Unit 11 Text B
The Perfect Picture
It was early in the spring about 15 years ago – a day of pale sunlight and trees just beginning to bud. I was a young police reporter, driving to a scene I didn’t want to e. A man, the police-dispatcher’s broadcast said, had accidentally backed his pickup truck over his baby granddaughter in the driveway of the family home. It was a fatality.
As I parked among police cars and TV news cruirs, I saw a stocky, white-haired man in cotton work clothes standing near a pickup. Cameras were trained on him, and reporters were sticking microphones in his face. Looking totally bewildered, he was trying to answer their questions. Mostly he was only moving his lips, blinking and choking up.
After a while the reporters gave up on him and followed the police into the small white hou. I can still e in my mind’s eye that devastated old man looking down at the place in the driveway where the child had been. Beside the hou was a fresh spaded flower bed, and nearby a pile of dark, rich earth.
“I was just backing up there to spread that good dirt,” he said to me, though I had not asked him anything. “I didn’t even know she was outdoors.” He stretched his hand toward the flower bed, and then let it flop to his side. He lapd back into his thoughts, and I, like a good reporter, went into the hou to find someone who could provide a recent photo of the toddler.翻译员
rearA few minutes later, with all the details in my notebook and a thereby-five studio portrait of the naïve child tucked in my jacket pocket; I went toward the kitchen where the police had said the baby was.be afraid of
I had brought a camera in with me – the big, bulky Speed Graphic which ud to be the newspaper reporter’s trademark. Everybody had drifted back out of the hou together – family, police, reporters and photographer. Entering the kitchen, I came upon this scene.
On Formica – topped table, back lighted by a frilly curtained window, laid the tiny body, wrapped in a clear white sheet. Somehow the grandfather had managed to stay away from the crowd. He was sitting on a chair beside the table, in profile to me and unaware o
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f my prence, looking uncomprehendingly at the swaddled corp.
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The hou was very quiet. A clock ticked. As I watched, the grandfather slowly leaned forward, curved his arms like parenthes around the head and feet of the little form, the presd his face to the shroud and remained motionless.
In that hushed moment I recognized the makings of a prize-winning news photograph. I appraid the light, adjusted the lens tting and distance, locked a bulb in the flashgun, raid the camera and compod the scene in the viewfinder.
Every element of the picture was perfect: the grandfather in his plain work clothes, his white hair back lighted by sunshine, the child’s form wrapped in the sheet, the atmosphere of the simple home suggested by black iron trivets and World’s Fair souvenir plates on the walls flanking the window. Outside, the police could be en inspecting the fatal rear wheel of the pickup while the child’s mother and father leaned in each other’s arms.
adele怎么读I don’t know how many conds I stood there, unable to snap that shutter. I was keenly aware of the powerful story-telling value that photo would have, and my professional conscience told me to take it. Yet I couldn’t make my hand fire that flashbulb and intrude on the poor men’s island of grief.
99宿舍查分At length I lowered the camera and crept away, shaken with doubt about my suitability for the journalistic profession. Of cour I never told the city editor or any fellow reporters about that misd opportunity for a perfect news picture.
Every day, on the newscasts and in the papers, we e pictures of people in extreme conditions of grief and despair. Human suffering has become a spectator sport. And sometimes, as I’m watching news film, I remember that day.
光电信息科学与工程就业前景长沙会计培训I still feel right about what I did.
