For Tony

Tony, the pottery pachyderm, is named after my good friend Tony Mercurio. This patriotic fellow is politically astute and always votes but he never reveals his political party. However, I did notice that his trunk leans slightly to the right. Tony (16” high) is part of a series of sixteen Pot People that I created in the clay studio in 2005.

Now this July I fondly remember his namesake, Lt. Col. Anthony Mercurio, who died two years ago this month after proudly served a full career in the U.S. Army including a tour in Vietnam. Tony now rests in honored glory in Arlington National Cemetery. Here were my thoughts at his Memorial in 2006.

Like everyone here, I’m proud to say that Tony was a friend of mine. His smile always lit up a room. His jokes were so funny you had to laugh, even though you knew that they were really baaaaaaaad jokes.

Does anyone remember the ice chest that Tony found alongside the highway? He said that he stopped and looked at it because it looked like a brand new chest. He opened up the cooler and found lots of ice and something carefully wrapped in a white cloth. He was curious by now, so he unwrapped and unwrapped and unwrapped the cloth and found a big toe, a severed big toe. Obviously this was a medical emergency, so Tony did the only thing possible. He called for a toe truck! I can still hear Pat Krohn groaning over that one.

Tony and I spent many a pleasant day driving out in the country looking for eagles or checking out a ghost town down on the Mexican border or sneaking up to Mt. Lemmon for pie and ice cream, although it certainly wasn’t on the approved diet for either one of us. But sometimes a man’s just gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Each of us always swore that we wouldn’t tell on the other.

Throughout all of our drives we talked, always we talked. Ours was never a silent friendship. We each shared a passion for history, both the recent and past events that have shaped our country. Tony taught me about Viet Nam from his personal experiences and he shared the broader picture of the political situation of that time. I had spent much of the 1970s in remote national parks, isolated from television and much of the news, so many of Tony’s stories were totally new to me.

In turn I could share with Tony some of my knowledge of the history and biology of our beautiful desert country. Even when we never got out of the car, there was so much to see and learn if we just took the right dirt roads. I showed Tony where I panned for gold in the desert and where to find lush green-pastured hills that stretched as far as we could see and belied the fact that we were in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

But most frequently Tony and I talked about politics. As you all know, Tony and Lisa were heavily involved in Republican politics in Texas and have retained a strong interest here in Arizona. In fact Lisa will still occasionally let her views be known in letters to the editor in the Green Valley newspaper. I do wish though that she wouldn’t pull her punches and let us know what she really thinks.

Politically, Tony was a proud conservative in the Ronald Reagan mold and through his efforts, and Lisa’s, Tony helped bring about the political change that has redirected our country for the past 30 years. My political convictions were a little different from Tony’s. Dare I mention the ‘L’ word here? To say that Tony and I were on opposite sides of the political fence would be an understatement. We were such opposites that if he and I were building that political fence, Tony would probably be nailing on vertical boards on one side of the fence while I was busy putting up horizontal boards on the other.

But for all of our political differences and all of our political discussions we never had an argument, only discussions. There was never an attempt to prove the other person wrong or to try to change the other person’s opinion. For me it was a wonderful experience to have serious discussions on political topics of the day with someone who had a different viewpoint than mine. I know that I could have done that with a number of people in Green Valley, since we liberals are in such a minority here, but what made the discussions with Tony so special was the fact that neither he nor I ever had to defend our positions. We could each say what we thought about the economy, or the war, or George W., or Bill Clinton and we could each gain an understanding about how someone else might feel differently about these things.

Tony and I disagreed on many of the small details of governing our country but there were many big issues that we agreed on. We both loved America. We both believed in keeping our country safe. We both lamented the super-strong partisanship that has gripped our Congress and our political system today. Both the elephants and the donkeys ought to be made to stand in a corner until they can learn to talk nice and play well with others.

Tony proudly supported the red issues and I proudly supported the blue issues but I have to admit that there was one red issue that we both agreed on..…that bright red cherry pie on Mt. Lemmon…with ice cream of course.

Tony, I miss you. But I’m sure glad I knew you.

Richard