He's gone

 I would run up the stairs as fast as I could when they would yell down at me from the window to tell me he was on th phone, just to say hello.  The excitemnt I felt when he would pop up for a visit is beyond words, and only in a childs heart. The visits would happen maybe once a year, if I was in New York, maybe twice a year. Up until he went to prison.

I was turning into the most rebellious teenager, I resented my mother, and loved my absent father. I was turning into my mothers worst nightmare......   We were living in Greece and by the time I was 15 my mother couldn't handle me anymore so she sent me to New York to live with him. He was fresh out of prison, working in  an all night diner and living in the apartment above. It was located on Flatbush avenue across the street from a police station. The noise was 24/7.

I learned a few thing about him while I stayed with him. He liked to cook, and he cooked very well. He liked Charles Bronson movies and was amused by Boy George (hey, it was the early 80's). He wrote poetry and loved to take photograph's, and he still loved his guns.  The one thing that annoyed the shit out of him was that I smoked pot so he would bring me packs of cigarettes and tell me to smoke those instead....  He really didn't know what to do with me, and I got bored. I left after a couple of months and headed out on my own.  I still loved him, and when I would get in trouble I would call and he would take care of things.
 We would lose touch with each other for  a year or two, and then get back in touch, but in 1998 he disappeared for 11 years and didn't know what had happened to him. I honestly thought he was dead back then.  Then through people he got in touch with me and that's when I found out he was living in Kosovo.  I was forty years old and when I told my half sister (from my mother side) that I was in touch with him again, she yelled at me as to why I even bother with him when he was abusive to my mother and didn't help raise me.  That made me think really hard......

This is the only picture I have of him and me when I was little, and it isn't blurry in realty, but I guess this is how it is meant to be shown on here.  He died today at 6:15 am our time, so mid afternoon in Kosovo.
May the lord forgive him for his sins and I pray he rests in peace.