The holiday season is a wonderful time to reconnect with important people in our lives we don’t see often. It’s always fun when you’ve been thinking about one of those people, and they connect with you first.
One of those people in my life is ‘Monty’ Delaney and I kept writing his name down on my things to do list to call him. “Monty’ (short for Montgomery) is an all-around great guy with a heart as big as his 6 ‘6’ frame. Besides being a warm wonderful person I’ve known for many years, he was also once an attorney who never failed to show up on the dime whenever I needed him. Often to help me handle my former ongoing ‘parking ticket problem’. The ‘problem’ was, I’d forget to pay the damn tickets and they’d add up and then I’d land in ‘negotiations’. Oh and he’d also show up for that speeding ticket problem. LOL. Happy to report I’ve learned my lesson and now I don’t get parking tickets anymore and I drive like an old lady… but I still love seeing Monty. Just not in court.
Last I saw him actually, I had some fun on his radio show. He’s got a lot to talk about. Monty served as a police officer in the South Bronx for nearly nine years until a back injury led to his retirement from the police force. He spent a significant amount of time in traction and swimming pools for rehabilitation. During this time, he was also in law school, which he had to pause and later return to. he did, and after years of practicing law, a heart issue arose and Monty decided it was time to close his practice and focus on his more creative endeavors.
Monty is a talented singer-songwriter. He became involved in the music scene, playing at coffee houses back when, and has made some great albums. His 1996 album “Walking in the Light” was inspired by various societal and personal reflections and continues to be played across the country and he takes pride in its lasting appeal. It was produced by Rex Fowler of Aztec Two-Step, which was oddly the first musical group I saw perform in person when I arrived as a freshman at Ithaca College.
Monty had given me one of those CD’s and somehow it landed lodged inside the back sleeve of my cars front seat. No clue why. I accidentally found it last week when I went to the car wash and was cleaning out my car. I don’t have a CD player in my car, so I just put it on my front seat to remind me to call Monty. Then after the car wash, I made a cemetery stop to get out of the car to say a holiday hello to my immediate family in the family plot. (It’s what Italian girls do.)
What are the chances that when I got back in the car, there on my phone sitting on the car seat next to the “Walking In The Light” CD was a text from… MONTY! Really? What are the chances?
Naturally I called him immediately to report the serendipity, and we had some laughs as his lovely wife listened in, and we caught up about lots of things and he told me about his new book of poetry out now called “A Musings”. It’s a collection of poems he wrote over the years while waiting in courtrooms.
I invited Monty to stop by the radio studio this week to bring his new book and bring his lovely wife Connie, but sadly he woke up sick the day we planned it and so he called in to the show instead.
I think you’ll enjoy the podcast of our live lighthearted and authentic conversation of two friends catching up on The Debbie Nigro Show. The show is filled with laughter, personal anecdotes, and our shared history that underscores my point about of the importance of connections and the value of personal relationships. We will get together ‘in person’ when he feels better.
I hope I’ve sparked you to reconnect with someone important to you, that you haven’t seen or spoken to in awhile this holiday season. Do it. It feels good.
If you’d rather read than listen the audio transcript is below.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
0:00:00
And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show.
6
0:00:04
Walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking in the light.
