While He Slept

There was a time when my brother drove me up the wall. Call it a generation gap.

You see, he was five or six: I was 19 or 20. And yes, I was old enough to know better, but sometimes 20-year-olds aren't the most mature.

My brother had his age as an excuse.

If I was watching television, he would come into our family room and make noise, or stand in front of the TV, or do something else to disrupt my enjoyment of whatever it was that I was watching. He was testing his boundaries, testing my patience.

Even to this day, my patience can wear thin fairly easily. And he was my little button pusher.

Often, I would yell at him, scare him, and make him run to our parents. I would have a few minutes of calm before he would return. Sometimes, I would pick him up, carry him to our parents, explain his behaviour, and I would get a bit more of a reprieve.

Occasionally, I would pick him up by his shirt and throw him across the room, where he would land, gently, on the second sofa in our family room. At that, he would bawl and run to our parents.

I got no reprieve after that. I may as well have turned off the TV and walked away. It was the same result, only this time it would be my parents doing the yelling.

I would never try to pick him up now.

When I was in journalism school, I took a photojournalism class and loved to experiment with photography, to capture images that would add to a story. But the class also involved simply capturing photos of a certain theme.

For one theme, the subject was candid photography. The subject was not allowed to see us capture the image. I thought I would try to capture my brother playing but he always seemed to know when I was around, always wanted to ham it up for the camera.

And so, I waited until I was sure he wouldn't see me at work. I waited until he was asleep.

I wasn't particularly stealthy about my approach to this shot. I didn't need to be: once he had fallen asleep, you would have to practically shake him to awaken him.

I opened the door and entered his darkened room. Turned on the overhead light. I had a flash, on a cable and turned away from my subject, toward the ceiling. I focused and shot, and then without further ado, turned off his light, left the room, and closed the door.

Candid. The photo earned me an A (though I was told that if we had another candid theme, my subject had to be conscious).

Happy Birthday, brother!