Read Online If I Lose Her by Greg Joseph Daily - Free Book Online Page A

was ready to meet her parents. I wore a new pair of black wing tips my mom
had come across in her store, a pressed pair of black slacks and a white shirt
that I had spent more than half-an-hour starching and ironing myself.
     I looked at
the sky and thankfully we had good enough evening light that I figured as long
as their backyard wasn’t awful I should be able to pull off a decent portrait.
Then I took a deep breath and rang the bell. Jo answered. Thank God.
     “Hey Alex,
come in.” She was wearing the same slim-fitting, Oxford-blue dress she was
wearing the night of our first date.
     “Hello
Alex,” her dad said walking out from the kitchen. Her mother rose from the
couch where she had been reading some magazine and also walked to the front
door to greet me. “I’m Michael and this is my wife, Samantha,” he said shaking
my hand.
     “Hey Alex,”
Susan said coming down from upstairs. Then she tugged on her ear where my
piercing usually was and smiled. I just grinned.
     “That’s a
good-looking camera. Do you mind if I ask what kind it is?” Jo’s dad asked.
     Now, there
are two things that really get on my nerves about photography. The first is
when someone who doesn’t know the first thing about picture taking comes up and
tells me what they think will make a good photograph, like if I’m on holiday
with family and someone says: “Oh Alex, there’s this little bird over in the
tree a hundred feet away that is so damn cute. You should take a picture of
it.” The second is when someone tries to talk to me about my gear as though
they know something just because they own a camera yet they have never even
bothered to learn to change the aperture.
     “It’s a
Holga that used to be my dads,” I told him bracing myself for all of the camera
small talk.
     “Very nice.
Jo’s grand-dad use to use a large format for his photography that I still have
in the office. Would you be interested in seeing it?”
     I was taken
back. Jo hadn’t ever mentioned that photography was in her family.
     “Yeah. I’d
love to.”
     “He was a
real good landscape photographer back in the day. We used to go hiking up near
Boulder and the Vail valley when I was a kid, and I would build a campfire or
maybe do a little fishing while he would take photos.”
     In his study
was a beautiful antique, large-format bellows camera standing on a wooden
tripod in one corner. “When he died, he left me his equipment. I still go out
once in a while to take photos, when I really need some alone time, but I think
the real spark jumped from my dad to Jolene. Look, that’s her grand-dad there,”
he said pointing to a small black and white photo hanging on the wall.
     “Who’s that
other guy with him?”
     “That’s
Ansel.”
     It took me a
minute to process.
     “Ansel
Adams?” I said turning to him.
     “Do you know
his work?”
     “Are you
kidding? I used to look at Ansel Adams’ and Edward S. Curtis’ photos for hours
wondering what it would have been like to haul one of those monsters around the
mountains or valleys, taking photos before anyone knew anything about
photography.”
     “Really?
Didn’t Jo ever tell you that her grand-dad knew Ansel?”
     “No, she
never mentioned it,” I said looking at the photo of the two men smiling back at
me.
     “Well, then
you better see this,” he said flipping off the office light and leaving the
room.
     I followed
him out through the kitchen and into the living room, and there hanging on
their living room wall, as though it were one of their summer portraits, was a
stunning print of ‘Moonrise, New Mexico’. The very photo I fell asleep to every
night and woke up to every morning for more than 5 years.
     “Are you
kidding? Is it–”
     “It’s a
vintage, hand-signed piece; printed by Ansel himself.”
     It was
stunning. The depth of blacks and contrast in the photo was so much more than I
had seen in my little magazine clipping, and there in the corner