Leif the Young Photographer - North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii - January 5, 1985 - Almost 10 years old

Leif began to be interested in photography when he was quite small, even back in Japan before he was 8 years old. By the time we lived in Hawaii, he had a Pentax pocket camera of his own, as I recall, but liked to borrow my Minolta SLR to try fancier lenses and shots.

It's on Oahu's North Shore that some winters the giant waves up to forty feet high come rolling in, those incredible waves you see in surfing films that no one else in their right mind would try to go out in. One winter when we lived there, the waves were up, in January 1985. I've already written about Leif scaring the daylights out of my when he skipped out into the bay on the coral rocks after one of the huge waves receded. He could have been washed away when the next one came in.

But he was also having a great time taking pictures, and I caught this photo of him when he positioned himself in an alcove and was snapping away. He loved those immense forces of nature.

At Fourteen, Leif had a dream shattered

Leif had dreamed of being a fighter pilot for years and I think he fashioned a good part of his personality around that dream and what he thought a fighter pilot would be like, but when he was fourteen, that dream was shattered when he found out his eyes weren't good enough to pass a flight physical. It wasn't only the end of a dream to fly, but also the end of something I don't even know if he was fully aware he was pursuing . . . following in the footsteps of his father and older brother as a pilot.

I found this short essay that he wrote for a school assignment that year, when he was a freshman in high school, about how he learned of the end of this dream. While what he says is true about it opening other avenues he hadn't considered, his way of brushing aside his disappointment is quintessentially Leif. He would always present things to others as though he could take it nonchalantly, whether this was true inside or not. This was a major disappointment for him. I think if it had been the only one, it would have passed and he would have excelled at something else. Unfortunately, his life seemed to be a series of such disappointments when it came to both love and career.

He went into Air Force ROTC in college, and was a top notch cadet, but when he went to summer camp, he pulled a muscle in his groin and wasn't able to do the sit-ups, and ended up failing the physical fitness test because of that. Then he was out of sequence for graduation and would have been a year behind. In typical Leif fashion he decided that wasn't for him. He didn't want to have to go back and do it over, and he didn't want to be around college an extra year, so he dropped out of ROTC. This was a big shame because he would have been an excellent officer.

Then when he enlisted in the infantry and tried to excel there, and did, as the best machine gunner, he was once again, for the third time, betrayed by his body, which looked so incredibly big, strong and tall. This time it was his lungs when he got asthma and couldn't keep up on the runs.

But here is Leif in his own fourteen-year-old words;

End of the Illusion

After they finally called us in from the waiting room I was led into one of those typical optometrist's offices with one of those chairs with one of those odd-looking gadgets that resemble a pair of goggles attached to it.

After waiting around examining the equipment I was greeted by by the most attractive brunette I have seen in some time who
introduced herself as "Dr. Danny" (short for Danielle).

We fumbled around for a while trying to make sure that my eyes weren't going to explode from glaucoma and then she planted me in the chair and began to flip switches, turn dials, and make me dizzy with all the different lenses that blurred everything totally out of focus, and this discomfort was compounded despite her charming company by the itchy sensation produced by the aggravating dye that she had dropped in my eye for the glaucoma test.

She constanly asked me which was clearer and to read the smallest line on the chart. After about an our of this she pulled
the metallic monster away from my face and said in a rather sympathetic voice, "How do you feel about wearing glasses."

It was that moment that began my realization that I had been deluding myself for several years as to what I wanted to do for a career. Ever since I had been a little kid I had dreamed of being a fighter pilot and had gotten myself so locked into this ambition that I had completely ignored my other interests, and as I know now, I have many. Flying has always been a passion in my life and still is, but other things, not the least of which is music (this is evident to anyone who enters my room, which is cluttered with dozens of tapes, CDs, and records, guitars, music books, and last but definitely not least, is the giant centerpiece, my Kenwood "Spectrum 875 music system and entertainment center," with a matching set of speakers boasting a combined output of over 620 WATTs, which I was willing to part with $1,199.00 to aquire).

