painting with words

my wife and i are netflix users. it allows us the maximum flexibility of renting movies and sometimes watching them immediately and sometimes sitting on them for awhile. recently we received the John Adams series that had aired on HBO in the mail and i was excited. as a history major and one interested in the revolutionary war time, i had heard that this was a well done series that maintained integrity in the details and the arch of the story.

i must admit, despite my interest in the time period, i knew relatively little about John Adams. he has frequently taken a back seat to his greatest friend and intellectual foe, Thomas Jefferson. their relationship, as portrayed well in the series, was one in which they found common purpose for ends and yet divergent means to reach those very ends. they were colleagues of the highest degree and because of their differences of opinion and political persuasion, found themselves foes at times. and in one of the bigger coincidences of history, they died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution.

the mini-series is based on the book John Adams by David McCullough. he is a fairly prolific and now famous author in the history world. his books are exceptionally well researched and he has a humility about him in his interviews that suggests, anyone can do this arduous task if they would just set their minds to it! when he won his second Pulitzer Prize, McCullough was described as a writer who is "painting with words" when he writes history. what a great image, for so many reasons. this was also the title of a featurette documentary about him on the dvd.

upon watching the said documentary my wife said to me, "i want him as our neighbor." i couldn't agree more. he is a congenial man. a man that introduces himself to those along the street, and he is a man who has a wealth of knowledge. he owns a writing "shack" although he says that it is his office, and therefore not a shack. it is small and secluded from his home and he has all he would need, and many of the things that we think we need are not included.

i believe my wife and i want David McCullough as our neighbor because he is a master story teller. he knows how to make the story of who we are and where we have come from into something that is both riveting and interesting. he can make those subjects we learned about long ago into something we care about again. and mostly, he exudes excitement and passion in his craft. i wonder what the world would be like if we were a little more like David McCullough day-to-day; if we cared enough to tell a story that would capture people's attention? perhaps we all need to learn to tell our own stories better, so that we can all become better neighbors.