2
0:00:25
Oh my gosh, that’s my friend, talented, talented singer-songwriter Montgomery Delaney. I call him Monty and there’s a little back story as to why I asked Bobby to play his song Walking in the Light as I introduce him as my guest this next segment because I’m doing something today, I think is a reminder for all of you out there. It’s about reconnecting at this time of year with people that matter in your life you don’t really see all that often so welcome Monty Delaney. Good morning my love. Hi buddy can I tell the story of the song in my car when you called me last week? Sure. All right so I’m you know how you write down notes for yourself I write down you know things to do today things I have to do and I write down people I mean to call or do something with or book or whatever. So Monty Delaney’s name I’m carrying like day to day. I got to call Monty. I want to invite Monty blah blah blah blah blah let him come to the show. He had his own talk show on another station that has since folded. I’m like, oh come up to the station maybe you do a show here. So anyway, I never did make the call to Monty. I’m at the cemetery right before Thanksgiving in the Thanksgiving week You know, going to say hello, as my father, again, had passed on Thanksgiving Day. So, I’m standing in front of the grave, my mom, my brothers, my brother, it’s like everybody’s in the grave, it’s very awkward. But before I did that, I had gone to the car wash, and I was trying to move things around, and I reached in the back pocket of my car, and I pull out the CD, Montgomery Delaney, Walking in the Light. I’m like, son of a gun. If this ain’t a reminder to call him, nothing is. is I put it on the front seat of my car and the phone rings it’s Monty Delaney at the cemetery with the song walking in the light staring me in the face are you kidding me and what did you say to me I don’t remember you like no coincidences Debbie there’s one of those God winks they call him or you know unbelievable moment yeah God God winks anyway Monty Delaney everybody should know that I love you And that you’ve saved my butt a million times. Monty was a full-time attorney for many years He took care of everybody and like did favors for everybody and how many parking tickets did you get me out of? Not out of it. Did you come to court for me for my daughter?
1
0:02:43
I mean, are you are you allowing me to violate the attorney-client privilege? No, are you waving?
2
0:02:48
Um, no, I’m really not waving, but I just want people to get the gist. And I would forget about it, and then it would be a court day, and I’d be like, call him, and I’m like, I don’t know, where… And he’d just show up. I can’t even…
1
0:02:58
Let’s just say you’re a much better driver these days than you were back then.
2
0:03:01
I was always in a hurry back then. Now I’m not in a hurry. I’m like, you know what? I’ll get there when I get there. So besides an attorney, you spent how many years as a police officer?
1
0:03:13
I was a cop in the South Bronx for almost nine years and then I got hurt and I had to get retired. I broke my back and they retired me. Wow, that’s a bad break. Yeah, I was in traction for six months and then I would spend another year in a swimming pool and to get back on my feet again, it was tough. I was in the middle of law school when it happened, so I had to put that aside and then go back to it when I was rehabbed.
2
0:03:40
I didn’t realize that sometimes people tell you things about them and you forget over the years. Monty Delaney, by the way, is a very big man. How tall are you?
1
0:03:49
I’m 6’6″.
2
0:03:50
Yeah, I wore my heels for you today. He was supposed to come into the studio and I was checking him because we hadn’t actually talked since last week and he’s like, I’m sick as a dog. My wife gave me codeine so we’re talking
1
0:04:04
Virtually right now. I had this horrible cough. I couldn’t stop coughing and she said you know I have this medicine for when I was sick, and you know I don’t you know I just took a couple of teaspoons of it, and I was out like a light
2
0:04:14
Money doesn’t drink. He doesn’t take any drugs. He’s just like he’s out from codeine. You know whatever Maybe feel better. I don’t know that it worked. I’m glad it worked. That’s a big body to like put down.
1
0:04:28
No, Deb, I was coughing so hard that my back actually hurts this morning.
2
0:04:31
I know, and I told you I had the same thing. And we were talking, Bobby, and I this morning, there’s something going on.
1
0:04:35
I didn’t want to come over there and get everybody sick.
2
0:04:36
Oh yeah, good thinking. And you saved me the trouble of putting on my other eye mascara. I was like, screw it, I’ll just have one eye done. He’s not coming in the studio, what the heck? I’m kidding.
5
0:04:47
What about me?
2
0:04:48
No, I did the other eye for you, Bobby. Thank you very much. You’re welcome. I hate the poor guy to look over and be like, are you serious? Anyway, Monty, the subject of reconnecting with people you care about that you don’t see very often, what sparked you to call me that day?
1
0:05:03
Just that we had spoken about a month or two ago about maybe getting together for lunch and I haven’t seen in a long time that I care about and you were one of them and I called and serendipitously you pulled out my CD and you called me.
2
0:05:29
There we go baby, there we go. Now you’ve, after the whole legal thing and during, you really loved music. Music was your love. You have lots of kids and grandkids and wives and you have a nice wife right now. Her name is Connie and I’m dying to meet her.
1
0:05:46
Oh my gosh, she’s an angel. She’s an angel.
2
0:05:48
But you’ve been married a couple of times. You have a lot of dynamics going on with the family.
