people

Once upon a time, there was a dog who pooped in the house and the mother got him a new litterbox. And it was purple. And it was a girl named Sammy. And he started pooping a lot. The end.

(That’s Sammy pooping in the house.)

-by Sammy Martin

(illustration by Angie)

My dad used to like to tell this story about going to my grandparents’ house in Mitchell County one time when he was younger and newly in love with my mother.

He was the original roamer in our family. He loved to be outside, working in the garden, running for miles and miles, riding the tractor on the farm. And when he visited my mom’s house, he went for a walk in the mountains. There weren’t a lot of people living around Tipton Hill then. There aren’t many now. But people know when there was a new person around. And at 6-feet, 9-inches tall, my dad was hard to miss. So a few days later — after my dad and mom left — rumors started circulating around about this man people saw walking up and down the hills. “There’s a hippy out there,” people said. My grandparents eventually heard about this and, of course, said “Oh, that’s just Eddie.”

This is funny to me because I know hippies. I live in Asheville, after all, and my father — who went through confused periods where he made us all watch Jimmy Swaggart crusades on TV and wouldn’t let us listen to anything but gospel music — was NOT a hippy. He was progressive in his own ways: he wore his hair a bit longer; he was remarkably anti-racist; and he was certainly an environmentalist.

Who would think that this man holding my sister is a hippy? And to the right, that’s my rumor-squashing grandfather eating jelly beans with me on my grandparents’ couch.

These are two of the last pictures I have of Dad, taken the day I graduated from grad school. He couldn’t make it because he wasn’t feeling well, but he had my sister take these Polaroids of him holding a “Good job, I (heart) U” postcard. That answers the age-old question of where I get my goofy sense of humor.

Happy father’s day, Dad! I miss you!

My dad loved cameras. He had buckets of lights and bulbs and camera parts. He had tiny point-and-shoots. He had Polaroids. He loved his Kodak Disc Camera SO MUCH that when we left it on the Blue Ridge Parkway by accident during an ill-contrived picnic, he drove two-and-a-half hours back to the picnic site to find it.

But none of this camera love compared to when he got his first video camera in the mid-90s. He carted that huge thing (which looked, in comparison to today’s models, like a camera a TV crew would use) to the beach on one of our last trips there together. He set up his tripod, and stood there (was he in his red Speedo? I can’t remember) and filmed HOURS UPON HOURS of the waves coming in and out and the birds flying overhead. He told me once, If I could have been anything, I would have been a photographer for National Geographic. In a Speedo, probably.

So when I present to you this little slideshow (sorry, the migration of my blogs to WordPress deleted all these, and, well, do you really want me to rework them? If so, comment and I’ll try to find the files! Really! I don’t mind!) of my recent trip to Savannah, know that I come upon this honestly, this urge to record every little thing. And let me tell you how awesome it was to travel with someone who takes more pictures than me! And who laughs like crazy when I make her pose in front of fiberglass elephants in the parking lot of a fireworks store! (Which is not included in this little show because, really, nothing can compare to the alligator shot.) Ha ha!

I’m loving summer already! Thanks, Dad!