other people, but it's still hard. Funny the stuff that goes through your mind when this happens. Fear, uncertainty, guilt (did I do enough?). Ultimately, you just have to let things take their course. There is nothing else to do. Explaining your state of mind to someone else is useless - if they've gone through it, they understand. If they haven't, they don't.

I honor the hours, days, weeks, months and years my parents were there to support me. I was there to support my mom at the end, and I'm now there to support my father. He's fully aware he is getting ready to make the journey and embraces the process. I'm constantly tense and sad, but that's part of the process too.

To anyone reading this who is going through, or has recently gone through this, I send you good thoughts. This is a hard thing. It is what it is.

I was doing some freestyle writing this morning. You know how you have a string of thoughts that start in one place and end up in a completely different time zone…Anyway, I wrote a word with the letter “l” in it and my pen hesitated part way down the right side of the loop and made a notch in the letter. This took me off the thought I was writing and led me to think about an odd experience – about someone who wrote like that.

20 years ago, I lived in Redford Township, Michigan, which butts up against the west side of the Detroit city limits. I grew up there, in fact. My parents bought a new house there when I was 5 and they lived in that house for 40 years until I persuaded them to move closer to me. I had moved to St. Clair, Michigan, which is about 15 miles south of the city of Port Huron.

Anyway, there was a local gas station on a corner near where we lived in Redford where we would take our cars for oil changes and basic maintenance before all the quick oil change places cropped up. My husband took his car there for an oil change, and later he told me that the guy manning the counter kept going outside and talking to the women at the self-serve pump. My husband said something to him like “Checking them out?” And the counter man’s response was “You never know. Sometimes you get lucky.”

About a month later, I took my car in for an oil change, and while I was sitting waiting, I watched the same guy joke with everyone who came in to pay for their gas. This guy was absolutely hilarious. I went home and told my husband “I just spent an hour with Robin Williams”.

About a month after that, I came home from somewhere and as I walked in the door, my husband said “You know that guy at the gas station you thought was so funny? He’s a serial killer.” I said “You’re kidding!”. He pointed to the TV where the news report was still on and sure enough, there stood Leslie Allen Williams being arraigned on two or three counts of murder. I had interacted with this guy and he had my address and phone number. Thank God I wasn’t his type.

Now that I write this, I remember I was at Eastern Michigan University from 1968-1972, during a spree by another serial killer, John Norman Collins. The head residents in the dorms had us signing in and out because bodies kept showing up intermittently. I knew the roommate of the last victim Karen Sue Beineman. I also went on a blind date with a guy who told me he had been questioned in the murders (this was before they caught John Collins). I was sitting in his jeep when he told me this with nowhere to go. It was an odd sensation. Of course, fortunately for me, he wasn’t the killer. There was a book published later called “Michigan Murders” about John Norman Collins and his killing spree. I think it has been re-released lately under a different title, but it was odd reading that book and being familiar with where all the bodies had been found.

Funny how writing one letter oddly (Leslie Allen Williams made notches in all his “l”s – I looked at the repair order from the gas station after he was arrested) will take your mind down a weird corridor in your memory.

I wonder how many of us have encounters with truly evil people and never know it.

Things I have learned that are universally true:

- The water from the bathroom sink tastes different than the water from the kitchen sink.
- It is a law of physics that 6 socks go into the dryer and 5 come back out.
- When your adult children move home, the tv remote can only be found on Mondays and Thursdays. The rest of the time it’s invisible.
- Your spouse assumes the can opener is broken without noticing the blender is plugged in instead.
- The phone always rings when you’re about to find out who did the murder.
- Clothing from the dollar store is 6 sizes smaller than marked.
- It’s not a good idea to have two identical pairs of shoes in different colors when you dress for work with the light off because your spouse is still sleeping.
- Putting coffee grounds in the water bin when you’re half awake will ruin your coffee maker.
- When you’ve been thinking about that food item all day at work, you come home and remember you ate the last of it the night before.
- Cheap Teflon looks like pepper on your fried eggs.
- Your stomach only growls when there is a lull in the conversation at the business meeting.
- That show you finally decide to watch for the second time turns out to be the rerun of the episode you watched a year earlier.
- The day you finally decide you are going on that diet, your spouse comes home with a gallon of Moose Tracks ice cream.
- Nobody will ever own up to the tomato sauce explosive matter in the microwave.
- You always find the molded fruit in your crisper drawer the day after garbage pickup.
- For women: you can never be too rich or too thin or have a big enough purse.
- For men: even if you are dressed impeccably, the wind always messes with the comb-over.
- When you find keys in a drawer you haven’t seen for 15 years, you can’t get yourself to throw them out. God only know what they’re for, but you don’t want to take any chances.
- And finally, for me at least, it’s a universal truth that major appliances tend to break down two or three at a time.

I know these only scratch the surface of universal truths. There are many more out there just waiting to be discovered by modern science.

I have not written any blogs for a while. My father will be 94 on April 8 (God willing). He called me a week and a half ago and said he thought he had appendicitis so I took him up to the local emergency room. After 10 hours and x-rays and CAT scans, they determined he had a huge blockage in his intestines.

