LUCKY SHOT

PART ONE

I started out with nothing. I still have most of it left.

Dad had met my mum in the sixties in the San Francisco bay. He was a 21-year-old army boy, she a street kid, following the hippie myth all the way from Higginsville, Missouri. One night. One kid. A lucky kid. That’s what they’d told me.

Dad did the right thing. Mum didn’t. She died when I was ten. That wasn’t part of the plan. Dad kept me. For a while. And then he couldn’t.

They call me Lucky. My parents that is, they called me Lucky when I was a kid. Anyway, there I was, in my late thirties, wondering what the hell to do with myself. My dad, my girlfriend, my dog, my job, and my best friend; all were gone. For one reason or another, I’d lost them all. I stayed in Santa Fe. I tried to work, to keep the homestead fires going, but, well, like I said, it was a rough year. I packed my bags, threw everything into the crew cab of my 1983 Nissan truck, and prayed she would take me further than Eldorado, the one in Santa Fe that is. With camera in hand, I looked for a new life.

Is this what they call a mid life crisis?