JUST BETWEEN YOU AND ME

By Edwin Cooney

I’m a little sensitive, so if you can help it, don’t let this get out of the room! Something happened to me today that kind of makes me feel old.

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not complaining about it. Actually, it gives me a sense of awe. The thing is, it’s happened to me before and I mention this because I suspect it’s also happened to you. Earlier today, I heard Leslie Gore singing “It’s My Party and I‘ll Cry If I Want To.” What grabbed me was the realization that Leslie’s first big hit was out forty-seven springs ago—wow! What will I be thinking three short years from now when Leslie’s smash hit is fifty years old? I can’t imagine what I’ll do; can you imagine what you’ll be doing? (What do you suppose Leslie will be doing?) It’ll be exciting, won’t it?…or, perhaps it won’t be exciting at all. Sometimes I get ahead of myself.

It was on Monday, September 25, 1972 that I felt this sense of awe for the first time. I was twenty-six years old; I’d be twenty-seven that November 28th. I was student teaching at Greece Athena High School near Rochester, New York. One of my students was a lad named Jeff. Jeff was twelve years old in age, but more like sixteen in both mind and body. Jeff read books beyond the seventh grade level and stood over six feet tall. When I asked Jeff what his date of birth was and he replied June 12th, 1960, what grabbed me was that I vividly remembered where I was and what I was doing the very day Jeff was born!

June 12th, 1960 was the first Sunday I spent in a foster home in North Fenton (which is near Binghamton, New York) with a family named Jones.

I’d attended services at the local Methodist church that morning. It was the same church in which I’d been baptized back in 1954 when I was living in that community with another foster family named Baker. I don’t remember what the Yankees did that day, but I do remember that I found a book of matches in the grass. I wanted to light one, but lost my nerve and finally took the matches into the house and turned them over to Marj or Lloyd Jones—both of whom were smokers. That’s what was happening in my life the day Jeff was born in Rochester, New York.

The ability to remember stimulates the capacity for wondering and even speculating. The worlds of 1960 and 1972 were exciting and transitory times.

That summer of 1960, which I spent with the Jones family, was the only time I’d be with them. The Democrats would nominate the youthful John F. Kennedy and the Republicans would nominate the youthful (but less obviously so) Richard Nixon for President of the United States. JFK was forty-three and RMN was just forty-seven. It was the summer of the Moscow trial of CIA U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers who was shot down that May first over Soviet Sverdlovsk His fate was by no means certain. He could have gotten life; he could have even been sentenced to die. After all, we’d electrocuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for Soviet espionage—and everybody knew that the Soviets were really cruel. (Francis or, if you prefer, Frank Powers’ sentence would be seven years of hard labor). Powers’ ultimate fate would be more tragic than his Soviet sentence. On Saturday, February 10, 1962, he would be exchanged at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin, Germany for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy we’d tried for espionage in 1957. Powers would return less than a hero, but would be cleared of misconduct and praised for not having revealed any secrets to the Soviets. Powers died in 1977 returning from covering a brush fire in Santa Barbara County, California. His helicopter ran out of fuel and crash-landed in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area several miles east of Burbank Airport.

Like 1960, Jeff’s birth year, the fall of 1972 was a time of transition. As Jeff began seventh grade, the tragic terror attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics was taking place; RMN was running for re-election and would win forty-nine states -- but Watergate, Nixon’s “Waterloo” was gestating in America’s political womb. It was inadequately detected by “All the President’s Men” including Nixon himself. Jeff was just twelve and I was just…well…I was just young, that’s all.

Today, Jeff -- wherever he is -- will soon be fifty. What the summer just ahead holds is anybody’s guess. Our current president, Barack Obama, is forty-eight, the same age Richard Nixon would have been in his first year as President had he beaten JFK. What makes aging awesome rather than merely debilitating is one’s perspective. It’s like being on a high mountain peak where one can observe life as it progresses and speculate about life as it transforms the observer to a dimension beyond earthly comprehension.

“Be not afraid, neither be dismayed,” were perhaps the wisest words of JFK’s acceptance speech that summer of Jeff’s birth and my youth. Awesome, isn’t it?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY