Good Luck Preparing for the Unexpected

There was a large guest groups scheduled for the week after camp, and as much as I would have liked to stay, I needed to get back to work.  They were going to be returning from another big shoot on Thursday, and I needed to be there to process the new footage.  So I said goodbye and headed home on Tuesday afternoon, with a long drive ahead of me on Wednesday.

 

When I got to my parents house Tuesday evening, we all had dinner together.  When the meal was over, they sat me down, and said they had something to tell me.  In the conversation that followed, they informed me that now that my Mom was done taking care of my aunt, instead of returning home, she was actually going to move out to my grandparent’s old house.  My parents were not necessarily planning to get a divorce at that point, they were just going to be living separately for the time being.

 

This came as a bit of a shock, since while I had no illusions that my parent’s marriage was perfect, things had seemed fine when I was there the previous weekend.  They had at least discussed this topic with me once in the past, six years before.  They had told me then that they were at least going to wait until my brother graduated from high school.  That event had passed three years before, and after a few months of waiting for the other shoe to drop, I had stopped worrying about it.

 

Ironically the straw that had broken the camel’s back was an argument about their shared email account.  Technology had a way or stressing my parents out, and if things didn’t work the way they expected, the frustration level increased exponentially.  Regardless, it’s a pretty ridiculous thing to be fighting over.

 

What followed that evening was a very strange conversation by any measure, and still left things pretty open ended.  But one way or another, I had to leave for LA the next day.  I did put the journey off for a few hours, long enough to meet H for lunch, to get her perspective.  I had actually quoted a few of her past observations about my family to my parents the previous night.  She had no experience with that situation, but it was still good to have someone from the outside to talk with about everything.  At the same time, she was also dealing with a major recurring infection, which was scary to even hear about.  We also had a discussion about trust between males and females, which was very interesting and enlightening.

 

Once we had finished lunch, I continued south to LA, to my other home.  I got to my apartment late that night, and headed to work the next morning, trying to put the family issues out of my mind for the time being.  There was no shortage of distractions at work, and they had just finished a shoot on a large Navy ship off the coast of San Diego.  I had missed out on that shoot as well, due to budget constraints, and that was the only time we lost any data on the production.  We didn’t discover until months later that an entire media card of footage had disappeared without being copied, which is exactly what my role usually prevented.  Between editing the footage we had already shot, and preparing for the combat shoots coming up that fall, we had lots of work to keep us occupied.