Too Young to See
Every time I look at this image, I think of not only the two, Sue and Catherine, or the place, Purchase, but of a time when our lives felt as light at their leap. Did we know just how good we had it, just how lucky we were, to be able to carve out the kind of time needed to excel at a new sport, to aspire to be the best at something as much fun as ultimate? These images bely that we did. We grew up in other sports, and then found this one — more than a game, rather a sport where men and women get in cars on weekends to play, invent, celebrate, dance and just be.
I moved to Boston not for work but for ultimate. Who does that? I moved up after college because there was a team to play on, friends to live with, built-in safe harbor. Oh, and because Boston offered something I could report back to my parents — the possibility of work in a field I’d recently become enamored with. Photography. The year before I’d enrolled in UC Berkeley’s summer program. There, my life took a dramatic turn after I enrolled in a photography class while playing pick-up ultimate with the local team, The Flying Circus. Team names the surest sign that we were not in Kansas anymore. Our very own Oz in the making.
Two credits all that’s needed to get back on track for my senior year, so I took an English course, famous horror stories, like my transcript, and basic black and white photography. This my second photo course, but the one that made the biggest impression on me.
“What’s your major?” she asked as I pulled an image out of the fixer.
“European history,” I said.
Looking at my images she responded without giving it much thought. “You’re in the wrong major.”
WTF. I thought. Didn’t know this woman, and she didn’t know me. The comment might have been meant to make me feel good, but it just made me angry. Threw me off. I’d ask the lab assistant about it later.
“What did she mean?”
“You have an eye for composition. There’s a whole field of graphic design and photography you might explore.” He said. “I know photographers here in Berkeley whose images are not as striking as these.”
I wish I could remember their names. Meet them both for a cup of coffee.
Life is comprised of a series of conversations that stick with us, to us, conversations that alter the trajectory of our lives, like meteors getting pushed slightly off course while careening towards the sun.
Sometimes dramatically.
“Don’t you want to go to college?” the lacerating words from my father.
Sometimes accidentally.
“Just remember, money makes people happy,” advice but more like a warning from an educational consultant, making sure I understood what it would mean to dedicate a career to teaching.
And sometimes subtly.
“Pretend like you’re holding a bird in your hand. Hold it too tight and it dies, too loose and it flies away,” advice from my first photography teacher, who thought my compositions suffocated my subjects.
Life lessons, all.
I wish I had the ability to conjure up all these bits of advice, plot my path through life against their impact. They return to me at the strangest times, just pop in my head. Words that make us who we are. Motivate us to take risks, make the leap. Words that confirm a belief we might already have, and sometimes completely change how we look at the world.
“Sleep brings hope,” guiding words from someone working with us to win educational placement for our daughter. “Like my father used to say to me, don’t borrow worry.”
Words to live by.
My photography began on a whim, a desperate lurch for credits as I hurtled towards the real world with no real clue of what might come next. Over one summer, under bright San Francisco sun, I captured my future in a series of black and white images, too young to see it at the time.
(all images copyright Steve Mooney)