A week later, after 4 days in ICU, they cleared him for surgery, which they performed last Friday. He's doing well now, had a hamburger for the first time last night and he told me he never thought a hamburger could taste that good (this after two days of liquids and jello).

In the meantime, I'm picking up his mail, paying his bills, taking him stuff from his house and holding down a job.

I find lately, the only time I'm relaxed is when I'm making images - which right now only consists of photography - no time to draw - so I plan on going out this coming Sunday and shooting all day before heading up to either the hospital or the rehab, depending on where my father ends up. My mother passed away in October, so I really would like my father to stick around for a while. Now I have to get him to stop taking some of the massive number of supplements he takes, which probably helped get him to the age of 94, but some of which, I'm sure, contributed to the huge mass stuck in his intestines. He's really a kind man, patient, unassuming, but stubborn as hell. If I remove some of the massive collection of pills from his house without permission, he'll probably be very peeved. I guess I'll just start reading labels and trying to figure out which ones won't hurt and may help. A daunting task when there are probably 100 bottles sitting there in his kitchen.

Like I said, life has been interesting.....

The first picture I ever took was in 1955 of my 3-year-old friend. I was 5. I took it with my father’s Brownie (which he still has). I made her pose with her arms in the air (heaven knows why) and I sent her a copy of the picture on her 50th birthday.

I generally don’t shoot people – at least not as “fine art”. I find it the most difficult thing to do well, and I’m not that interested in it for myself. I certainly take pictures of relatives and my grandchildren. Lots of pictures of the grandchildren, in fact, because they’re very young and won’t stay still and pose. I took a few pictures of my mother when I knew she was dying, which are still in my camera, and I have pictures of family members and events going way back, but really not that many.

I didn’t get into photography seriously until about 20 years ago because I used to be an oil painter and working 50-60 hours a week (and occasionally 70), I didn’t even have time to take the top off the Titanium White, let alone clean up after painting. And, as a painter who used a traditional working method, that is background first, let it dry for a week, another layer, let that dry, etc., it took months for me to finish a painting.

There are many fine photographers here on FAA – certainly many more gifted than I am, and many (in my opinion) not as good, but I’m fascinated by photographs of pieces of ordinary things that make beautiful abstract or graphic art. If anyone cares to comment on this blog, I would be interested to know what subject matter fascinates you and why.

I’m still trying to learn my camera, and I’m hoping to steadily improve in the digital world to the point I did with film. So much to learn. Some day, I’ll be brilliant at it.

I would say I have a normally open mind. I’m not gullible, but I do believe in things unseen, UFOs, loved one’s spirits hanging around (I’ve seen the former and felt the latter), and I’m often amused by people who are very intelligent, but either they believe in nothing other than what is apparent to their 5 senses, or they go the other way - into the conspiracy realm - and believe Elvis is alive and living in Canada.

One thing a lot of people don’t believe in is personality profiling through handwriting analysis. I’m not talking about predicting the future here, or anything psychic or paranormal in any way. I’m talking about taking a sample of someone’s handwriting and reading character traits from the pressure on the paper, the slant and the various letter formations, etc.

I became fascinated with the subject of handwriting analysis several years ago and bought several books on the subject. Some of the books I found to be too general and practically useless, but 3 of them gave good, specific information enough to do a pretty full analysis. After studying these 3 books for a while, I decided to analyze my own handwriting. It was SCARY accurate. Now, I know what you’re thinking – I extracted the traits I like from this analysis and dismissed the rest. Not so. I carefully matched my letter formations, slant, etc. against the best example in each book and only read those sections. There was plenty of negative stuff in there.

One item that really caught me off guard is “you tend to buy more books than your shelves can hold and you go overboard with your vices” (true – I have more books than bookshelves). It also said I’m a non-conformist in that I don’t care about trends (true), I would never be caught in designer clothing (true – unless Jaclyn Smith K-Mart clothing counts) and I’d make a hopeless Republican (true). It said I resent it when relatives encroach on my free time (true). I tend to pick up on other people’s emotions (true) and should not surround myself with negative people. I have a fluid communication style and I do not hesitate when I speak (true – I never use “um”, “you know” or other fillers and I don’t stutter or restart my sentences). One thing that I need to work on is my compulsive need to be right all the time (true – if I’m in a conversation where someone is wrong about a fact, I feel compelled to look it up and show them they’re wrong).

There was a lot more stuff, a lot of it positive, but these were the most specific and spot-on items I found. As a side note, during a particularly traumatic time where I was experiencing a lot of death and other stress in my family, my handwriting started slanting backward when it usually slants quite a bit forward. According to these books, back slanting writing is a sign of pulling back and being reserved and guarded. That lasted about 6 months.

So, my point is, if you look into a subject that you feel is out in left field, you might find some merit there once you get into it. Handwriting analysis may become a lost art – I heard on the news the other day that elementary schools are thinking about dropping cursive writing training because everyone uses a keyboard to communicate now. What a sad day that will be when our children no longer take pen to paper and write freely.