He Turned the Camera Around

Trying. | A note from the field

There's a photograph I didn't plan to take.

I was doing what I always do at the ball fields moving around the edges, looking for the frame nobody else sees, trying to catch something true in the space between the action. That's what photography taught me. That the best moments aren't the obvious ones. They're the ones happening just off to the side of whatever everyone else is watching.

I had my camera up. I was shooting the game.

And then I noticed my son doing the same thing.

He was standing about thirty feet away, camera raised, eye to the viewfinder, completely locked in. Tracking players, reading the light, doing the work. And I watched him for a second, maybe longer, before I realized I was doing to him exactly what he was doing to the field. Studying. Framing. Trying to hold something still that won't stop moving.

Then he turned and pointed his camera at me.

And I pointed mine back at him.

That's the picture.

Nobody tells you that doing it right means losing them.

You pour everything you have into a kid, your time, your values, your obsessions, your failures, your get-back-ups and if you do it halfway decent, they take all of it and walk away from you into their own lives. That's the job. That's the whole point. But knowing the point doesn't make the math hurt any less.

What nobody tells you is that somewhere in the middle of that leaving, before they're fully gone, they become you for a moment.

Not you as in a copy. Not you as in they do everything you do or want what you wanted. More like, something moved through you and into them and settled into who they are, and one afternoon at a baseball field you look up and see it standing there with a camera in its hands.

That's not a small thing. That's everything.

I fail often as a parent.

I've been too tired when I should've been present.

Too caught up in building things when someone small needed me to just sit down and watch cartoons. I've let my own noise drown out theirs. I've kept score of the wrong things and missed the ones that actually mattered.

But I'm trying.

Not as a performance. Not as a thing I say to feel better about the gaps. Trying as in I show up the next day. Trying as in I keep going back to the fields. Trying as in I still pick up the camera, still sit in the bleachers, still look for my kid even when he doesn't need me to find him anymore.

And maybe that's the part that transferred. Not the talent. Not the craft. Not whatever I think I know about photography or baseball or building something from nothing.

Maybe what transferred was just the trying.

The photograph is black and white. His curly hair catches the gray light. The field opens up wide behind him lights, fences, players in the distance doing what players do. And he's standing there in the middle of all of it, camera up, unbothered, doing his own thing.

He doesn't need me to teach him. He doesn't need me to show him how.

He just needed me to be there long enough for him to watch.

I failed at a lot of it. But I was there. I kept showing up. And somewhere in all those at-bats and innings and drives home when neither of us said much, he picked something up.

He picked up a camera.

He turned it around.

And for one second at a baseball field, we were the same.

That's what I'm trying to build. Not perfection. Not a legacy I engineered. Just enough presence, enough effort, enough showing up that something true passes through.

I'm trying.

Trying. is a brand built on the belief that persistent effort is its own identity. If this hit something in you, share it with someone who needs it.