Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119)
Read Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) Online
Authors: Jordan Sonnenblick
“Oop! The Moment!
Once you miss it, it is gone forever!”
HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON,
legendary photographer
The very first thing I can remember is this: I am really, really mad at my mom for some reason. I'm sitting in the middle of the living room, arms crossed, pouting. At this stage, I am a world-champion pouter. There's an old guy â my grandfather â kneeling in front of me, trying to cheer me up.
“Come on!” he says. “If you give me just one smile, I promise I'll ⦠umm ⦠I'll give you a mint!”
I remember thinking,
A mint? He thinks I'm going to give in completely, just to get a mint?
When I don't smile, or even uncross my stubby little arms, he ups the offer. “OK, what if I buy you an ice cream?”
Ice cream, huh? Now he's talking my language. But I'm still mad, so I shake my head and concentrate on pouting harder.
Grampa leans in really close and whispers, “Peter, what if I give you a tour of my studio?”
This is too good to be true. Grampa is a professional photographer, and he never lets me go into his studio. Whenever I ask, he tells me, “You don't want to go in there. You wouldn't be allowed to touch anything. Besides, it smells like chemicals from the darkroom.” But that only makes me want to go in there even more. It's Grampa's Special Place, where he goes to Make Art. And Money!
Still, even at age three or whatever, I know how to play it cool. “I don't know,” I say. “Can I go to your studio
and
get a mint? That way, I won't even smell the menicalsâ¦.”
Grampa looks puzzled for a second, then laughs. “Menicals? You mean chemicals! All right, big man. Let's see that smile!”
I smile, big-time. Grampa takes my hands, walks outside with me, and puts me in his Big Truck, an SUV with a big yellow picture of a mountain on the side. In classy-looking letters I can't read yet, the words G
OLDBERG
P
HOTO
are printed right under
the back window. We drive across town to the studio.
I have no idea how long we spent in the studio that day, partly because I've spent so much time there since then that I can't be one hundred percent sure which memories are which. But I remember being in awe. Huge blowups of Grampa's photos are everywhere. There is a whole wall of brides: My grampa gets to look at a
lot
of beautiful ladies. Another wall is just for landscapes: The sun rising over the Alps. A pond with mist hanging over it. A desert that seems to stretch into infinity. My grampa gets to go to all of these places! The third wall is the best of all, even though it's kind of scary, too. Everywhere I look, there's something shocking: Soldiers, with real guns! An angry tiger, looking right at me! A cobra, raised up to strike! My grampa has looked at all of these dangerous things, with nothing but a camera between him and them.
Clearly, Grampa is the coolest person in the world. “Well,” he says, after I have gaped at every photo, “these pictures are my life's work. Do you like them?”
I nod really hard. Grampa grins and asks, “Do you have any questions?”
I look at the pictures some more. I have been wondering something the whole time, trying to imagine my grampa looking through his camera lens and pushing the button to take each of the pictures, but I am having trouble expressing it as a question. Fortunately, Grampa is amazing at waiting. Eventually, I blurt, “How do you
know
?”
“How do I know what?”
“How do you know the picture is going to be so good? Right when you push the button. How do you know?”
He laughs again. “Well, first of all, sometimes I take bad pictures, too. Only I don't blow them up and frame them for everybody to see. But ⦠when a shot is going to be really, really good, you can just tell.”
“How?
How
, Grampa?” I want to know, because I want to take pictures exactly like these someday.
Grampa looks thoughtful for a while, not saying anything. Then he bends his knees so we are eye to eye, puts his hand on my shoulder, and says, “I don't know, pal. Sometimes, you just know it when you see it.”
The first picture is a wide-angle shot, taken through the chain-link fence of the backstop behind home plate. There's a boy standing on a pitcher's mound in full uniform: green and gold. His cap is pulled low over his eyes, and his unruly black hair sticks out below the brim in all directions. He leans in toward home plate, his throwing arm dangling loose at his side. He must be looking in to get his sign from the catcher.
The second picture is zoomed in a lot closer, a full-body shot of the pitcher alone. He's standing sideways now, but his head is turned toward the plate, and you can tell he is about a thousandth of a second away from going into his windup. Maybe because he's fully upright, or maybe because of the tighter shot, you can just make out his eyes in this one. The look on his face is intense, like he is trying to stare a laser line right through the batter, the catcher, the umpire, even the photographer. The pitcher might be concentrating really, really hard. Or he might be in a whole lot of pain. It's hard to tell.
The next several photos are taken all in a row, click, click-click. Each is zoomed in more tightly than the one before it. The pitcher is in his windup, one arm cocked behind his head, his glove hand swinging down, across his body, toward the catcher. Then the throwing arm is whipping its way forward in stop-time as his compact body is launched forward by the thrust of his back leg against the pitching rubber. There's a shot that freezes the action just as the ball leaves the pitcher's hand. His arm is coming straight down, and his entire body is tumbling forward. If you look past all of the moving limbs, you might be able to tell that something has gone wrong. The pitcher's face is now stretched in a grimace of agony.
In the next shot, the pitcher has fallen halfway out of the frame so that you can only see his head, his shoulders, a blur of infield, outfield, the blue sky. The photographer adjusts in a split second, swinging the camera downward just enough to center his subject in the frame one more time. Now the pitcher has tumbled to his knees, and his glove hand is pressed against the elbow of his throwing arm. Click. There's another photo, blurred as though the photographer is moving when the
shutter opens: the boy falling forward. You can tell his face is going to hit the dirt at the foot of the pitcher's mound. You can tell it's probably going to hurt.
The photographer is my grandfather.
The pitcher is me.