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Richard McCann on ED COX
(July 6, 1946 - September 1, 1992)
This I say, to you and you, is all I know.
I am a passenger, hear me--listen as I go.
--Ed Cox, "Passenger"
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The year Ed died of an unexpected stroke at the age of 46, he volunteered to come with me to visit my mother in the nursing home, where she was making a lonely recovery from a broken hip and a series of sudden diabetic comas. I knew Ed would make a good visitor for my mother, who had always hungered to tell the story of her life to everyone she met, even then, when there was really no one left who wished to hear it. But Ed had a gift for listening deeply, with a patient and even profound attentiveness.
This gift was evidenced everywhere in his poems, which often included not only the voices of his parents--whose pained and loving utterances resonate and echo through such poems as "Testimonies," "Passing It On," and "These Two: Ezra and Agnes"--but also the voices of people he encountered around the city, such as the street evangelist in "Mary in November," or the homeless man in "Cuddle the Bricks" whose oracular words are almost Whitmanic: "I am you,/ as you are me in the misery of these avenues/ and streets. Cuddle the bricks, whisper/ beneath the great map of stars." Ed's gift for empathy, I imagine, was one of the things that brought him to the work he did for years, conducting poetry workshops for battered women and old people, first at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, and then at St. Mary's Court, the House of Ruth, and the Roosevelt for Senior Citizens.
That day, when we got to the nursing home, Ed stood at the foot of my mother's bed as I woke her. I wondered if she would recognize him as someone she'd met almost 20 years before, back when he was briefly dating my brother David, who had later died of an overdose.
"Do you know who this is?" I asked her as she opened her eyes. I pointed at Ed.
For a moment, she looked confused. Then she brightened. "No," she said. "But I can tell you this--he's a priest."
"No," I said, "he's a poet."
Then I looked back at Ed, who was standing there quietly, with his handsome, lanky Irishness. I could see what my mother saw. There was something priestly about him. One could see it in his earnest attentiveness, for instance, and in the gentleness of his gaze--though there was nothing pious about him, nothing at all, and, to the best of my knowledge, he no longer practiced the Catholic religion in which he'd been raised. If there was something of the priest about Ed, it was because he had schooled himself so ardently in the tradition of poet-priests whose works and lives he admired, such as Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who'd been arrested for their anti-war activities, and Ernesto Cardenal, the revolutionary Nicaraguan priest and poet whose words had provided Ed with one of the epigraphs for Part Of, the manuscript he was working on at the time of his death: "One feels oneself part of another person and that other person becomes a part of us."
It was Ed's deep and abiding spiritual dimension, in fact, that distinguished
him from the other gay poets who participated in Mass Transit, the now legendary
open readings that took place in the early 1970's above the Community Bookshop
on P Street, where one could hear new work not only Ed but also by such poets
as Michael Lally, Lee Lally, Beth Joselow, Terence
Winch, Tina Darragh, Ethelbert Miller, and Liam
Rector. Toward the end of Mass Transit, in the mid-1970's, when some of
the other gay poets who went there found themselves increasingly identifying
with the New York School and the work of such writers as Frank O'Hara, John
Ashbery, and Kenward Elmslie, Ed continued on the path he'd already set for
himself, following in the footsteps of writers like Thomas Merton, the contemplative
Trappist monk and social activist whose poems Ed sometimes quoted and who, like
Ed, seemed (as Eleanor Sullo has written of Merton) "torn by conflicting
energies--zeal both for the sensory life around him in scenes, buildings, great
art, and food, and for the something more that dwells in the spiritual realm."
In Ed's work--and, most particularly, in his earlier work, from Blocks
(1972) and Waking (1977)--it's hard not to see that even his brief, evocative
explorations of sexual desire and longing are essentially contemplative, as
in his poem:
CRUISING by Ed Cox
someone will come up
approach you on street
and say
I haven't been here long
this place........this way
this wind these windows
But there is something that these earlier poems (with what poet Reginald Shepherd has has described as their "spare, wistful evocations of adolescent gay longing" and "desire for touch and connection," rendered in a language that's often "stripped" to its most "essential elements") don't quite show of him: Ed himself was a big talker, a chain smoker who fueled himself with endless cups of milky coffee. When he stayed at my apartment--as he sometimes did during the last year of his life, after he'd hit some hard times and lost his Capitol Hill apartment--he and I would sit awake until 4 a.m., pushing each other deeper and deeper into restless late-night conversations that inevitably tracked back to the sorts of pained and emblematic childhood memories that stirred Ed's imagination and formed the basis of a number of acutely rendered poems, such as "After the Rent," "Family Album," "My Aunt," "What Do I Know," "Innocence," and "High School."
