Mario Cuomo, governor of New York, writes in Life magazine about a time when he was especially discouraged during a political campaign:
I couldn’t help wondering what Poppa would have said if I told him I was tired or – God forbid – discouraged. A thousand pictures flashed through my mind, but one scene came sharply into view.
We had just moved to Holliswood, New York, from our apartment behind the store. We had our own house for the first time; it had some land around it, even trees. One in particular was a great blue spruce that must have been 40 feet tall.
Less than a week after we moved in, there was a terrible storm. We came home from the store that night to find the spruce pulled almost totally from the ground and flung forward, its mighty nose bent in the asphalt of the street. My brother Frankie and I could climb poles all day; we were great at fire escapes; we could scale fences with barbed wire – but we knew nothing about trees. When we saw our spruce, defeated, its cheek on the canvas, our hearts sank. But not Poppa’s.
Maybe he was five feet six if his heels were not worn. Maybe he weighted 155 pounds if he had a good meal. Maybe he could see a block away if his glasses were clean. But he was stronger than Frankie and me and Marie and Mamma all together.
We stood in the street, looking down at the tree.
“Okay, we gonna push ‘im up!”
“What are you talking about, Poppa? The roots are out of the ground!”
“Shut up, we gonna push ‘im up, he’s gonna grow again.” We didn’t know what to say to him. You couldn’t say no to him. So we followed him into the house and we got what rope there was and we tied the rope around the tip of the tree that lay in the asphalt, and he stood up by the house, with me pulling on the rope and Frankie in the street in the rain, helping to push up the great blue spruce.
In no time at all, we had it standing up straight again!
With the rain still falling, Poppa dug away at the place where the roots were, making a muddy hole wider and wider as the tree sank lower and lower toward security. Then we shoveled mud over the roots and moved boulders to the base to keep the tree in place. Poppa drove stakes in the ground, tied rope from the trunk to the stakes, and maybe two hours later looked at the spruce, the crippled spruce made straight by ropes, and said, “Don’t worry, he’s gonna grow again….”
If you were to drive past that house today, you would see the great, straight blue spruce, maybe 65 feet tall, pointing up to the heavens, pretending it never had its nose in the asphalt.
Remembering that night in Holliswood, I now couldn’t wait to get back into the campaign.
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see attached photo of tree in 2015