Goodbye Aretha Franklin

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©Scott Sines
So I spent an hour or so at Aretha’s birthplace this morning. My thought was that the initial wave of grief had washed over most people and there just might be a picture down there of the truly faithful. Epic failure.

Still sometimes you just have to get off your ass and go look and you just might find something. I’ll be honest these pictures are pretty bad and I know it. But the thing they don’t show, can’t show is how welcoming the neighbors were. They were just so happy to have people come visiting.

Fans wrote goodbye messages anywhere they could find space. The message on this fellow’s shirt is oddly idiomatic of Aretha Franklin’s music.

The neighbors across the street from Aretha’s house were sitting in the front yard blasting her songs on a speaker and chatting up the visitors. Nearly everybody who visited wanted a selfie but the lady in the first picture (on the left in the white pants) would have none of that. If a visitor pulled out one of those sticks or went into the selfie pose, she pounced, offering to take a better picture of them, for them. No charge. She was just being nice. I wanted to take her picture but she didn’t want to be on TV which I thought was cute.

I asked if she was going to spend the day at the house but no she had to be at work at 11am at the neighborhood dry cleaners.

The battle to preserve Aretha Franklin’s birthplace is ongoing. The city has erected a historical marker but the property and the marker need to be protected from vandals by a cyclone fence.