It's in Ed's later work--and, most particularly, in his brilliant and astonishing long poem, "These Two: Ezra and Agnes," published in its entirety in The Washington Review in 1989--that his voice finds its most complex and fullest amplitude. If one compares "These Two: Ezra and Agnes," for instance, to what seems its initial, much briefer version, "Agnes and Ezra," which Ed published in his chapbook Blocks (1972), it's not difficult to discern the ways in which he learned over time to open and sustain his poems, as much as to distill them. In fact, the achievement of "These Two: Ezra and Agnes"--a poem comprised in great part of stories and secrets that Ed's parents told him, in voices that are at once regretful, tender, harsh, and deeply anguished--derives from Ed's ability to render painful and difficult material without comfort and without flinching. Indeed, "These Two: Ezra and Agnes" (reprinted here) strikes me as Ed's great poetic achievement, with its compressed but densely lyrical portrait of Irish-American working class family life, and its evocations of the harsh and loving words we hear in childhood that will haunt us forever.
As for Ed's own childhood: he was born in 1946 and, as William R. MacKaye writes in the biographical sketch that accompanies Ed's Collected Poems, he was "taken home to a house on Capitol Hill where his first memories were shaped. He had more than thirty addresses after that first childhood home, but all of them--except the four years he spent in the Navy, stationed first in Tokyo and then in Baltimore--were in and around Washington." A 1964 graduate of Archbishop Carroll High School, the first fully integrated school in Washington, D.C., he studied poetry writing at the University of Maryland for one semester with Rudd Fleming and Rod Jellema, although he was not, at heart, an academic poet. In great part, Ed educated himself through his own omnivorous reading--which included philosophy and theology, as well as poetry (he was better acquainted with Kierkegaard than anyone I've ever known)--as well as through his own determined curiosity about the life around him, particularly as it related to "Making a Difference, through act and through poetry," as Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about him. In 1969, Ed helped to found the DMZ G.I. Coffeehouse at 918 9th Street N.W., a haven for G.I.'s seeking counsel and information on anti-war activities. In the 1970s, in addition to being active in Mass Transit, he was one of the founding members (along with Michael Lally, Lee Lally, Terence Winch, and Ed Zahniser) of Some of Us Press, publishing affordable chapbooks such as Michael Lally's South Orange Sonnets, Lee Lally's These Days, Beth Joselow's Ice Fishing, and Leonard Randolph's Scar Tissue.
Ed belonged to what we natives think of as the real Washington, D.C.--not the city of monuments and power, but the city that's made of memory and particularities (even as the city itself grows less particular, now that so many standardized office buildings have supplanted much of what was once distinctive). Ed's work traverses the entire city, just as he did--from Anacostia Naval Base to St. Joseph's Church on Capitol Hill, where he first attended grammar school, and from St. Elizabeth's, where his mother was sometimes hospitalized for depression, to the curved wooden benches of Dupont Circle. At the same time, it traverses the Washington of Ed's childhood and memories, the city in which his father, a linotype operator, worked the late night "lobster shift at The Washington Post" (as Ed wrote describes it in "These Two: Ezra and Agnes"), spending "long hours/ at the keyboard, meeting press deadlines" before "stopping at New York Avenue for a cup of coffee and a doughnut" on his way back home.
Even now, more than a decade after Ed's death from a sudden and unexpected stroke--possibly resulting from undiagnosed endocarditis (he'd had rheumatic fever as a child)--it's hard to realize that I won't be running into him walking down a city street, as I often used to. It's hard to consider how his life and work were cut short. Only a few years before his death, he was awarded the prestigious Lyndhurst Prize for his poetry, and he was working to complete a new manuscript, Part Of--a manuscript that went unpublished until 2001, when poet Richard Peabody, with intelligence and kindness, published Ed's posthumous Collected Poems. They are poems well worth the reading. Ed was a writer uncommonly dedicated to scrupulous self-searching, performed with clear-eyed honesty in private acts of language. In his work, he often shows us how words can harm and haunt us; through the example his living work provides, he shows how words might redeem us yet.
