My name is Doug Franklin. I’m thirty‑two, and the night my family finally saw me was the night they chose not to show up. At 2:18 p.m., with the city rinsed in rain and my palms slick, I typed into our family group chat: I’m receiving an award tonight.
It would mean a lot if you came. Four minutes later, Jake—three years younger, the suburban legend with a trophy for every season—replied: We’re going to a concert instead. Been planned for months.
Sorry, bro. A beat after that, Mom added: Don’t guilt us. The words landed like a stamped denial—processed, impersonal, irreversible.
I stared until the letters blurred, then sent the only reply that felt smaller than how I felt: All right. What they saw on live TV that evening made their jaws drop. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I grew up in a Cape on a quiet Boston street where drama meant trash day mix‑ups and the neighbor’s snowblower starting too early. Our fridge was wallpapered with Jake: headlines, clippings, laminated certificates. My camcorder stills curled under a football‑helmet magnet rubbed silver from years of milk runs.
Mom—Susan—managed our home like a spreadsheet, neat columns and conditional formatting. Her rubric was simple: straight A’s, varsity letters, prestigious college, conventional career. Deviate and you got the tight‑lipped look she saved for math errors, like I’d misplaced a decimal in the ledger of our lives.
Dad—Tom—sold pharmaceuticals and occupied the house the way a radio in another room occupies space: audible, present, rarely tuned to you. His parenting thesis was a chorus he never tired of: Listen to your mother. Jake’s life arrived with crowds and whistles—football in fall, basketball in winter, baseball when the grass remembered how to be green.
Mine arrived as smaller sound: the plastic whirr of Grandpa Mike’s old camcorder, the click of a tripod that stuck on cold mornings, the clack of two VCRs refusing to cooperate. The summer I turned eleven, I filmed everything—ants hauling a crumb like a sofa; clouds late to a meeting; Mrs. Romano’s terrier, Max, sneezing directly into my shot.
I cut my first “documentary” with stubbornness and a pause button. When I screened it for family night, Dad checked his watch, Mom said that’s nice, honey with the pleasant neutrality of a polite receptionist, and Jake laughed at my star‑wipe transitions. Only Grandpa Mike squeezed my shoulder: You’ve got an eye, Dougie.
You see what other people walk past. I held those words like a life preserver and swam. In high school, the AV club was my team.
I worked weekends at the electronics store, selling HDMI cables to buy a lens that wouldn’t murk out at dusk. When I said I wanted state‑school film, Mom’s mouth went white at the edges. The Franklin boys have always attended Harvard or Yale, she recited, skipping the part where “always” didn’t include her or Dad.
You’re throwing your life away on a hobby, Douglas. It isn’t a hobby. It’s my life.
Nobody makes a living pointing cameras at things. Thousands of people do, Mom. Dad watched from the doorway—arms folded, expression blank—the human version of a closed door.
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