Mackey McGill remains the funniest person I have ever known since we were kids in 1962. Even then, he was still McGillacutty, a carefree, freckle-nosed, redheaded teenager charming girls and their mothers from the top of the three-meter board with his colossal cannonball splashes and half-gainers—long before he became the most famous fashion photographer in the world.  

Even then, Mackey used his camera as I used my pencil, capturing moments in time that otherwise would have been lost. He spared no one from his lens, like when he caught Narcissus covered in flour, making her famous chocolate chip cookies in her kitchen. Or when Mrs. Mac concentrated on a heated bridge match, and he immortalized me with my face contorted in pain due to an ill-fated belly flop from the high dive.

But it was a fateful event, a chain reaction akin to a domino run, that forced all of us to confront the inevitability of growing up. It all began when Mackey hatched that hair-brained scheme to photograph Dink Westergaard from inside the branches of a Hemlock tree while she took a tennis lesson.