Although it came as a bit of a shock to discover that the ideal of being flight eligible that I had been dreaming of for so long was no longer a possibility by the normal means, it was also a blessing in disguise because I had locked myself into an occupation that I really wasn't sure that I wanted to do for the rest of my career, and music, photography, and snowboarding, all have become an integral part of my life.

Today as I was thinking about this, we were in a store in Sarasota where they have many of these placards with witty, interesting and poignant sayings, and I realized when I was reading them, for many of them were about believing in dreams, having hope, believing that something wonderful will happen, that I have lost that belief, that my illusions were shattered when Leif died.

Leif's G.I. Joe "Bumper Car"

This is a photo Leif took in May 1987 when we were living at Fort Sheridan, Illinois on the the north side of Chicago. He was twelve years old at the time. I hadn't ever seen it before I found his albums after he died, or at least I didn't remember it. I like it because it's an amusing example of his sense of humor.

We had some "Broetchen" (German hard rolls) and at that time, like a lot of kids he didn't really care for the crunchy crust but he liked the soft interior, so he sometimes he would kind of hollow it out and eat the part he liked. Evidently this time the hole he made in the "leftover" crust made the roll remind him of a bumper car just the right size for one of his G.I Joe figures, so he plunked one into it and added a wooden skewer or pencil to be the rod at the back of the car that connects it to the electricity to run it, and there it sits on the plate full of crumbs.

It's hard to imagine anyone but Leif thinking of something quite like this. He often saw things in new and different ways than other people did, and also had that wacky and surprising sense of humor I've mentioned often.

Nostalgia, Remembrance, Gratitude, Wishing

Finding Leif's photo albums, the two he actually put together (as opposed to a bunch of loose photos from his army days, mostly of people we don't know) not only brings back a lot of memories but shows me new things about Leif and what he chose to photograph. Even as a young teen he was photographing himself, though not as much as he did in the last few years of his life. I don't know for sure whether he placed his camera on something and used the timer on these two or whether he had someone there with him who took them, but I'm pretty sure neither Peter W. nor I took them, or even saw them before.

These were taken the the back yard of our house (army quarters) in Puerto Rico, and I probably should have known about them and scanned them to post when I was writing about that house and yard. Now they'll have to stand on their own.

These were taken around February 1991, or at least that's when the roll of film was developed, so Leif was sixteen years old in these photos. In the one where he is far from the camera, it looks like he is swinging the machete he used to help keep the jungle under control around there. In the one where he is posing leaning back against a palm tree, you can see the same outfit closer up. He dressed in fashion and in fashion fads in those days, with his purple shirt and deliberately ragged jeans, the kind with narrow ankles.

Tonight Peter W. and I were having dinner in Brandon and he said he felt very nostalgic for all the times we have shared, and that he wondered whether we would ever have dinner in Brandon without remembering the times we did so with Leif. I said I didn't think so, and that I think of him in every room of our house. Even the car we were driving was hand-picked for us by Leif. We talked about the years and times in so many places and how fortunate we were to have each other and our sons. He said that when we are young, we don't really appreciate what we have because we are so busy trying to get ahead, make a secure future for our family and ourselves, and that he wishes we could go back and do it over.

I suppose in a sense we don't really appreciate everyday life because it is everyday. We don't know how special it is until it's gone. I can share the nostalgia with him, and and looking at photos of Leif or photos he took, and thinking about all this every day for the blog certainly brings home to me how much we had and what a great loss we have suffered. Yet we are still fortunate to have had so many good years, to have had two brilliant and handsome sons, to have each other, to have seen so much of the world.

In another sense, though, I did know how good I had it, how special our lives were. That's why I took so many pictures, trying to save all those memories, trying to preserve something of those feelings, and I am so immensely grateful not only for the experiences and the family, but for the photos and the memories.

