I'm rushing to pack for a portrait shoot in Aspen later this week. Though I've had wonderful times in Alaska and Montana, I've never spent much time in Colorado. It will be great to see some of those majestic mountain views I've only seen in photographs. Not to mention I'm excited to get out of the heat and humidity that has been Washington of late.

Before I leave, I thought I'd share with you the incredible déjà-vu I had on Monday, one that brought me back to the very first time I ever picked up a camera in junior high school.

Alexandra took her first tennis lesson on Monday and I, of course, dutifully tagged along to record the moment. As I stood along the chain link fence outside the court, trying to focus through the holes, I had this overwhelming sense of having been in that exact spot before. And I had.

Many, many years ago, right around the time of the nation's bicentennial, my Uncle Allan in Chicago sent me the greatest gift I've probably ever received. It was  an Olympus OM-1. And for those of you who are either too young to remember or too old to remember, the OM-1 is the camera that started a revolution. The first truly lightweight and tiny SLR, it ushered in a new era in photography, one that made professional cameras much more accessible and attractive to the consumer market. The OM-1 was a revelation, pure and simple.

My uncle sent me this camera for one reason: I told him that I thought I liked photography. To say my uncle is generous is an understatement. In fact, my whole childhood was seemingly spent in University of Chicago sweatshirts (where he was a legendary professor) and playing with the Lego toys that kept arriving in the mail. But after the OM-1 came, it was all photography, all the time. And most of that photography was done in the same spot: at the tennis court at the Plainview Pool.

(A pioneer in sleep research, Allan Rechtschaffen was recently awarded the National Sleep Foundation's lifetime achievement award. A quick Google search tells me, "He worked with Anthony Kales in developing the currently accepted adult human sleep scale criteria used by sleep laboratories to report human sleep scale data which is commonly called the R and K system or Rechtschaffen and Kales system named after its key developers.)

Clearly Uncle Allan had other things to do, but one of the things he loved to do was critique my photos, by mail from Chicago. There was no "send me a quick jpeg" back then. No, I would take pictures, develop them in the darkroom in the basement of my house, print them, and mail them to Uncle Allan for his comments. He would mark them up, with comments like "great action!" and "good crop!" and I would be giddy. 

So every few days I would ride my bike back to the Plaiview Pool, flash my Town of Oyster Bay identification card to the teenager at the guard shack, grab some french fries and ketchup from the snack bar and settle in behind the chain link fence by the tennis courts. Sometimes I would bring the Spiratone 400mm "Girl Watcher" lens I bought from an ad on the inside cover of a comic book, not a place one normally associates with quality photographic equipment. It was plastic and not very sharp, but I didn't know anything back then other than "Girl Watcher" was a great name for a lens. I never really gave much thought to the folks who were playing tennis and how they must have been perplexed as to why some kid was shooting pictures of them. Only grown-ups think about things like that, not a kid with an orange Schwinn Varsity 10-speed. I guess you could say that shooting tennis was how it all started for me.

And without a doubt, I can state the following: had it not been for that OM-1 from Uncle Allan, I would not be here these many decades later writing about my career as a photographer.

It's normal that a parent would start to see double, historically speaking, as his child gets older and starts doing the same things he did as a youngster. And so it's probably not surprising that as I stood outside that fence at the tennis courts in Arlington the other day, all I could think of was another tennis court from a distant time.

Matt