Ben's been on the Rollingwood Waves swim team since he was five. Now he's fourteen.
In a week the Summer league swimming will be over. We'll have an awards picnic at the pool. We'll have a show of images using an LCD projector and some white seamless paper tacked to the side of a wall. Kids will laugh at photos of each other. Parent's will say, "Awwwwww. That's so sweet." when they see random photos of their kids. And things will calm down. Then Summer will be over and Ben will be in high school and it'll be back to the endless studying and relentless projects. He's taking a film class (movies) this year. It emphasizes screenwriting. But they also shoot a project. And then Summer will be over and only the master's swimmers will come to the pool with any sort of regularity. I'll miss it. So I'm shooting a thousand images a week. Trying to lock in visually what I feel emotionally when I'm at the pool. It's so much more than swimming. It's about growing up. The tidal flow of life.
Don't remember the camera or the lenses. Just the race. And later, when I get in to swim, I imagine the same cool water across my face. Maybe the only magic in photography is the power to condense so much into memory.
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