It is both joyous and sad to remember it all, joyous because it was so good, sad because Leif is gone. Tonight Peter said it still doesn't seem real or possible that he's dead. We know it is true, but it seems as though it just can't be so.

I wish, oh how I wish, he were still here!

Leif's Photos of Sports Cars from August 1986 in Oakland, California

Long before he got the Minolta 7000, Leif was taking pictures. The earliest ones I've found were taken the summer we moved from Hawaii to Illinois, and that's probably what got him started wanting a good camera. I no longer remember what camera he was using, but it must have been one that we had and weren't using for Peter W. or me.

These are some of the first photos he took, of sports cars he spotted in Oakland, California, which is where we stayed briefly when we got back to the US mainland. It was in a kind of warehouse district on a military facility and the surrounding area. He was particularly thrilled to spot the unusual stainless steel DeLorean and took quite a few photos of it.

Whether it was looking for them, reading about them, test driving them, making models of them, or owning and driving his own cars, Leif was completely enamored of cool cars from a very early age.

Leif was eleven and a half years old when he took these photos.

Leif the Photographer

When Leif was in junior high school in Highland Park, he started on four new interests that consumed him, learning to play the electric guitar, building and running radio controlled model cars, computers, and photography. The computer wasn't completely new, since we'd had one in Japan and Hawaii, but it was in Illinois that his interest blossomed and he also began using it for school assignments. I've already written about the RC cars and his guitars.

There was a camera shop in Highland Park that also sold used cameras. I was doing a lot of photography for publication in those days, as well as the usual family photos, and Leif was with me at times when I went to the camera shop to request special processing. My entire family seems to have the photography bug, at least in my generation, and Peter W. has it as well. I think it rubbed off on Leif. He spotted a Minolta 7000 SLR camera that he wanted and lobbied hard to get it as a gift. The set was considerably more expensive than what we usually spent for either Christmas or birthday for our sons, and I wasn't sure that expensive a camera was a good idea for a young teen. However, Leif was very technically savvy, and had some obvious artistic talent, and we wondered whether this might prove to be a really good thing for him. In the end, we made one of our many bargains with him. He would get the camera and the superb MD lens that came with it, one which went from wide angle to a short telephoto, and a flash apparatus as well, but they were for both Christmas and birthday, and he had to work off the remainder of the price that was above our gift budget.

The first couple of years he had the camera, he took quite a few rolls of film. His favorite subjects in those days were cool sports cars, whether seen on the street or at a car show, and our cat, Scamp. He also liked photographing ultramodern architecture. When we moved to Puerto Rico after his freshman year of high school, he photographed his first love, K., when they were on a date, and his friends at a party.

After that, he used the camera less and less and although he kept it, it mostly gathered dust. One reason for that was the cost of film and developing. He did take some pictures of Nikko when they were at Fort Drum, and a few with his army buddies, but after that, he acquired an inexpensive digital camera and the combination of that and his computer made it much easier to take pictures. From that time on, his main subjects were himself, his computers, his guns, his cars and motorcycles, and photos of the two women he was involved with and loved after his divorce. He also liked to take photos and video with his cell phones. I've posted quite a few of his photos on this blog already.

Eventually, when we were moving him to Florida, I asked him whether he wanted to keep the Minolta. He just shrugged. It was plain he wasn't going to use it any longer, and over the years the shoe mount for the flash had gotten cracked, so he thought it wasn't worth anything. I sold it with some camera equipment of mine and Peter W.'s and he was happy with the digital camera he had until it quit working. The last birthday gift we gave him was a new Fuji digital pocket camera he had his eye on, January 27, 2008, when he was here for dinner the day before his birthday. Sadly, in the two-and-a-half months he had it, he hardly used it.

The photos above are of Leif in Puerto Rico with his Minolta 7000 camera in 1992 when he was photographing the Tall Ships coming into San Juan during the celebration of the 500 years since Columbus discovered America, his camera, and one of the photos he took of a Ferrari in December 1986.