Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip Read online

  I heard a strangled, high-pitched scream. I wondered where it was coming from for an instant, until I realized my mouth was wide open. Everything started going black around the edges, and I was slumping over again. The last thing I remember seeing was that hitter, standing on first base like he owned it.

  One day later that summer, six weeks after my elbow surgery, my grandfather picked me up before dawn on a surprisingly cold and windy Saturday to go on a little photo safari. For years, we had gone hiking together with cameras pretty often. When I wasn’t playing sports, you could usually find us together snapping pictures of nature scenes, old-fashioned trains, or whatever else Grampa thought I might like — but this day was different. Grampa wouldn’t tell me where we were going, or even how long we would be gone.

  I mean, I didn’t care. All I had been doing for weeks was sit around the house, watch sports, eat Cheetos, and complain. Except when I was at physical therapy, where I would sweat, grunt, and complain. My parents kept trying to find stuff for me to do, but the only things I was even remotely interested in doing were things I could never, ever do again. I mean, I was supposed to be in my seventh summer of baseball camp for the whole month of July, and my fifth summer of basketball academy for most of August.

  But when you’re not allowed to go anywhere near a ball, it’s kinda hard to get your money’s worth out of sports camp. So that’s how I found myself trudging along in the dark behind Grampa, schlepping a heavy backpack full of camera equipment up the side of a mountain somewhere in the Pennsylvania stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Aside from the backpack, I also carried a tripod in my good hand. Grampa was carrying a camera bag, plus a separate canvas knapsack full of sandwiches, drinks, and whatever other provisions my mother had thoughtfully forced him to lug uphill. Mom meant well, but I was pretty sure she believed I would starve if I spent three hours in the woods without a gajillion calories of snacks on hand.

  Grampa led me through woods, over areas of broken rock, into and out of moss-covered clearings, and finally out into the open. I gasped. We were basically at the top of a cliff. There was a field of gigantic boulders, and then … nothing. Grampa picked his way carefully over several of the rocks, and I followed. Now we were right near the edge, looking out over a deep valley. Actually, it was almost a canyon. The sun was coming up, but we were facing north, so it was still pretty dark below us.

  Grampa gestured for the camera bag and tripod, and without speaking, I started helping him set up. I still didn’t know why we had to be on a cliff this early to take whatever pictures he wanted, but I had been helping Grampa shoot pictures for what felt like forever, so I knew the general drill. For the next few minutes, Grampa gave instructions. Grampa was never big on talking about anything but photography when he was getting ready to shoot. He did this for a living, and he never messed around when there was a camera in his hand.

  “Peter, get me the Nikon with the two-point-eight telephoto lens. No, the longer one — the four hundred.”

  Wow, that was a serious lens. I mean, a couple thousand bucks worth of serious. Long zooms are expensive, and lenses that let in a lot of light are expensive. Lenses that are long and bright — forget about it. I was kind of nervous about putting something that valuable on a shaky tripod … on a boulder … on the edge of a cliff. I raised one eyebrow, and Grampa said, “What?”

  “Uh, nothing. I just … I mean, I’m wondering what the heck we’re going to be shooting that you need such serious glass for.” “Glass” is the generic photographers’ term for lenses, especially the really good lenses you put on fancy professional-type cameras. Most of the time, when we went out into the woods to take pictures of deer and snakes and stuff, we could get pretty close to the animals, and the light was good. So why take a chance and bust out with the super-pricey lenses?

  Grampa sighed, settled his long body down so that he was sitting on one fairly flat boulder and leaning back against another, and asked me to put the tripod right in front of him. Then he squinted at me in the slanted light that was coming from behind him over the rocks. Between the angle and the way he was silhouetted against the dawn, I couldn’t be sure, but I almost thought I saw my grandfather wink.

  “Eagles,” he said, leaning forward to look through the camera’s eyepiece. “We’re shooting eagles.”

  “Eagles? How do you know we’re going to see eagles here?”

  “Easy. This valley is right along their seasonal migration route. On a good day, something like fifteen eagles fly by this lookout.”

  “Is this a good day?”

