Third in a series
Re “Sellers’s Retirement Plans? He Talks About Others”
[img]2585|right|Chief Sellers||no_popup[/img]In his first full week after retiring from a 30-year gig at the Fire Dept., Chief Chris Sellers inevitably talks about his family more than about himself.
His 21-year-old son Evan currently is on a five-month holiday in Nicaragua, where he has been buying property with an eye to the future, and bolstering the lives of grindingly poor families he encounters – which is most of them.
Back in the States, Evan Sellers works on fishing boats. Why? The magnet is spending his days on the water, a love affair inherited from his father, which gives birth to a story.
“My real dad left when I was one or two years old,” Chief Sellers said. “I never had seen him. When I was 13, getting ready to graduate from ninth grade, my parents called me in. They sat me down and said, ‘Your biological father would like to come to your graduation. How do you feel about that?’
“I said ‘I don’t care. That’s fine.’
“Since I had not really ever seen him, I didn’t recognize him when he did show up.
“Turns out that he had talked to my parents about his parents, my grandparents, having an 80-acre farm up in Idaho. He wanted to take me up there after graduation. I said ‘okay.’
“I never had been on a plane, never had been out of the state,” said Chief Sellers, still only 52 years old. “We flew up there, saw them, and the last part of the trip, we flew back to San Diego where he was living.
“Some of the guys he worked with had chartered a fishing boat to go out for albacore, an overnight trip.
“I never had been fishing on the ocean, although I had been fishing on the lakes.”
Chief Sellers’s face brightened to a glow almost as penetrating as thesun.
“I caught three albacore, and I absolutely fell in love with ocean fishing.”
Here is the clanker to the chief’s 39-year-old story:
“That was the last time I ever saw my biological father.”
(To be continued)