THESE TWO: EZRA AND AGNES by Ed Cox
Dedicated to Rudd Fleming
He said the large open windows and few small fans did little to
move the air.
......................I was hung over, sick as
a dog. The linotype
......................machine squirted lead. We'd
gone to the race track
......................in New Jersey, drank all
the way back to Union
......................Station.
...................................At seven years
the Baptist orphanage. His
father dead, the year before, of tuberculosis.
......................................................................She
had to put me
there and she worked long hours in the factory sewing overalls.
We'd sit at the table and just east molasses and string beans
while the fat matron ate full plates of ham and beans.
.....................................................................................There's
the story he told about being beneath the weighed down branches
of apple trees. There was a farm, dairy and his apprenticeship
to become a printer.
.................................Boy, I could throw
a baseball, had a curve.
Played shortstop, too.
....................................The sky is
a speckled blue map of stars. My
mother waits in the car on a road in West Virginia where they
drove down to buy moonshine. I thought I'd pee myself with all
those dogs barking, she said.
...............................................I'll
tell you, Churchill didn't
give up. The Germans bombed London day and night.
.......................................................................................Dad
was just
eighteen, lanky, all skin and bone. The recruiting officer told
him to go to the nearby market and east as many bananas, drink all
the water he could hold. He eked, sucked in, held the air,
stepped on the scale, a pound over, into the U.S. Navy.
........................................................................................She
was a
beauty, pure class. I met her in Shanghai. She was the daughter
of the Spanish ambassador. We went to the best of places. Lots
of Russians and English in the nightclubs. She gave me a silver
tiepin before the fleet sailed.
.............................................That
he was a woman's man, he
always said. There was the teacher in New York City he endeared
with his way with words, a song after several drinks. (And that
winter in Chicago, at the Tribune, when I got stinking drunk
playing poker,
........................met this woman in some
hotel bar
........................and didn't leave the bed
for two
........................days. My cock was rubbed
raw
........................and she kept asking for
more.)
..........................................................................Listen
to me:
there's a fucking rat at the foot of the bed and some snakes
crawling in the springs. You damn well better bring me the other
bottle.
...........Sprawled sleep of burnt sheets, dark
snail-ashen shadows
at the side of the bed where he slept. A stiff belt or two still
in the quart.
....................In high school I'd wait-up
past midnight for him to
return from the lobster shift at The Washington Post,
....................................................................................long
hours
at the keyboard, meeting press deadlines. He'd stop along New
York Avenue
.......................for a cup of coffee and
a doughnut,
.......................buy another dozen to take
home.
............................................................................Often
he'd bring
the latest edition of the newspaper and sometimes would talk of
work,
..........tell a story about having to take copy
..........to a young reporter on the fifth floor--
..........note the ellipses
..........in the lead paragraph were not proper.
........................................................................He's
seated in a
........................rickshaw with a buddy and
stares directly at
........................the camera. All those curls
in his hair,
mother said,
........................and he was so handsome.
..................................................................She
was the 13th
of sixteen children. Her mother, my grandmother Flynn, stands in
the middle of a small arched bridge
.........................................................in
the photograph taken at a
..........resort town on the Maryland coast. In
England she worked as
..........a maid for a wealthy Protestant family,
saved her earnings
..........for the passage to America.
......................................................All
those who left, made journey
..........to the great promises of Columbia. The
blight of potatoes,
..........stories of those who hunger made them
desperate enough to
..........eat the spoiled white meat.
.....................................................You're
too young to remember, she
said, the time your red-haired cousins danced at the wedding.
The men let you sip the foam off their beers.
........................................................................There
is this being
..........at peace in the rain, asphalt of damp
mornings.
.....................................................................................O
Danny Boy,
O Danny Boy, she sang on St. Patrick's Day and cried, talked
about her mother,
.............................how the woman suffered
through those last years
.............................and her arms bruised
from injections.
...........................................................................................He
said a
.........cruiser and several destroyers were dispatched
to Japan
.........after the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, tidal
wave.
.................................................................................Son,
the shore
.........was stacked
.........with bodies,
.........stacked like bricks waiting
...................................................for
the mason. I thought I'd
.........never eat again after that heavy stench.