  “Could be. It’s windy enough. Coffee?” He reached into the backpack I’d been carrying and took out a thermos and two cups. Mom would have totally disapproved of her father giving me coffee, but he’d been doing it for years whenever we went out on our photo missions. When I was a little kid, when Grampa came to pick me up, I would always ask if we were going on a Man’s Journey. He would always say, “That’s right. I’ll be the big man …” Then I would say, “And I’ll be the other big man!” Then I would laugh my head off.

  Guess you had to be there.

  I sipped my coffee. You’d think a tough old guy like Grampa would drink it black, but actually he loved cream and sugar. It was like having a mug of warm ice cream. We didn’t talk for a long time. That might have been the best thing about being with him: You didn’t have to think of stuff to say every minute. We could spend three hours together cleaning lenses, or editing photos on the computer, or even just driving in his SUV to some wildlife preserve in the middle of nowhere, and it never felt uncomfortable.

  I might have dozed off a little bit, because the next thing I knew, my coffee was cold, the sun was up over the ridgeline, and I had to pee like a bandit. I looked over at Grampa, and he was sitting perfectly still, except for his eyes. His eyes were scanning the sky from left to right, then back again. I stood up and walked down the trail to find an unobtrusive place to urinate.

  When I got back, Grampa was fiddling around with the camera. I knew what he was doing, because I would have thought of it, too. Now that the sun was getting higher, he was screwing a polarizing filter on to the end of the lens so that the sky wouldn’t look too bright or washed out if an eagle came flying by. “So, Grampa,” I said, “have you ever done this before? I mean, you’ve never taken me here.”

  He smiled. “I’ve been coming here at least twice every August for thirty years. Once, when your mom was a kid, I started to get bored of shooting nothing but parties, so I picked the hardest shot I could think of and vowed to get it someday. I mean, people get married all the time, but an eagle coming over the mountain, right at sunrise? That’s a once-in-a-lifetime deal … a major challenge. You always have to challenge yourself, Pete. Remember that.”

  “And you always come here alone?”

  “Every time.”

  “Then why —”

  “Why are you here, Pete?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  He didn’t say anything for the longest time as his eyes flicked back and forth along the horizon. Then I understood. “Mom told you to talk to me.”

  He nodded.

  “About what?”

  “Your arm. Your plans. School.”

  “What are you supposed to be telling me? My arm hurts and I probably can’t pitch again. What plans am I supposed to have? And what about school? It will start, and I’ll show up every day and go to classes.”

  Grampa poured himself a refill. He always said that after forty years of shooting weddings, he could stand still in a tux for six hours without a bathroom break, and from what I’d seen, that wasn’t an exaggeration. It was like the man had an entire extra bladder hidden away in some other dimension or something. In tense situations, it meant that you would always, always squirm before he did.

  “Pete, your mom and dad are both concerned about you. They wanted me to tell you that we’re here for you if you need anything.” Grampa looked a little bit embarrassed; he wasn’t a big emotional-speech k
ind of guy. “Oh, and … well … you need to join a club.”

  “A club? What kind of club?”

  “Dunno. Your mom got a brochure from the high school, and it said freshmen are strongly encouraged to participate in after-school activities. So, if you aren’t going to be doing sports …”

  “Great. Maybe I can join the knitting society.”

  He gave me his devastating Blue-Gray Eyes of Death stare.

  “Chess club?”

  The eyes were still upon me.

  “Irish step dance?”

  Grampa sighed. I never could take it when Grampa sighed. “Fine,” I said. “Tell her I’ll look into it, OK?”

  He nodded, ever so slightly, then turned back to searching the sky. Grampa used to have the sharpest vision of anybody in the world, by the way. For the next hour or so, every few minutes I would see a big bird, jump up, and point. Grampa would mutter, “Hawk,” and keep looking. Apparently, we weren’t there to shoot hawks.

  At one point, I asked, “How long are we going to sit here?”

  “Why? Got a date?” He smirked.

  We waited some more. I took another trailside bathroom break. I paced back and forth across the rocks. I crept forward to take a peek over the edge of the cliff. I took out the spare camera body we always carried, fished around for Grampa’s 85mm portrait lens, and started shooting candids of my grandfather from various points among the rocks.

