BORN: WASHINGTON DC
I used to come to the Lincoln Monument when I was a kid. I don’t think I particularly cared for Abe Lincoln at the time, although I do now. But I used to sit on the monument’s steps here, staring off down the Mall toward the Capitol, and there was something in the place that embodied Lincoln’s story and the early days of the city and the early days of the country.
Thinking about all that made me feel I was in the middle of something that might one day matter. And that everything that ever happened to me might one day matter because I was a character in that very big story. I suppose that’s what happens when you grow up in Washington. You feel like an insider in the national story in a bizarre sort of way—even the gossip of Washington is the gossip of America and that’s what I grew up with at home. People talked about domestic and foreign policy as if they were things that mattered in our lives, which is pretty bizarre, thinking about it these days. At any rate, it’s a place I remember as being important to me and it certainly helped define me and shaped the things I would pursue later in life—writing, journalism, storytelling. I am very much a product of my hometown.
—Kirk Cheyfitz