3 MINUTE SKETCH

I had a friend in high school who worked in a shoe store. He said you can tell a person’s character by the shoes they wear. “Women who wear high heels with open toes are looking for love.” I thought everyone with five toes on each foot were looking for love.  My friend died young so I’ll never know how he would have turned out. If he were here he could check my shoes and tell me how I did. My little bit of insight turns, ironically, on reading and writing. I think what one reads and writes is an indicator of, maybe not their worth but certainly their possibility. I have friends who read only menus and street signs, who write only to text message and sign their names. It doesn’t make them any more or less but I get a sense of their curiosity and their need to know, about anything. I get a feel for the size of their ideas. I don't think Buddy got beyond handling ladies feet and sneaking a peak up their skirts. We all went through that phase but he died and I didn't.

Sixty Minutes is a television, news-magazine program that has been running since the 60’s, still going strong. Recently they devoted a full program to honor former reporters, showing clips from their best projects and listened to off camera comments and observations. Beginning with Harry Reasoner and Dan Rather they did in depth exposés and human interest stories into a new century and finished with Andy Rooney. Up until his retirement and subsequent passing, Andy Rooney wrote for the program and did a short, 3 minute sketch at the end of each show. He took a bit of trivial fodder and made something of it. Sometimes with humor, sometimes with irony, he put his own skeptical, unpredictable spin on ideas that should not have held your attention, but they did. He was a great student of the Human Condition. Andy had great quotes. One was, “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” He thought his readers deserved that. He could be bothersome, even offensive but he dug after the bone until his story was complete. Sometimes he was wrong but he never made excuses or passed the buck. After critical comments on NAACP strategy and boycotts in the south he was arrested for riding with blacks in the back of the bus. When he was wrong he apologized and fixed what he had broken. 

I read a self help book back in the 1990’s titled ‘Do It!’ At one point the author used writing as an example: “If you want to be a writer” he said, “you don’t need an agent or a computer, all you need is a pencil and paper. When someone reads what you’ve written, that makes you a writer. If you want to be famous or win a Pulitzer, that’s still where you begin.” That makes me a writer; not famous or even successful but sometimes people read my stuff. I can’t say Andy Rooney was my hero or that I even wanted to be like him but if someone today would include us in the same sentence, I would be flattered. The fact that he was a writer with bushy eyebrows, an agnostic, more liberal than conservative earns him high marks in my book. I really identify with his quote, “I didn’t get old on purpose. If you’re lucky it could happen to you.” And, (I know you never begin a sentence with 'And' but I did anyway - Creative License) and he also said, “People accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they believe.” All I can think of now are climate change deniers, anti vaccination/anti sex-education people. Maybe Andy is a hero after all.