I give everyone I meet this piece of advice: “Do what you love. And do it often.” We never know how much time we have on this world, but whatever that time, it’s far too short to not be surrounded by the people or the things that we love. It’s far too easy to forget that, to think we have infinite time, and then lose track of the people who mean the most to us.
My mom has a very philosophical way of looking at the days around her, especially when they’re hard {or just giving her a hard time}. She calls it the “Leroy Test.” It’s named for her younger brother, my uncle, and all that happens in the Leroy Test is that Mom gets up, looks around at what the day has thrown at her, and asks, “What would Leroy do with this day?”
image: npr.org
My uncle was a brilliant man, a practiced storyteller, and a force of nature. I might have mentioned in my 15 things post that I think he’s one of the bravest men I’ve known, simply because he’s waded head-first into some of the worst possible situations because he believed in telling stories, true stories, to people who needed to know them. To put this in context, I was in a lot of the same situations. I was heavily armed. Uncle Leroy was armed with a camera, a mike, a sheaf of paper, occasionally a cell phone. Some days, they gave him a flak vest, some days not. It didn’t stop him.
I remember one day during my first deployment, back in 2003, being out on a patrol and coming across a couple of broken down vehicles. We called up for a recovery vehicle and moved to pull security for them until help could arrive, and as we waited, I realized that the big shaggy-haired guy leaning on the front of a vehicle and lecturing one of my soldiers about something looked pretty familiar, so I walked over to see who it was. Sure enough…
image: npr.org
I asked him if he knew what kind of an area he and his crew were driving around without escort, and he told me of course, the area where all the stories were. Danger didn’t stop him.
Cancer did. We lost him to cancer in 2008, but he fought it all the way and blogged about it to make the experience, if not easier, at least more understandable to everyone else.
Lots of people might know him from his time producing stories and television programs, and from his cancer blog, but some of the best stories live on in pictures. They need no embellishment, no elaboration. They just are. The stories they tell is one of the major reasons I became a photographer. I only regret that I wasn’t taking pictures soon enough to capture more memories. However, there exists at least some proof that my dad was fast with the shutter {first two pictures}, as was my uncle’s cameraman in Albania {last picture}, and these photos tell a warm story all their own:
Mom and Leroy c. 1980, image: laurafreberg.com
Meeting my uncle for the first time {yes, that’s me}. Image: laurafreberg.com
Uncle Leroy in Albania, image: laurafreberg.com
I love the way my mom is looking at my uncle, with mixed love and exasperation. And the way he looks like he’s laughing when he’s holding fierce little me. And the way he’s smiling in the midst of everything, whether it’s in the middle of a deceptively calm group of kids in Albania, in the dust of Iraq, or in the top portrait, a picture that headed his cancer blog for a long time. Leroy lived life large and laughed at it, whether it was smiling back at him or throwing its best punches. That’s enough to inspire me to get up, look my day in the face and think, “No matter what you throw at me, my uncle would have liked to have this day. And he would have done something pretty amazing with it.”
