Jumpstart the World by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Author:Catherine Ryan Hyde [Hyde, Catherine Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-89677-4
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2010-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

I went home, but it seemed weird and pointless to be there. There was nothing I wanted to do. I felt like I needed to throw myself into something. But identifying the something was proving tricky.

I felt like it would be a good time to have a friend. I could tell my friend all about my cat, and how worried and stressed out I was. And if it was a really good friend, I might even be able to talk about the thing with Frank. But that would have to be a pretty damn good friend. I didn’t have anybody who was even close to that category.

I looked down at the leather bracelet on my wrist—I’d been wearing it pretty much every day—and I did think briefly about Wilbur. Maybe I could tell Wilbur about my cat. But I didn’t even know Wilbur well enough to know if he liked cats. If he would understand.

I ate some crackers and then decided that my camera was my only real friend. I loaded up all my lenses and a couple extra rolls of film and took it all out to the street in search of Crazy Harry. I decided I would do a sort of photo essay on Crazy Harry. Maybe someone would look at the pictures and see what was so desperately lacking in his life. Maybe I could photograph the hole in Crazy Harry and it would mean something.

I’m not sure why I thought that. Except that something in my life had to mean something.

I sat on the stoop in front of our building for almost two hours. Until the sun moved across the sky so that I wasn’t in the cool shade anymore, and then it got too hot to hang out and wait.

I never saw Crazy Harry. Maybe he was back on his meds and I’d missed my shot. Or maybe even crazy people need to take a day off now and then. One way or another, he never showed.

First, it made me mad. Here I’d lost all my friends except my camera, and I couldn’t even get a break on something to shoot.

Then I decided it wasn’t reasonable to assume that some perfect shot was going to be sitting there waiting for me just because I needed one.

I hated moods like that, where you feel like you need something to fill this big hole in you, and it has to be now. The hole never gets filled, somehow. The something is always just out of reach.

But then I thought, Maybe you can’t just expect the shot to be there. Maybe you have to find it. Pursue it.

Maybe even create it.

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