  God, I was restless. I swear, I could never shoot weddings. Plus, my left arm was aching. The doctors said it would do that for at least another month, as the cartilage regenerated to replace the piece that had broken loose inside of my elbow joint in the spring. Ugh.

  Then Grampa said, “Pete.” I looked over, and a huge, amazing bald eagle was flying right toward us.

  You have these dreams of what the first day of high school will be like, you know? You’ll walk down the hallway and all your boys will give you high fives. Hot girls from the other middle schools will check you out as they whisper and giggle behind their hands. The teachers will immediately notice your incredible brilliance. The coaches will seek you out and invite you to try out for their teams, although they also tell you that, for you, the tryout is just a formality. If you get lost or something, you’ll be guided to class by some of the friendly and nurturing upperclassmen.

  I’m here to tell you, my introduction to ninth grade wasn’t quite that good. First of all, I kept getting jostled and banged around in the halls, so my bad arm (that’s how I thought of it now) felt like someone was stirring it around in a vat of ground glass. Second, I got lost over and over again, but nobody came jogging over to rescue me. At one point, I asked a girl who looked like she would know her way around, and she and her friends made a whole big deal out of teasing me:

  Ooh, look at the cute little furr-reshmannnnnn! Are you lost, little freshy-guy? Where do you need to go? Don’t worry, we won’t let you wander the big, scary halls. Will we, ladies? Now, all you have to do is go through this big metal thing called a door, and then walk up these steppy things called the staircase, and …

  I basically just wanted to die. Especially because the girl was a complete babe, and I could feel my face bursting into a crazy blush. That was on my way to third block, which for me meant my elective art class: Introduction to Photography. We had gotten a course guide in the spring of eighth grade, and when I was looking over it with my parents, my mom had forced me to sign up for this one. I could still hear her voice ringing in my ear half a year later: Ooh, that will be perfect for you! You know so much about cameras already — it will be an easy A. And look — it counts in your grade point average! It’s never too early to think about looking good to colleges…. I had tried to tell her that photography was a private thing between me and Grampa, but that had gone over like a lead balloon. So not only had I given in, but I had also convinced AJ to sign up with me.

  AJ and I met up on the way into class. He asked me how my day had been, but totally stopped listening when this one girl walked in. My back was to the door, so I didn’t really see anything except that she was tiny and had on a black hoodie. From my angle, she could have been anybody. Apparently, from his angle, not so much. “Wow,” he said. “Cuteness alert! Thanks for making me take this class, Pete. I love you, man!”

  Half an hour into the period, I was ready to strangle my mom. First of all, the teacher had stomped into the room and immediately assigned us seats alphabetically — never a good sign — which put me across the room from AJ. Second, Mom and I both should have paid a little more attention to the “Introduction” part, because the teacher was saying stuff like “The lens is the part of the camera that lets light in.” And “One important thing to remember with a digital camera is that water is not your friend.” Or my favorite: “If you all pass the first three written tests, in just a few short weeks you’ll be ready to touch a real camera!”

  I snuck a glance over to the far corner of the lab, where AJ was sitting, looking bored out of his skull. He was completely going to kill me for getting him into this. The girl he had pointed out was sitting next to me, and she looked bored out of her mind, too. In fact, she was muttering sarcastic comebacks under her breath, à la “Oh, so the lens cap needs to be off for best results! Ooh, better write that one down.” I tried to eavesdrop without being obvious about it, but when she said, “A real camera? In just a few short weeks? Mercy! We’re not worthy!” I snorted.

  She noticed. More than that: She turned and stared at me. Head-on, she was really pretty, in an angular way. She had jet-black hair that fell long and a little bit wavy over one shoulder, dark wire-rimmed glasses, sharp cheekbones, a tiny nose that might have been slightly pointy, and the palest blue eyes in the world. I mean, incredibly pale blue, like the eyes of a sled dog or something. Which might sound unattractive, but somehow on her, these eyes were working. She would have been cute with regular, normal-colored eyes — but with the ones she had, she was slaying me.

  “Don’t look at me,” she stage-whispered. “You might miss some priceless tidbits.”

