By Edwin Cooney
I was walking down the street just yesterday, November 28th, when I happened to stop at a little outdoor cafe and, for whatever reason, I sat down at this open-air table and ordered a beer. Suddenly, I noticed this fairly smallish guy sitting across from me. I didn't see him as I approached and sat down at the table but, suddenly, there he was! He wasn't particularly remarkable, but he had a smile that was genuinely both steady and sincere. He was about five feet eight or nine and seemed to possess almost all of his hair and his teeth. Sunglasses hid his blueish eyes. However, as soon as he opened his mouth, I liked him a little less. His voice was rather loutish and although he was certainly articulate enough, occasionally his words were too fast and slightly out of rhythm. One could tell he was a smoker because his left hand had fingers that were stained with nicotine and the stem of a pipe protruded from a front coat pocket.
He was courteous enough and inquired about me, not intrusively, but with some depth. As we talked, I learned several things about him.
He likes to think that he's a Christian, but like Jimmy Carter at one time, he is sure that he doesn't practice it enough and says that if it were a crime he wouldn’t be indictable. He was once a “rabid" Republican and had switched to the Democratic Party although not with the same assurance that he once had as a young Republican. He even seemed to regret having made that change permanent as it is.
"Some of my friends back in the 60s and 70s used to call me ‘Mr. Conservative’ or just ‘Conserve.’ Others used to call me ‘Edgar’ after J. Edgar Hoover,” he exclaimed with just a tad of embarrassment.
"The real difference between the two modern parties is that Democrats genuinely like people, while Republicans really love government as long as it is state government. Today's Republicans are just warmed-over 19th century Democrats who cheered when South Carolina seceded from the Union,” he said with a half grin. "How else can you explain the modern GOP's love for the late treasonous Confederacy?"
"I've always liked to debate," he said, "but not as much to win the debate as I once longed to. These days I like to debate in order to get the full taste of the other person's motives, interest, and intensity.
I asked him if he'd ever married or fathered children. I have been married twice and I have two boys. "I feel sorry for my first wife these days," he said with a half grin and half grimace. "I was probably a better father than I was a husband. Looking back on it, I'm not sure I'd have wanted to be married to me back then,” he said. “The truth is I wanted to be a father more than I did a husband, especially after my older lad was born. A sense of responsibility and even religious accountability was ever present in those years. I suppose part of the reason I was less than admirable as a husband was that I was forced to grow up outside my natural family and I'm not as family-oriented as many are. My younger son, who is named after his maternal grand-father, is very family-oriented!
“The single most important person in my life was a special lady named Edith Rachel Gassman, who I met as a houseparent at my residential school for the blind in Batavia, New York,” said my table companion. ""She and I were more contemporaries than we were mother and son. I used to bring my girlfriends around to meet her and she often, but not always, thought I could do better. However, she was certainly thrilled when my first wife and I gave our first child her last name as his middle name," he remembered.
The old guy went on to describe his second wife as "a lovely, sharing and receiving lady through and through!"
The hardest thing to handle throughout our discussion was the way he spoke of historic, sociological and political issues. I came away less sure than he seemed to be about his openness to ideas counter to his own. I'm guessing that in his heart he is more of a partisan than he insists he is. If you ask me, he believes he ought to be more objective than he is and he has a conscience about it. Additionally, the guy wants to be more popular and likable than he is. So I probed him a bit.
On the subject of religion I asked why religion matters to him. "Oh," he replied. "I don't care particularly what your religion is but in order to be secure I think everyone ought to have a sense of spirituality. When I think of what it must take to be an agnostic or an atheist, I'm reasonably sure such a person must possess an exclusive devotion to reality which subordinates humane reactions that would leave me feeling lonesome. On the other hand, we who are religious possess no monopoly on what Abraham Lincoln liked to call “the better angels of our nature."
I've had a good life and expect to have a little more of it if I can! After all, I love my wife, my two lads, my grand and great grandchildren, my best friend, my close friends, the NYSSB Alumni Association, the Lions Club, and, of course, the New York Yankees. I'm a big Aaron Judge fan. I have to be, after all he's so big!
"Then," he suddenly exclaimed, "I must always remember my love for those who read the columns I write every week!.
“You write a weekly column?” I asked.
"Yah," he replied," I've been writing a column called “Cooney's Corner” since June 16th, 2005," he replied.
“Wait a minute, fella, what's your name?" I asked.
He replied: I always sign my columns…
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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