You would think that Mario Cuomo would have been proud to watch his son Andrew sworn in as governor of New York last New Year’s Eve, ascending to the job his old man held for 12 years. Apparently, you would be wrong.
“You really want to know how I felt?” the elder Cuomo asked me last month. I nodded. “Yeah? Everybody says the obvious thing, which is, ‘You must be so proud.’ Matilda” — his wife of nearly 57 years — “says that all the time. ‘I’m so proud of Andrew.’ She says, ‘You never say you’re proud.’
“And I say: ‘Matilda, you want to do me a favor? Let’s go to the dictionary. And you know what I think “proud” means? “Proud” means you’re saying something good about yourself.’ She says, ‘C’mon, what a pain in the . . . ’ — and then she selected a body part of myself that I don’t want to mention. But I think it’s true. In my dictionary, ‘pride’ means that you feel that you have been enhanced by your efforts. So it’s not pride.”
Then Cuomo drifted back in time, to the story of his father the ditch digger and his bride, immigrants who lost a son, also named Mario, because there were no city hospitals. Back to his own birth, assisted by midwife, behind the family grocery store. Back to Ellis Island and the absurdity of the proposition that he or his son might have come to occupy the highest office in the nation’s third-most-populous state. “I somehow stumbled through and became a governor,” he told me. “I’ve told you that story. It was all luck. Luck and nothing else.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/magazine/mag-10Cuomo-t.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210
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