(Might be more readable in FB Notes mode, here: https://facebook/notes/mark-hughes-cobb/scottys-eulogy/10152422974392031) Hey, this is probably a classic tl;dr, but its a glimpse of Scottys service today (Wednesday 11/26/14). I know many couldnt make the trip due to family, health or other obligations, so this is just a bit of what went on, the sharing. At my familys agreement, we opened with The Beach Boys God Only Knows. I was so happy to hear people laughing, lightly. Exactly what we all wanted. Then after the Rev. Melody Traylor of Forest Lake United Methodist Church conducted the body of the service, Scottys beloved friends Steve Shaw, Chan Cox and Danny Hartley spoke, eloquently. I wont try to recall their words, but maybe I can talk them into posting those later. Then I got up. I got through some of the words below, and had trouble breathing on other parts, so really this is what I MEANT to say. But I also went back and added a few things that popped up as I was stammering, best as I can remember, so its got some of the extemporaneous stuff, in addition to my notes, which were written last night (Tuesday 11/25/14). After I finished, again at the familys request, the pallbearers carried out the coffin to The Beatles Let It Be. If you want, put those on. Anyway, here goes with what I had, and I hope it gives you a little more insight into that young brat, Scott T. Cobb: I should warn some of y’all: One of our grandfathers was a Baptist preacher. I knew Scotty longer than most of y’all. When I entered the world, he was a month shy of two years old, not thrilled about a new baby of the house. My first memory – though probably this is just one of those told-so-often-tales I only THINK I remember it – is Scotty stealing the bottle right out of my mouth as I lay in my crib. There’s your pattern: Big brother trying to CLARIFY how life is; baby brother learning to grow up fast. Or else. Many of the lessons Scotty taught were probably inadvertent. At just two years apart, in a family of five boys (eventually), we shared much: rooms, clothes, hobbies, games, music, books, cars… never a girlfriend, though in high school, there were a few near-misses. (Puns always intended). But because he was always bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, more creative, he pushed me to run, to grow, to think, to read, to try to be more…which is good, because I suspect at heart, I’m largely lazy. And I never got better than him – he was good at pretty much everything he turned his hand to: art, writing, music, sports… sometimes girls – never got better THAN him at anything… but I grew better BECAUSE of him. Maybe I pushed him a bit, too: can’t let little brother catch up. Competition is healthy. Well. Mostly healthy. Boy, I wanted to beat him… at something. And I can still recall, fondly, all the times in life I bested him. All two times. It was a dark day for Scott Thomas Cobb when I put him down, arm-wrestling. We were about 13 and 15, and I’d hit yet another growth spurt, bringing us, yet again, close to the same size. The look on his face that day was …precious. Shock and awe. But later I conceived a more charitable notion: What he was thinking was: “Grasshopper: Time for you to leave.” A few decades later, I beat him about the “proboscis.” (That’s the snout of a mammal, especially a protuberant one, like the trunk of an elephant). We were messing around with one of Elizabeth Anne’s Christmas toys, a spelling game, and he tried entering “probiscus.” The machine kept beeping. Maybe because by that time I had become a professional (obnoxious, showoff) writer, and spelling is one of my things, I nailed it. Scotty STILL insisted he was right, against me AND against the machine, because, as it turns out, in The Three Stooges’ short “Calling All Curs,” Moe clamps Curly’s nose in a pair of pliers – I believe it was a dispute between Hegelian and Spinozan philosophies -- and Curly cries out “My....!” what Scotty heard as “probiscus.” Maybe because Curly was a known Shakespearean orator, and possibly because his schnozz was twisted up in a pair of pliers, Scotty misunderstood. For the first, and I’m sure only, time, The Three Stooges let him down. So much of my early adventures in pop culture, sports to literature to model airplanes – to models -- stems from Scotty’s trailblazing, because when he loved something, he loved big, and he loved to share. Baseball cards. Comics. Dr. Seuss. Mad magazine. The Hardy Boys and Bronc Burnett. Music, music and more music. He showed me what heroes look like. We were visiting our grandmother, mother of our dad, Troy, up in the tiny northwest Alabama town of Kennedy, where, after eating one of Grandma Evie’s groaning-board meals, there wasn’t much you could do but walk- or sleep-off the carbs. Or visit the outhouse, still around in the ‘60s even though she’d had indoor plumbing installed. It was a two-seater outhouse, because the Cobbs of Kennedy were prosperous. She had a monster-size console TV Dad and Uncle Lloyd had bought her, but with pretty poor reception up there; this is before cable hit Kennedy. It may not have yet. We could barely pick up a baseball game out of Atlanta. So I wandered ‘round, like I do, trying to find something to break or bother, while Scotty focused on the game. “Hey,” he said after a bit. “Come over here. THIS guy has hit almost 500 home runs. He’s going to break Babe Ruth’s record. How come we’ve never heard of him?” The answer, of course, is that a black man in the South, in the ‘60s, chasing a legend, was not beloved by all, including the media. But to Scotty’s credit, he didn’t see the darkness; he saw the shining star. A good man, we learned, when we read up about him. Scotty cared more about the interior – and that sweet, sweet swing, those powerful wrists – than the exterior. We were lucky to have been raised in a family that taught us to seek a person’s character, beyond his or her characteristics. We became huge Hank Aaron fans that day…I still am. Made Dad take us up to