Man Abandons His Family, 20 Years Later Daughter Sees Beggar and Recognizes Estranged Father — Story of the Day
A woman recognizes the father who abandoned her as a young child in a homeless man she was photographing in the streets of New York.
Shelley Collins was 10 when the father she adored vanished without a trace. One moment he was there, always laughing, and joking, teasing Shelley, kissing her mom, then he was gone.
There was no goodbye note, no explanation. Shelley and her mother Dina had known he wasn’t the victim of some accident because his camera was gone, as was his favorite backpack, his passport, and half of the family’s savings. He had abandoned them.
Shelley was stunned when she recognized the man curled up against the wall | Source: Shutterstock.com
While Dina wept helplessly, Shelley had been dry-eyed, suffocated by a terrible rage. She’d loved her father, worshiped him. There had been nothing that Nicholas Collins could have done that Shelley wouldn’t have forgiven, except this.
His disappearance without a trace or explanation had left his wife and daughter questioning themselves, wondering what they had done, how they had failed him, believing they somehow deserved this pain.
Because Nicholas had been a talented photographer and had taught Shelley, she refused to pick up a camera until her last year in high school. She wanted to deny the talent she had inherited from her father the way he had denied her.
But somehow she found herself seeing the world through frames. The fall of light and dark was her instinctual language, and she finally yielded to her passion. Shelley’s daring, raw photos of everyday life quickly became popular and she won a prestigious award.
Shelley had adored her big, happy dad | Source: Unsplash
Over the next 10 years, Shelley traveled the world, capturing the joy and misery of a dozen cultures, then she received a phone call from a famous magazine. They wanted her to do a ten-page photo spread on the street people in New York.
Shelley agreed and hopped on the next plane to the Big Apple, never imagining she’d be coming face to face with her past.
Shelley dived headfirst into the sad and shut-off world of the homeless, haunted the dark alleys where they slept, warmed her hands at the flickering fires they started in trash cans. Slowly she was accepted, and her camera captured the loneliness of their lives.