Shooting the Moon Read Online Free PDF

your backpack. You’ll learn how to read comic books while you’re walking, and how to shove them into the back of your jeans the second your parents turn around to see why you’re moving so slow.
    If you’re like TJ, you’ll learn how to use a camera.
    Taking pictures was about the first thing TJ ever did that made him different from the Colonel. The Colonel was the gung-ho type, always in forward motion. But to take pictures, you have to stop, step back, look around. Taking pictures, TJ stood still for once in his life. Up until the time he picked up his first camera, he matched the Colonel stride for stride, no matter where we were. If we were home, you could find the two of them either playing football or working in the yard, also known as the Colonel’s domestic domain, digging, watering,weeding, putting pesticide powder on the rose bushes. If we were at the PX or commissary, TJ and the Colonel went into competition mode, seeing who could find the most items on the shopping list the fastest.
    But the camera slowed TJ down. I think that’s why the Colonel never made a big to-do about TJ’s pictures the way everybody else did. And TJ’s pictures were great. Even I could see what my mother was always saying: TJ had a good eye. You’d look at pictures he’d taken of an old stone wall circling round some ancient city, and you’d see things you hadn’t when you were standing right in front of it. You’d see the images the shadowy parts of the stones made, or the little piece of graffiti someone had drawn where the wall met the ground.
    The Colonel didn’t see the point of it. “You can live your life or you can watch it,” he’d say every time one of our expeditions got slowed down because TJ wanted to take a picture of something, a statue, a duck waddling down the middle of the road, a little kid who’d just dropped his ice-cream cone on his lap. “But if you’re going to watch, standback, because those of us who choose to live are going to run you down.”
    â€œJust because you never learned how to focus a camera doesn’t mean you have to pick on TJ,” my mother would chide him. The Colonel always laughed when she said that, but you could tell TJ’s photography still got on his nerves somehow.
    For years TJ took his film to the PX to be developed. But when we moved to Fort Hood his junior year, he signed up for a photography elective and learned how to develop his film himself. For the most part, his pictures were still a sightseer’s pictures: Here’s this interesting building, here’s this weird-looking tree, over there, see that 1958 Coupe DeVille?
    But after TJ enlisted, his pictures changed. One, he started taking pictures of people. Two, he started taking pictures of the moon.
    â€œDo you really think the moon is all that interesting?” I asked him one afternoon when we were sitting in the kitchen after school, not long after TJ had enlisted, his latest pictures spread out all over the table. In some of them, the moon was just abright blob of light in the night sky. In others, it was thin and sharp-edged as a dime. “A comet would be interesting, and a meteor plummeting toward Earth would be very interesting. But the moon just kind of sits there all night.”
    â€œIt’s got shadows in it,” TJ explained. “From the craters. I think the shadows are interesting. And I like the idea that now there are human footprints on the moon’s surface. There’s something pretty cool about that. And, I don’t know, it’s this place in space that people have actually gone to. Can you imagine flying through space to the moon?”
    â€œYou ever want to be an astronaut?” I traced a full moon in one of TJ’s pictures, imagining I could see Neil Armstrong’s footprints on its surface.
    He shook his head. “Don’t have the brains for it.”
    â€œYou’ve