Cloning

I must have been about his age, maybe seventh grade. I'd bought a used Argus C-3, a rangefinder camera with a fairly sharp lens--for the times, of course. That old brick of a camera offered possibilities I didn't fully understand, so my Sunday School teacher dropped by one day. He was a photographer--you know, school shots, weddings, family portraits. He knew what he was doing and somehow he'd discovered that I wanted to learn. So he dropped by. I remember exactly where he stood on our front lawn when he drew out the scheme.

It looked just like the drawing on the crumpled paper above, the wastepaper I'm about to toss. Same thing. He started with the science of the camera. "A photograph," he told me, "is composed of two variables--time and light." The more light you have, the less time you need; and visa-versa. If I shot with a closed aperture, I needed greater shutter speed. Okay.

I was into photography, largely because a friend of mine had given me a homemade photo enlarger. I'd mixed up developer and fixer, and slowly learned how to develop shots from the C-3 negatives. Something almost magic appeared in that process, and it took some diligence to turn out images that were worth looking at, not just girls in bikinis. My darkroom was in the basement.

In all seriousness, my dad told me he had a few questions about whether or not being a photographer was a vital "kingdom calling"--you know, "does the Lord God almighty want you taking pictures of school kids? Maybe he'd rather have you being their teacher."

(I'm sure Dad never considered photography as art.)

So education it was, but I never really lost interest in photography. In 1976, before the Schaaps moved from Arizona to Iowa, I bought a real single-lens reflex camera. 

Twenty years ago, I missed early morning forays into the country, the kind of thing I used to do a lot when I was my grandson's age. So I started getting up early on Saturday and driving around, armed with a camera. Photography teaches you how to see, Dorothea Lange used to say. It's good for the soul. It is.

Last week, a dozen elegant trumpeter swans were on the river, or so I was told. I pulled out my camera, stuck on the huge 400mm lens, and took my grandson out. Had never tried to shoot living things before. I put his pictures on a thumb drive so he could take them home. 

He came back to our place again last Friday. I'd hauled out my old Canon DSLR and was ready simply to give it to him. I took him downstairs, told him about all the eagles out at the river park, let him known he could use this old Canon of mine, and we could go out there. Then I started in a lecture that began with the diagram on that scrap of paper at the top of the page, the one my Sunday School teacher/photographer had used out there on our front lawn.

'T'was painfully clear he wasn't particularly interested. 

My grandfather, by all reports, was a better after-dinner speaker than he was a preacher, but then most preachers weren't all that good in the years he occupied a pulpit. They didn't have to be; they were dominies.

I don't think my dad ever thought much about the ministry. He was, as was his father, a greatly religious man, however. When Grandpa Schaap looked over his boys--four of them--and didn't see a one whose eyes were on the ministry, he might have felt a touch of sadness. 

I'm happy to say that I'm not my father either. As often as I've written about paternity issues--two novels, a collection of short stories--I've thought a lot about it.

I probably don't need to say that my son--the Oklahoma fire-fighter--isn't me either. And that's a good thing, don't you think? 

If we could order up doppelgangers, the world would be choking with clones. What interested me when I was in seventh grade is not what interests my grandson, sixty-some years later. That old Canon of mine comes with three lenses. It's a good old camera that could teach him a lot, but there are no Legos in the bag. With Legos he's in his own world. 

I'm enough of a Calvinist to believe that the idea of his loving photography was, from the get-go, my dream, not his. Call it pride--that's what it is. I wanted him to be me, and I'm guessing this morning, that Canon still here on floor behind me, that I'm not the sole sinner on that score.  

And I can't help myself either. This morning, I'm thinking, you know?--maybe when he's in eighth grade.