.......................................................................They're
not the same
.........as us, he said, and went on, especially
when drunk, as to
.........the misery in the Chinese cities,
...........................................................so
many people living
...............................................................on
boats they boarded-up
.....................as little houses. Death means
nothing to them,
.....................nothing. Why in Korea, a buddy
told me,
.......................................................................................the
Chinese
.....................brigades charged into battle
in huge waves,
.....................charged with horns and bugles--many
weaponless.
.....................He said they were everywhere
he looked
.....................with the binoculars.
.....................................................You
can go, go
.............................like a match on a
cold night.
...........................................................................Mother
said they
used large swabs to smear the ointment
on her head and they attached small metal plates,
lines leading to the electro-shock machine.
....................................................................Her
hands
and ankles were strapped down, a rubber-bit put in her mouth
before they turned on the switch.
......................................................Like
a blackboard, she's
.......................like a blackboard after
they're done, Dad said.
.......................It erases her depression.
..............................................................Memory
like chalk, her
.......................talk--when they allowed
her to come home
.......................for a few days from St.
Elizabeth's Hospital--
.......................tentative,
......................................seeking an
image to hold to.
I imagine the two
.............................of them in those first
nights as they sweated,
called out from their thrusting sex, sipped whiskey
and she listened to him reminisce about the trees
in deepest Virginia.
................................I'll tell you one
thing you better remember.
Don't ever let another man
...........................................knock
you
to the floor without getting back up
on your feet and taking it like a man.
You'll get your ass kicked
and you'll kick ass in your time, son.
...........................................................She
purchased a can
.................of light blue paint
.................at a sale. By the time my sister
returned home
.................from school, she told me, Mom
had painted
........................................................................................two
tables,
.................the radio and my statue
.......................................................of
the Blessed Mother Mary. She
said she didn't believe in Hell because she was living
it here on earth.
..........................Purgatory, she said,
was where her baby boy,
second child, was with all the other little babies
that died so early.
.............................They'd gone to New
York, weeks before they
married, and Dad took her to a highbrow, fancy restaurant for
dinner. So they ate big time,
.............................................as
Dad would say, and Mom--Bless
..................her soul, son; she didn't know
better--lifted
..................the finger bowl and drank the
lemon juice before I
..................could say anything.
..................................................Once,
during a two month binge,
..................down on money, he put on mother's
flowered housecoat,
took a table from the living room and axed it in the backyard--
..................cussed and damned everyone...like
the sailor she said
..................he would always be.
...................................................I
felt so proud with your mother
..................holding onto my arm. Boy, she
was stunning. I drove
to her house with her nephew--he worked as a machinist
...................at the newspaper with me--and
that was the day
we first met. She was so soft, slender, quiet; had a laugh
...................that affected anyone around.
I've never felt
...................that way about any woman
...............................................................and
I've been with many
........a woman in my time.
...........................................He always
said there
........had to be a God. That you could read all
the books
........you wanted,
............................travel anywhere in
the world, and you'd still
............................have to look at the
sky,
.................................................................ask
yourself how
....................all those planets and stars
got there--accept someone
had to create that beauty; that it just didn't happen
by itself.
...............There's a juxtaposition, a thyme
...............and a reason. Hold a rose, feel
and smell
...............the petals, he said,
.............................................and
you hold God in your
hand. Pray, pray for your mother to get better
son. Say your prayers and always remember your mother,
me.
........He is in the hospital bed and I walk to
the edge
........of the parking lot. There are tubes about
him,
........a "full moon above" as he wrote
in one
........of his country songs. A lone rabbit,
.................................................................remarkably,
feeds
........on the grass as over the ridge two streams
of red
........and white lights move on the beltway.
......................................................................One
Christmas he
brought home a full California Case
as a present and showed me how to hold
the line-gauge firmly, read the characters
for printing by the finger-tip grooves in them.
..........................................................................Now
this is a
black space,
....................this an Em space. Gutenberg
printed the Bible
....................just this way, he said.
.......................................................I
see her at the window,
chain-smoking, and remember, years later,
....................................................................her
cardiac death:
....................seeing her in the face of the
inward, large
....................woman, blue bandanna,
in the hospital lobby.
...................................I drank then,
got drunk that night.
