Dear Diary -

Day four without power.  I can't pretend that things are going well for me, but I seem to be limping along. 

I think a house reveals the personality of its owners, but bedside tables and dresser drawers reveal the owners' personality disorders.  It could have been worse, I could have found Fifty Shades of Gray and some *ahem* marital aids *ahem* buried in the bottom drawer of Sue's dresser; instead I found my dad's loaded .357 revolver and what turned out to be the combination to the safe in the garage.

So apparently my dad went paranoid in his old age.  In addition to the .357, I found a .45 semi-automatic handgun, a single-shot .22 rifle, another ancient-looking rifle of some sort and a 12 gauge shotgun, along with a ton of ammunition.  There's also about $100 worth of dimes and quarters along with some binoculars and some really strange books.

Dad was too young for Vietnam and a little too old for the Gulf wars.  I guess he tried to enlist right out of high school but was denied because of the infamously bad McClary knees.  It didn't stop him from being a military buff, so I'm used to seeing Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler and W.E.B. Griffin novels around the farm.  The books I found in the safe were of an entirely different kind.  There were books about home defense, canning, homesteading and basic survival skills.  He even has the official U.S. Army Survival Manual from 1973!

It's so hard to think about Dad in the past tense - I keep expecting him to walk through the door and ask me why in the heck I'm messing around with his bills and re-arranging his house.  As much as I love my dad I have a sense of not knowing him as well as I thought that I did.  Going through his house has revealed pieces of him that I never would have known, but it still doesn't make me feel any more comfortable about doing it. 

My discoveries haven't been all bad, though.  I found a scrapbook in the cedar chest that contained what must have been every newspaper article that mentioned my name, every program from every event that Dad and Sue attended for me and pictures of Dad and me that I'd never seen.  It kinda made me feel like shit, though, and got me thinking about all of the times that I'd slighted them (especially Sue) for fear of pissing Mom off.

And now I feel like a crappy person.  A crappy, confused, scared person.  Great.

S