Hazel had her project boxes out, building whatever twelve-year-old girls build.
You know the drill... glitter, glue, scraps, cardboard kingdoms and always a mess for dad to clean up once the extravaganza is complete. While she worked, I told her a story from when I was in the fourth grade in Cub Scouts. We made our moms pendants out of old prescription bottles. We poured colorful aquarium gravel into the bottle cap, baked it on parchment paper, punched a hole through it as it cooled, and pulled yarn through the hole. Gramma CeCe loved the thing. I might still have it tucked away somewhere.
Hazel told me to go find it. So, we headed over to my old footlocker.
Now, this isn’t just a box, it is a time capsule. The kind you would expect to find hidden in the cornerstone of a municipal building. Mine just happened to be in a red footlocker I painted blue in 1976. It holds the story of John Shepley from the beginning: trophies, letters, pictures, ticket stubs, medals, certificates, treasures, and ghosts.
Hazel lasted about ninety seconds before she forgot all about the 1970s pendant for her grandmother. What grabbed her wasn’t the craft, it was the mountain of Polaroids and Kodachromes stacked inside. Pictures of her daddy growing up. Pictures of a life she never saw and probably never suspected.
The ones that caught her the most? The party years.
Me drinking a Little Kings at a high-school party.
Me doing a beer bong at a fraternity house.
Me leading a Second Line down Royal Street in the French Quarter.
Dad pounding pints in a London pub.
Dad with several empty Irish-coffee mugs at the Buena Vista Café in San Francisco.
Mardi Gras with Jumbo at Shanahan’s.
Dad hugging people of all shapes and colors, all smiling.
Bachelor-party golf outings with cart girls in bikinis.
A hot tub in Vegas with the Houston Oiler cheerleaders
Tailgates in Bloomington, Champaign, Iowa City, Baton Rouge, and South Bend.
And then came the pictures of me with a couple girls I knew BEFORE her mother. Hazel didn’t say much, just raised an eyebrow like only a twelve-year-old daughter can.
Eventually we reached the photos of her mom and me. The digital-camera era. The box-camera era. Those early years when everything was still ahead of us.
Mom and Dad at a Bears game.
Mom and Dad at a Cubs game, a Sox game, another Bears game, a Jayhawks game, then another Bears game.
Mom and Dad cleaned up for a wedding.
Mom and Dad in PopPop and JoJo’s house before the renovation she’s grown up with.
And then New York, a year after 9/11.
Oysters at Grand Central Station.
Standing in front of the Chrysler Building.
Near the Brooklyn Bridge.
Her mom laughing, smiling, hair different in every picture. Beautiful in all of them.
Hazel stared at those the longest. Her first real glimpse of her parents when they were in love, before the long chapters life eventually wrote. She asked to take a dozen photos home. Of course I let her.
The rest of the day was just as it should be. Baking, projects, homemade pizza rather than turkey, a Stranger Things marathon, and the sort of quiet Thanksgiving rhythm instead of the hustle and bustle.
I think the Shepkids will remember Thanksgiving 2025 for a long time, Hazel especially. It was the day she saw her parents in another lifetime, and her dad as a young party monster before he turned into the guy who sweeps glitter off the kitchen floor.
She’s used to seeing a thousand pictures on her phone. She wasn’t prepared for a thousand pictures in a cardboard box buried in a footlocker. Different world, same dad.
Thanksgiving is over now, and it is time for the first official Christmas song of the season. Everyone else can start with Mariah Carey or Bing Crosby. I’m going with The Pogues, "Fairytale of New York."
The Bears play this afternoon. The Hoosiers and Boilermakers battle for the Bucket around suppertime. I pray Chalkhead Nation had a spectacular Thanksgiving and is rolling into Christmas and Hanukkah with some fire in their step.
Gusto and Astonishment
