Remembering Gordon Cobb

November 16, 2005 was the day I first encountered Gordon Cobb, who died at age 61, just before Christmas. I know this because I sent an email to a friend, reflecting on Gordon’s taking the “no” side in a small debate about a plebiscite, then soon to be held, on proportional representation:

You once told me (and I paraphrase, but closely) that Ivan MacArthur and Gordon Cobb are the “two smartest political organizers on PEI.”

Last night I had my first meeting with Gordon Cobb, a small event
organized by Cynthia Dunsford at the Queen St. Commons structured as a “debate about the plebiscite.”

Gordon was representing the “no,” and the young fellow who’s head of the “yes” spoke to the affirmative.

Both speakers made a good case, and I came away more confused than not.

Before the session I was leaning “yes” quite strongly; Gordon’s
eloquence, and his well-rationed arguments have me leaning equally in both directions.

Inasmuch as I was, and remain, a fervant believer in proportional representation, that Gordon had me wavering was testament to his oratory, his intelligence, and his political smarts (my correspondent replied, in part, “Gordon is that he is without a doubt the most devastating debater I know of…”).

That was 20 years ago. Gordon and I were friends, of a type, since.

Not a close friendship—I never went to his house, he never came to mine; we never exchanged emails or texts; I have no photos of him, knew nothing of his personal life; we never met, indeed, outside of happenstance encounters —but a friendship nonetheless. 

More often than not we would end up chatting at Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row, and more often than not we would end up chatting about the broad political or cultural themes of the day.

Gordon was a determined thinker, with a reasoned, deliberate, systematic mind; he had a way of seeing the larger picture, understanding the players and their motivations, perceiving how the chess board might move forward. In conversation, he listened (an uncommon skill, especially for men of our generation).

In the month since he died I’ve come to realize that Gordon was knit into the fabric of Island life very deeply. The list of people who counted him as a friend is long; the list of people testifying to the depth and importance of their friendship with him longer than I could have imagined.

Last Thursday we went to The Trailside for an edition of the Jack Pine Folk Club dedicated to Gordon’s memory (before he died he was to have appeared in the guise of Milton Acorn). Poets read poems—their own, Gordon’s—songs were sung, glasses raised. 

Someone from away, landing in the middle of it, would think it an unusual gathering, in part because of the very nature of the “and now a few jigs, reels, and hornpipes,” but, more so, because, as Gordon himself wasn’t there, they’d encounter only the shadow he cast, and be left wondering about the strength of one person’s imprint on such a motley collection of people.

James Baldwin wrote this in 1955, reckoning with life in Paris:

One had, in short, to come into contact with an alien culture in order to understand that a culture was not a community basket-weaving project, nor yet an act of God; was something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they had been forced to deal. And their great men are revealed as simply another of these vicissitudes, even if, quite against their will, the brief battle of their great men with them has left them richer.

Surely, in that light, Gordon was a “great man.” In thousands of conversations, scores of appearances on stage, prose and poetry, political machinations in the back room and out front, he made a mark. On Prince Edward Island. On all of us.