Yesterday I went along with our reporter to photograph David McCullough.
This was at once a fantastic assignment and a crushing one. It was fantastic because I very much admire David McCullough; I think we need more writers like him to make history more accessible to people. But it was crushing because all I wanted to do afterwards was tell my grandfather, who loved history in general and Mr. McCullough’s work in particular (particularly the John Adams book and miniseries) that I got to go on this assignment and see the house and the backyard shed where David McCullough does most of his writing (on a typewriter from the ’40s)…and, of course, I couldn’t.
David McCullough talked about his own grandchildren during the interview; he described being a grandfather as tasting a new food you’d never had before and realizing it’s the best thing in the world. And he also talked about how there is no such thing as the foreseeable future, a thought that I found comforting, even though on the surface those aren’t very reassuring words.
The interview was, needless to say, one of the best and most thought-provoking I’ve had the privilege of sitting in on, which was a good antidote to being completely overwhelmed by emotion during the hour or so we were there. David McCullough’s grandchildren are lucky, just like my cousins and I were (and are).
On a lighter note, I now hope to one day also have a neat little shed in my backyard where I can work on projects.