There is the fog on the Potomac River
and two old black men fish
......................by the wall. A small fire
burns in a halved
......................gasoline barrel.
...............................................Dad
said catfish were good eat'n
......................if you fried them the right
way. Catfish bones,
......................black-dotted bones of dice
rolling
............................................................................in
the stairwell
......................of the steps behind the warehouse
on Fifth Street.
Throw them bones. Man, don't hold the dice.
I ain't got all day for your nickel
and dime jive.
.......................Hey, hey--got to pay the
rent,
.......................put food on that table.
..........................................................She
said Grandfather Flynn
got drunk on election day when Al Smith
was defeated so badly--
.......................................passed out
in a snowbank. Two weeks
later he died from pneumonia. He built seven houses
for his children in the neighborhood, each one near
to the other.
....................I'll never forgive your father
for drinking away
that $5,000 from the house my father left to me. It was gone
in a few months, not a penny left.
.......................................................There
is a holy card
.....................in my first grade Missal that
she put there.
.....................I sometimes hear her voice
in song,
..............................................................................want
to kiss
.....................the hand that brushed away
the hair
.....................from my forehead, damp after
a bath.
..................................................................................I
want you
to get better, to get well. I don't want you to leave
and go back there. I don't like you being there
with all those crazy people, Momma,
............................................................and
hearing those screams;
.....................them people picking at their
skin
.....................like you said some of them
do.
.......................................................................Dust
of bricks. Tin
awning roof over the coal
shed, latched door. To go into the backyard,
.................................snow along the
way to the door--and kick,
kick again. Get rats!
Get! Get out of here!
..................................Lift-up, open
and shovel
..................................small pieces
at the bottom,
..................................near the spouted
pail. They are gone,
..................................hidden. Somewhere
light touches
..................................their eyes.
...................................................Now
Agnes, I'm not going to
............play that number. It came up last week.
The license tag in
............the dream had a seven and a four--that's
that. Ok. Seven,
............four, eight--just one dollar until
payday.
............................................................................It's
cold
............and President Kennedy is at the Capitol
for his
............inauguration. Breaths of the crowds
rise away. An old
............man, the poet Robert Frost, reads a
poem.
................................................................................By
the long avenue
..................................of that day,
aloft on the huge muscles
..................................of the sculptured
man taming a horse,
...............................................................................................from
..................................that statue seeing
Kennedy pass by, watching
..................................the old men touch
their hearts to fields away.
..................................Little ones waving.
.................................................................Dad
said this life is all
we have. All those people with those big houses, cars, and
money. Sad, son, so many of them forgetting where they came
from.
...........You look up and there's an apple on
a tree, a pear.
...........So much from a single seed.
..........................................................Mold,
slice of white bread.
..........Green, blue. Magnifying glass above
..........the shoots.
............................Fr. Connor climbed
the few stairs
............................to the pulpit, lectern.
He bowed
............................to the altar, to us.
Rows on rows
............................of candles. The green
of trees
............................and holly, wreaths
tied: bright red bows.
............................Christmas and choir,
old woman's
............................rosary raised
..................................................with
cupped hands,
............................her tongue waiting
for new life. The aisles
............................full.
....................................Sweep the sky
of clouds and turn,
glide down by the paths
along the river;
.........................traverse of paddle boats,
wake, cherry
.........................blossoms.
...........................................Ice!
Ice! Nice ice right here! Ice!
Ice! Clean, clean ice here!
..........................................The sparked
wires
...........of streetcars on Pennsylvania Avenue
a block away--
...........large black woman loudly preaching
...........the Bible at the corner: Right in this
book. It's
...........all in these sacred pages for you to
read and pray
...........upon. You're lonely,
.............................................you
need someone, somebody. He's
.............................................the
Way. He's the One. All
.............................................the
sheep went to Him
...........where he stood.
.....................................Cobweb in
the small room at the rear
.....................................of the house.
The small ones with her
.....................................on the trembling
realm she has spun. She
.....................................the sun on
their galaxy.
............................................................................Well,
all I know
is he hasn't been back to her and those kids
for more than a wee now Mrs. Cox. She's working
two jobs.
.................The church is empty. The carved
door of saints
.................is open. A pigeon is trapped inside.
..........................................................................I'm
a first-
..........................grader. I line up in
the line for first-graders.
..........................We're in the school yard.
