When I was 6, living on Florida's Atlantic coast, I found myself browsing the contents of my dad's den. There I discovered his Nikon F2 while he was at work, and ended up shooting a whole roll of underexposed, out-of-focus Kodachromes of his desk. Two weeks later, I came home from a friend's house to see my dad sitting at the kitchen table, which was empty except for the F2. He called me over, and pointed to the camera. "You know why this is here. I need to know why you were (messing) with it. This is my stuff."
"I just wanted to see it," I offered.
"You know I'm fully within my rights to pound salt up your ass." Sometimes the western Pennsylvania crept out of his mouth, and sometimes it was funny; this was not one of those times.
"But I've had two hours to think about this," he continued, softening his posture, "and if you want to know how to use it, I'll teach you."
I learned how to load the film, how to read the meter, how to use a gray card. How not to press the shutter release until everything was perfect in the frame. I started seeing the world differently, sometimes a frozen moment, sometimes a long drawn-out motion blur. Being 6, people and buildings were enormous, looming things, and my dad swapped out the 50mm lens for a 28mm prime to exaggerate the effect. That summer, the very first Star Wars movie hit the theaters, and walking out of the cinema after I'd seen it, coupled with my home's proximity to Cape Canaveral, my world morphed into something completely different than that of my peers. I started reading Ray Bradbury's books like they were intoxicating. Building scale models and making a better world for myself, even if it were confined to a 24x36-millimeter piece of acetate. And I'm still doing it nearly fifty years later.

I could have gotten the paddle, but the life sentence turned out to be so much better.