You never saw him. He worked behind the scenes. But he was the one who said, “Look up there. Kids and their mother.”
They were on a pedestrian bridge over a busy road, looking down at the traffic and trying to get truckers to blow their air horns.
“Pull over,” I said, because I like to pretend I am in charge.
He was already stopping when I said that.
His name, John McCarron. Occupation, cameraman. Personality, real nice.
I wrote about him so many times he started saying “no more, please. You just want me to buy your books.”
No. I wanted others to know about him.
His daughter was killed in a traffic accident when she was 19. That’s in the books. He, and his wife, had to go through the hardest thing in life, the death of a child.
They are doing the same thing now in a little school in Connecticut. It happens many times, everywhere, throughout time. But when it does it always rips apart the parents left behind.
The problem is it is not supposed to happen. Kids bury parents, not the other way around. The pain is without measure. The sadness is without bottom, or top or wherever sadness stretches it numbing, life draining heaviness.
But somehow John survived, and not just survived, but went out with me day after day looking for something good to put on television. He was a news cameraman. That was his job. But mostly cameraman look at bad things, accidents and crimes and corruption. Maybe someone could live with deep internal pain if they were looking at the same thing outside.
But John’s job was to look for good things. Hurting inside, while looking for good things that would bring happiness to others.
And he did it. The kids and their mother on the bridge. We went up there and watched them pump their arms and listened to the truckers give them a blast. And the baby ducks crossing the road. He was up on the sidewalk and out with his camera before I saw them. And the old man fishing in a tiny pond. John talked him into letting us put him on television because it would make others feel good.
Hurting inside, while making the world better outside.
John died a few days ago. The world is better because he was here.
Mike
Comments