A nun stands at the head
..........................of each line. They speak
softly and ritually nod
..........................to each other.
................................................Oh,
Sister Anne--please show this little
girl to her line. And your name? Anne too? Oh, but no e. So
your mother told you that? Here, right here
with the others.
..........................Now I lay me down to
sleep.
.................................I pray the Lord,
.................................my soul to keep.
..........................If I should die, before
I wake,
..........................I pray the Lord my soul
to take.
The Korean astronomer. He lived on the third floor at the front
with his wife, infant son.
.........................................Some clear
nights he set up
.........................................his telescope
in the wide space
.........................................between
the apartment buildings. I
..........................stood by, waited, and
said nothing. He said
..........................come here, be careful,
don't touch
..........................the telescope and just
stare through
..........................the lens. It's Mars.
It was there.
.............................................................................The
night
angels sleeps beside, beside the bed, near
the partially open window. The curtains
are her wings. She protects. The Archangel Michael
watches, too. He has long blond hair and wears
a tight green and yellow-striped
swimsuit beneath his robe. He moves near
as I touch myself under the covers and then turns away.
..........................................................................................Penance
..........................will be the Our Father
five times
..........................................and then
you must walk the Stations.
Now go, be a good boy. You are forgiven.
.....................................................................Check
the stove. Hide
...........................the bottle of sleeping
pills and the razor blades.
...........................Look in on her, watch
for cigarettes. Give her
...........................one Equanil. Don't stay
up too late.
....................................................................................The
older boy
..............has his hand on her leg, her hand
inside
..............his open shirt.
......................................The sky at
last light. Peninsular realms
......................................of clouds,
black flecked path of birds.
...................................................................................................This
...........................was taken of Aunt Sis
with a boyfriend,
...........................one of many. Look at
that hat! That's him,
...........................his foot on the running
board.
...........................................................................Rows
of altar boys
on the steps of St. James Church, white cassocked,
their slick hair parted simply.
................................................Dan,
the one who gassed himself,
................................................shut
tight all the windows
that summer night.
...............................Robert, he was with
the submarines.
...........................................................................................She
is
the sister of Margaret, the girl with the tapeworm. You
remember that story. Her sister said the girl
could hold a piece of popcorn to her open mouth
and the tapeworm darted out, would snap it away.
.................................................................................Let
us pray
...................for those gone. Let us bow our
heads in the House
...................of Our Lord. Offer your thanks
to Him
...................who has give us this day.
............................................................Grandmother
carried
...................one of her babies around on
a white pillow. It
was so weak and died after three months.
...................................................................Those
mountains
...................................in the summer.
Then, boy, the fall.
...................................Quilt of abundant
trees
and from a ridge the lush valley.
Foxes roaming nearby.
......................................Past, way
of the dream. This waking,
....................tremor of pipes in the cold
night.
.........................................................................It
was her,
.........................................................................she
was there.
.................................................................................................I
miss
....................her, boy. Two days ago I was
reading the newspaper,
....................finished the cup of instant
coffee
....................and I turned to the kitchen,
....................called
..............................your mother: Baby,
honey,
..............................would you mind making
me
..............................another cup of cof...
Suggested Reading
Works by Ed Cox
Blocks. Washington, D.C.: Some of Us Press, 1972.
Waking. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1977.
Collected Poems. Arlington, VA: Paycock Press,2002. With
introductions by Robert Coles and Richard Peabody, and a biographical afterword
by William R. MacKaye.
"These Two: Ezra and Agnes," in The Washington Review,
October-November 1989.
Review of Collected Poems
Reginald Shepherd, "Poems of the Quotidian World," Oyster Boy Review
16 (Winter 2002). http://www.oysterboyreview.com/16/reviews/ShepherdR-CoxPoems.html
Obituaries
"Poet Ed Cox Dies at 46, Teacher and Social Activist," The Washington
Post, September 4, 1992
"Ed Cox," The Washington Blade, September 11, 1992
Ordering Information
Ed Cox's Collected Poems can be ordered from Paycock Press, 3819 N. 13th
Street, Arlington, VA 22201 or http://www.atticusbooks.com/books/paycock/paycock.htm
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bob Lunsford, Ed's brother-in-law, for permission to print "Cruising" and "These Two: Ezra and Agnes," and for providing the photo of Ed.
