I'm Ready
Sometimes half of storytelling is just realizing you have a story on your hands.
Brief musings about storytelling each day (or as frequently as I can muster).
Aug. 10, 2026
AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE, I try to carry an actual camera with me. The iPhone camera is great, and getting better every year, but there’s something about having the weight of a “real” camera on your shoulder that feels comforting and filled with possibility.
Which is both legitimate and, in the end, a bit ridiculous. After all, the old saying is right in this respect: The best camera is the one you have with you. As was demonstrated to me acutely this past weekend.
I was at the Pittsburgh ballpark for a game Saturday night and happened to be standing nearby when two hometown baseball stars of my 1970s childhood, John Candelaria and Manny Sanguillen, were reunited. Candelaria was in town to mark the 50th anniversary of his no-hitter the following day, and Sanguillen runs a barbecue stand out past centerfield. I saw them encountering each other, slid into position, watched them for a bit, drew out my phone camera on instinct and got a few shots. Time elapsed: about 45 seconds.
Here’s what happened next, and why I’m writing about it here — because the whole thing, I realized afterwards, was a sequential storytelling process.
Relevance. I realized a few minutes afterward that the photo might be newsworthy to baseball fans and people in western Pennsylvania and contacted my news organization to offer it up.
Early iteration. A bit later, I posted a personal post on Facebook that contained the photograph above and started getting reaction from nostalgic Pittsburghers of a certain age (who am I kidding? All Pittsburghers are nostalgic).
Context. I got to thinking about these two now-elderly men encountering each other so many years after their glory days, and how the world of baseball and the world writ large had changed around them. Those bigger themes began kicking around in my mind. I started to get a storytelling itch.
Personal connections. I realized I had two personal memories/anecdotes about Candelaria in my mental storage space and dragged them out to ponder them.
Assets. I realized that not only had I also taken related photos outside the ballpark before the game that could be used, but that somewhere I had a photo of 11-year-old me and a young Candelaria at a neighborhood baseball party in 1979.
Ticking clock. I realized that if I was going to write something, it had to be quick because the anniversary of the no-hitter was the next day.
All of that combined to spur me to sit down the following afternoon (yesterday) and start tapping away. The result was this, on my Unsorted but Significant Substack of personal and personal-adjacent essays:
The short moral of this short yarn: Something may not be a story at all … until it is. Be open to that.
And have that phone camera at the ready.
And now, Bryan Adams.
To Ponder
How do you realize when something you encounter “in the wild” is a potential story? What is your inflection point in that respect?
Do you ever take pictures on a hunch they might be useful later?
Family historians: How might something like this play out in your patch?
If you’re interested in reading about how everyday life and unusual things shape us, check out my other Substack, Unsorted but Significant:
I love this storyweaving back and forth in time. I really enjoy the videos you always include, and the pondering section stretches my thoughts. ❤️