Braves games, summer after summer. Scotty and I would draw up – he was a fine artist, and an even better cartoonist – plans of strategic attack, to maximize weekend fun output. The second siege of Atlanta, but this time around the only thing burned was our faces, from sitting on the first-base side, because Scotty, being Scotty, had worked out somehow, statistically, where the most foul balls landed. One lesson I think he meant, was the real first one – not that stolen-bottle mess – and this IS a real memory, very vivid. He gave me the greatest gift I’ve ever received, and probably ever will: Scotty taught me to read. He opened up the world of words to me, which opened up…the world. He’d come home from Mrs. Pruitt’s kindergarten and trace the letters he’d learned, sounding them out: “S is for Superman.” We worked from comic books; those simple declarative sentences, those brave, bold words. Sunday night when I got back in town from Scotty’s, I went to Barnes & Noble, because that’s what I do, by default, many otherwise-unoccupied nights: look for more books. I went to a section I don’t often visit these days, the comics…graphic novels. I pulled down one titled “All Star Superman.” The usual suspects were still there: Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, The Daily Planet, Kryptonite….In the midst of saving the world, over and over again, and while working to cure his own illness (thanks to that dastardly Lex Luthor), Kal-El stops a suicidal girl from jumping off a building, because that’s what being Superman means: You can’t spend all day punching out planet-sized monsters. You’ve got to sweat the small stuff. He tells the distraught child: “You’re much stronger than you think you are.” S is for Superman. S is for Scotty. Earlier this year, we talked about going fishing. Now I haven’t been on the wormless side of a Zebco rod ‘n’ reel since we were kids at Lake Eufaula, with Chip and Kevin Owens. But Scotty kept faith, just as he had when stuffing this largemouth bass he’d caught at Kenny Hollis’ lake, near Dothan. I, and others, tried to tell him that 3½ pounds was not trophy size, but he insisted. That catch hung on many walls over the years, including the Oakwood Court duplex we briefly shared back in college days… and it was in his house Sunday, in the den, like some of us a bit worse for wear and years. And there’s no truth to the rumor that it was me who kept shoving empty beer cans into that gaping mouth. Scotty found fishing, he told me back in May, “therapeutic, catching anything or not.” He offered to bring the gear, and to clean and cook – assuming we’d catch anything. So I checked around about Tuscaloosa fishing holes, but with one thing and another, his health varying, our schedules clashing, we didn’t make it out. Now I’m flashing back decades, and I’m going to bust our old babysitter, Robbie Nance. Hope the statute of limitations has run out. Robbie used to let Scotty and I stay up way past our bedtimes, because she liked to watch the late-night creature feature, and reruns of “The Twilight Zone.” We were both of us only about two small football-sized armfuls back then, but our cuddles must have been some comfort to old scaredy-cat Robbie. There was a “Twilight Zone” episode, not one of the really frightening ones, about an old man and his dog who wind up, accidentally, dying together. Im not remembering this exactly right, so please don’t get on your cellphones and check, OK? But the old man and his dog -- I remember the dog’s name, Rip, like Rip Hewes, the Dothan football coach they named the stadium for; and because, back then, dogs were a lot more interesting to me than most people – wake up in the afterlife, and go strolling down a wooded path, until they come upon a park, with a pleasant-looking man who calls himself gatekeeper. He welcomes the old man…but tells him Rip isn’t allowed. The old man backs away, because any place that wont let dogs in is clearly Hell. So Rip and his man keep walking, and they come to another lush greensward, and the gatekeeper there says “Of course Rip can come on in. Oh, and you too.” I remember the old man and Rip settling down by a beautiful lake, the biggest grins on both faces. So this week I’ve been thinking about all that silly childhood stuff, and I visualized Scotty walking down a path, finding an idyllic spot where the fish practically jump into your creel. There’s at least one slobbery dog, of course, maybe our old German Shepherd Misty, and a guitar…Oh heck, who are we kidding? It’s Scotty: Dozens of guitars. Our grandmothers are fighting over who gets to cook the fried chicken, and Pop Hughes, the barber, who Dad once assured me knew more corny jokes than he, Scott and I combined, is holding court. Our other grandfather, the farmer and preacher, well I think maybe he’s finally resting up there. Not too many people to send down the road to where no dogs are allowed. Our big brother Randy is ready to talk cars and girls, and maybe the latest heavenly fashions. Dad is at the grill, about to fire up the Troyburgers...and finish with a dessert of the world’s finest popcorn. Pops-Rite. How did I just get that? That was one of his subtler jokes: Pop’s right. And somewhere old buddies Kenny Hollis, Chip Owens, and Sumo, are lurking, and later they’re going to get into trouble. But for now he’s hunkering down, watching the bait sink, meditating on the next trophy bass that might never bite, and he’s smiling, as Scotty so often was. And the pain is gone from his knees, and the pain is gone from his back, and the pain is gone from his heart, and he knows he is loved. And he is content, and he is at rest, and he is at peace. I tried to find something from Shakespeare to close with -- Ive played Macbeth and Oberon and Caliban and so many roles...but this is a stage I never wanted -- I found this instead, which I think he would have liked better: Support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 06:00:00 +0000
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