Dreams Do Come True

Chapter 1

From the time I was about nine years old, my dream had always been to become a famous racecar driver, ever since my Dad had carried me with him to my first race, the Talladega 500! Those guys get to drive awesome cars at very fast speeds! Sometimes over 200 mph and only a gnats butt away from the car in front, back or either side of you. Not just anybody can handle conditions like that but I knew I could. Plus, they get to travel all over the United States, racing somewhere different every weekend. If you were good and had a big sponsor, you could make big money. When you win, which I had planned to do plenty of, you’d get a huge check with lots of zero’s! Those big paydays would also give me the life that I wanted in addition to the fast cars and hot women! A very big house with fine furniture and a big screen TV with surround sound. A game room complete with pool table, air hockey, table tennis, pinball machine, a few arcade games, dartboard and more! I’d have one of those cool swimming pools like I’d seen on TV where half of it was in the house and the other half was outside with an outdoor kitchen. Of course, there would be a big nice Jacuzzi, steam shower, massage table, a workout room with weights, treadmills, and all that cool stuff you would find in a gym. That was just the house. I also wanted a huge garage to store my many cars, a motorcycle, at least two four-wheelers (because my friends would need one to ride when they came over) and my bass fishing boat. What a life that would be! And, that’s not even mentioning all the hot babes that I’d be surrounded by all the time. They would be the icing on the cake, or maybe the best part of all!

Now that sounds very cool, especially to a young boy nearing fifteen years old and it is what I had always dreamed about. I even had my number picked out . . . 37. I had painted that number on my go-cart helmet with flames coming off the top and down the back, not too bad, if I do say so myself. It definitely looked better than the plain white helmet it was before I got a hold of it with my model car paint.

Even though I dreamed and thought of being a racecar driver for many years, that all changed when my Aunt Marly took me to a museum a few weeks before school started. That one day changed my dreams and my life forever!

There were beautiful paintings everywhere. Some were in watercolor, some in pastels, and my favorites were the ones painted with oil paints. The paintings were large and the colors so vibrant that they literally jumped off the canvas. I could hardly believe my aunt had to practically beg me to go with her only a short time ago, and now I’m in love with this place. I’ll definitely need to apologize to her and thank her this evening before she takes me home.

I was thinking in my mind about getting some paint and brushes so I could give this a try, when Aunt Marly asked if I were ready to leave and go for a walk in the park and grab an ice cream cone. I hadn’t realized that we had been there for almost two hours but I asked why did we have to leave so soon. With obvious amazement in her eyes and voice, she told me, Of course not, but I thought you might be bored and ready to go? Not at all, I told her, I love this place! So she said, Then why don’t we take a look at the next section? I asked, You mean there’s more? Of course, she said, the photography section, let’s go check it out! Well if this is all the art there is and you’re ready to go, I guess we could go ahead and take that walk in the park, feed the fish, and you know how I love chocolate ice cream! Aunt Marly told me that photography could be ART too and that she thought I’d enjoy it just as well as I did the paintings. I envisioned BORING pictures! I’ve seen plenty of those at home. My baby pictures, pictures of me and my black eye after wrecking my bike, pictures of me racing my go-cart at the track. Then there were pictures of my little brother taking his first bath, blowing out birthday candles, and playing in the sandbox. Pictures of my baby sister and her cat, playing with her dolls, and her first hair cut. Then there’s the entire book shelf of photo albums at my grandparents’ house. There were hundreds, no thousands, of black and white pictures of family and people, most of which I had no idea of who they were. More pictures were the last thing I wanted to see! I couldn’t believe a museum would have such stuff next to a room with all these beautiful paintings. How is photography, considered art?

After a few minutes of more persuasion from my Aunt, we turned down the hall and walked toward the photography room. I knew this wouldn’t take me long to look through here, and then we’d be happily on our way to the park.

We walked into the next room. I couldn’t see a picture anywhere, so I asked if we’d taken a wrong turn. Aunt Marly tried to explain that this was art created by professional photographers. I didn’t expect what I was seeing at all, because the only things I’d seen people do with cameras is girls (including my sister) holding a camera at arm’s length with the lens pointed back at themselves. Those pictures are everywhere, and I believe every girl in the world had pictures like that and several of them. They were all over the internet, and I had seen girls at school doing it all the time. Why do they do it? Do they love themselves or something? I just don’t get it!

I did remember seeing a professional photographer two times in my life. One of them was at our church, and that woman took pictures of all the members for a church directory. The other time was at the park. I saw this guy with a tripod and umbrellas, and he was taking a picture of a family. I wouldn’t have remembered either of them, except for the fact that, in the first case, I was in one of the church directory pictures. The reason I remember the photographer in the park were because of the umbrellas he was using. This guy had all his stuff over by the pond under several old large oak trees. To this day, I still don’t understand why someone would have umbrellas in the park on such a beautiful day and not a raindrop within a hundred miles! And, they weren’t for blocking the shade as I’ve seen some ladies do in those old western movies either.

Anyway, the pictures in the room weren’t like anything I expected to see. These pictures were huge and actually very interesting. I began to look around and was amazed at the beautiful artwork I was seeing, in a museum at that. And, it was actually created by a photographer with a camera? This intrigued me to say the least. They were absolutely, beautiful!

© Alan Johnson

© Alan Johnson

Model: Laci Walker

Huge pictures, some were over six feet wide. I couldn’t understand how so much detail could be found in something taken with a camera. One picture was of a flower that was bigger than I was, and it looked like it was real. The color was just amazing! There were pictures of all kinds of flowers and trees, birds and bees. Speaking of birds and bees, Aunt Marly rushed me through the section of pictures with girls in bikinis, but I still got an eyeful. I even got a glimpse of a woman that was naked but had a sheet draped around part of her. I wanted to check this section of pictures out with great detail but I knew she wasn’t going to allow that so I started trying to figure out a way I could get back here soon!

The next walls of photos were amazing and were my favorite (besides the photographs of the women) because they were of waterfalls. I love waterfalls and have had the pleasure of seeing several of them in my life and hoped to see many more. There’s a pretty big waterfall a few miles down the road from our house that I love to go to every chance I get. During early spring, after we’ve had lots of rain, the water is rushing off so fast that you can feel the mist from a hundred feet away. I like to stand there and just imagine the power and guess at the thousands, or even millions, of gallons of water coming off that thing. It’s amazing, and each season is different. I’ve seen what looks like fifty foot icicles that