1
0:05:52
I had to give a couple of houses away before I got it right. I don’t suggest that any young men do that. It’s a tough thing to do but I finally got it right. She’s just an amazing person. I had to grow and become the man I’ve become in order to be worthy of a woman like this. She’s just incredible. She’s an absolutely incredible woman.
2
0:06:11
What a beautiful thing to say. I hope she’s listening. Son of a gun. We’ll play this back.
1
0:06:16
I don’t care if she’s listening or not. She knows how I feel. That’s beautiful.
2
0:06:19
So the singer’s song, I’m holding a CD that was in my car, the back seat there, my thumb originally, I’m walking in the light, and I just played a little bit of it as we opened the segment. What was that song about, Walking in the Light?
1
0:06:32
Well, it’s an interesting story, because after I got rehabbed and I got on my feet again, while I was in traction, I said, one of the few things I could do while I was in traction was sit there and play the guitar. And that was the late 80s. And I said, when I got on my feet, I’m going to play the guitar again. And all these coffee houses started to pop up where you could go in there and open mics so you could play original music, you know? So, I started to go to these coffee houses and play. And then people started to give me gigs to come play at other coffee houses. And then I ended up making a cassette tape, 10 songs. And I started writing songs. And one night I lived in a loft in Norris Hill on Division Street, an artist loft. And down the hall from me was this guy who was kind of like a fascist, you know, it was like a, like sort of like borderline skinhead. And he used to have these like little fascist meetings in his loft. I came in from a gig one night, it was April. And, uh, he, he was a non-smoking fascist. So, the smoking fascist, they have a smoke in the hallway. So, I come in and there’s a couple of fascists smoking in the hallway. One says to the other, you know, Bob, there is a truth and its objective. And I went into my loft thinking, what a comment. So, I sat down with my guitar and it was April and I was thinking about April, I was thinking about Easter, Passover, and Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. And I started thinking about those things and in about 10 minutes I had written a song, Walking in the Light. The song uses Moses Christ and Martin Luther King to speak about what is objectively true. You know, certain people walk in the light and certain people walk in the darkness. And certainly, these guys down the hall are walking in the darkness.
2
0:08:15
That is a very heavy thing that happened when she wrote the song in 10 minutes. Son of a gun!
1
0:08:20
Sometimes they just come out like that.
2
0:08:21
Yes, yes.
1
0:08:22
When the song came out and I said, you know, I’m going to make this the title song of a new record. And I started writing the other songs for Walking in the Light. And, you know, that’s 1996. They’re still playing that record all over the country. And the songs have held up over the test of, you know, almost 30 years now. And I’m very proud of the record. It was produced by Rex Fowler. Now, Rex Fowler was part of Aztec Two-Step.
2
0:08:50
Oh my gosh, I love them. Very few people know who they are. When I went to Ithaca College and I first got up there and I was like all new and shiny little freshman, Aztec Two-Step was performing downtown and it was our first like concert we went to in college and you know, you do the baking and I’ll do the making.
1
0:09:08
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
4
0:09:09
Yeah.
1
0:09:10
Rex lives in Milford. I think he’s a Connecticut resident now. But yeah, I ended up getting to meet them. Everybody of a certain age has a, you know, first time I heard Aztec Two-Step story, you know?
2
0:09:22
It’s funny you say that, because I haven’t had this Aztec conversation with anybody in a long time.
1
0:09:27
Well, when I started to play out in the coffee house, eventually I got a gig opening up for them, and I opened up for them probably like 50 or 60 times over the years.
2
0:09:35
Wow, I never knew this, about little things we never know about our friends. It takes great confidence to play in front of people and you must be very fluid in your guitar playing, but you’re also a writer and most people who write songs also write for other things. You have a book that just came out, you told me, a book of poems. Tell me about that.
1
0:09:56
It’s called A Musings, A dot dot dot Musings. I get it on Amazon. I retired from the law because I got sick. I got some heart issues I’m dealing with. I closed down my law office. I was home and I was thinking, what am I going to do now? I looked at my phone one day and I thought, for years I would sit in courtrooms and courthouses and hallways and waiting around and I would write poetry while I was sitting there on the phone. And I realized I had, you know, five, 600 poems on the phone.