  I just looked at her some more, because I didn’t know what to say. Between the eyes and the incredibly rare conversational use of “tidbits,” I think I was stunned.

  She raised an eyebrow. I felt myself blushing for the second time in less than an hour. “Seriously, dude,” she said. “Tidbits.”

  I kept staring. In a few seconds, this girl was either going to have to marry me, or get a restraining order.

  She pointed one finger across her body at the teacher. “Come on! This way to the tidbits!”

  That finally did it. I laughed out loud. I mean, This way to the tidbits? Who wouldn’t be forced to laugh? I turned back toward the teacher, who was glaring at me. He had the class list in his hand. This was so not good. “What’s your name, young man?”

  First the “tidbits,” now the “young man.” What was this, Outdated Expression Day? “Peter Friedman, sir.”

  I caught the girl, in the corner of my vision, mouthing, “Sir?”

  “Well, Peter Friedman, perhaps you’d like to repeat what I just said about the difference between automatic and manual modes on a digital camera.”

  Ugh. The old repeat-after-me trick. “Um, did you say that automatic mode figures out the aperture, shutter speed, ISO speed, white balance, flash setting, and —”

  He cut me off.

  “Mr. Friedman, what do you mean by aperture?”

  “Well, it’s the width of the opening in the lens.”

  “And what is ISO speed?”

  “That would be, umm, the light sensitivity of the camera’s sensor. If you turn it way down, you get more clarity, but your shutter speed has to be slower and —”

  The teacher cut me off again. “What are you doing here, Mr. Friedman?”

  “Uh, I’m in this class.”

  “No, I mean why are you in an introductory photo class when you clearly know a lot about photography already?”

  “Well, uh, I thought �
�”

  “You thought you’d get an easy A, didn’t you? I think we had better send you across the hall to Advanced Photographic Techniques. Grab your things.”

  Before I even knew what hit me, I was sitting in a different classroom, surrounded by upperclassmen. Wow, AJ was completely going to kill me. I met my new teacher, Mr. Marsh, who had the strongest New York accent I had ever heard. He welcomed me in by saying, “Take any empty chay-uh, Peetuh!” I sat down, looked around, and instantly knew this class was going to be a whole lot more challenging than the one I had just left. There were huge blowup prints of all kinds of photos all around me: nature, sports, portraits. There were also a couple of expensive SLR camera bodies lying around on tables, and a class set of super-new computers with huge monitors. As I found a seat — which wasn’t hard because there were only maybe eight people in the class — Mr. Marsh introduced himself and went right back to what he had been doing.

  About five minutes later, just as Mr. Marsh was demonstrating how to choose between three different kinds of lens filters (or “filtuhs”) for outdoor photography, the door opened again. Blue Eyes Girl walked in.

  AJ was absolutely, completely going to kill me.

  For the first time all day, I smiled.

  I didn’t sleep well the first week of freshman year. I know you’re thinking I was probably worried about all the usual new-school stuff: settling into classes and making friends and not getting stuffed into a locker for the weekend by hulking football players. But as scary as those things were, they weren’t horrifying enough to make it into my nightmares that week.

  No, my dreams were way, way worse than that. They were all pretty much variations on two themes. The first one always featured a flashback of what had happened a few weeks before with my grandfather and the eagle trip: Grampa sitting on the edge of a cliff with his camera and me crouching next to him, looking through the viewfinder of the spare camera. The eagle appeared and I tried to line up a shot. But everything else was a crazed distortion. In real life, I had gotten maybe fifteen shots off, but half of them were blurry and the other half had the eagle at least halfway out of the frame. Grampa hadn’t taken a single shot. It was like he was frozen in place, for no apparent reason. When the eagle had gone, I looked over at Grampa, and he was just staring over the ridge blankly. After maybe a minute, he jumped up, shook himself like he was waking up from a daydream, and started packing. We went home in a weird, stunned silence. Back at the house, Grampa had unpacked all of his camera gear from the back of the SUV, brought it into my room, and said, “Here, Pete, this is all yours now. I’m done.” Then he hugged me hard and left. I tried to get him to stop and talk — to tell me what was going on — but he just walked away.