2
0:10:32
Really?
1
0:10:33
I said, let me take a couple hundred of them and put them into a book form. And so I did that. So I did that and I let this book out. And you know, they’ve gone through a couple of printings now on Amazon. People are liking it. The reviews of the book are very, very good. And what I did is I just put all these poems in alphabetical order so you could just open it up, fan through the pages, and stop on any page and read a poem.
2
0:10:55
All right, now wait a minute.
3
0:10:57
We have something.
1
0:10:58
Subtitle of the book is A Musing’s There is a Poem for Everyone. So in other words, you’re not going to like every poem in the book, but you’re going to find something that you’re going to like.
2
0:11:05
Oh my gosh, we are twins from another mother. When I was a little girl, I’m a big poem writer too, I wrote a book of poems, alphabetical order, and I made it like a phone book like dial a poem. I gave it to Mrs. what’s her name? Anyway she lost my book in school. I was like are you kidding me? I cut it out. It was carpet. But anyway I love poems. Do people buy poetry books on
1
0:11:24
Amazon? Is it something people buy? Well they’re buying this one you know I did and I did an in-store thing at Barnes & Noble like a book signing and well quite a few of them right there at the door of Barnes & Noble up in the Palisades Mall. They’re buying the book. I mean I didn’t write it for like a commercial success. I wrote it as you know basically just you know it’s going to be part of my legacy. My kids could pick up this book 20 years from now and say, oh God, you know, my dad wasn’t such an idiot.
2
0:11:48
Yes, your dad wasn’t such an idiot. Well I’m so excited. I didn’t know about the book signing. See we haven’t talked and I would have come to the darn thing. I have my own book coming out, How to Talk to Strangers, Advice from a Professional Stranger Talker. But my point is really to this conversation. It’s about creating relationships and talking to people and communicating in an authentic way so that you create relationships that take you through your life because that’s really the meaning of life is the good people you know on this planet get to connect with
1
0:12:17
like you. Oh yeah, yeah. My father who was like my nemesis, when he died in 1999, him and I had made a lot of peace with each other. And he was a World War II Marine, tough guy, you know, difficult guy to get along with. And he didn’t say many things to me that were like saving and repeating, but one of the things he used to say was that the measure of your life as a man is not going to be how much money you make or how much property you acquire. The measure of your life is going to be who’s in the church on the day you drop dead. And that’s the truth. That’s the truth.
2
0:12:50
Except if you live really, really long and everybody else went before you, then you’re like, seriously, what a ripoff. I was there for you.
1
0:12:58
Come on. You live to be 105, there’s not going to be that many people.
2
0:13:05
You’ve got to get some rent-a-guests.
1
0:13:07
Yeah.
2
0:13:08
I think everybody should leave behind a person who has to attend funerals for them, like if they pass, like just give a list of where they have to…
1
0:13:17
You know, my dad, when he died, I didn’t think anybody was going to come. The place was packed. There was a line out the door to get into. And so many people came up to me and said, you know, like, oh, my, your dad did this nice thing for me. Your dad just, you know, I lost my job in the 60s. Your dad bought me groceries for six months. You know, things like this. And I said, I wish he was that nice to us.
2
0:13:35
Right. You just never know. You find people reveal stuff at funerals. They don’t do that you never hear any other time in life and and they blurt stuff like and you stand there like you’re mourning and you’re like what and Like you know it’s like oh It came to go into things They told me because I’ve been to you know I was a lot of funerals for my family And I was like the family eulogist and people would just come up. I’m like you’re kidding me right Blurt stuff. I’m like we have to talk about that some other time. Sure. Anyway, listen, we don’t have time to read your poem, but I invite you, when you’re feeling better, to join me in the studio, and you can, because I love your voice, number one. I love you, number two. Number three, you’re not just any guy, you have much to say and share with the world. So when you feel better, come up and bring the book, and we’ll, by then my book will be out, and I’ll sign one for you, and you sign one for me, and we’ll just have a fest. We’ll have a book fest.
1
0:14:26
Oh, I would love that. I’ll give you a call after the holidays when things have slowed down and we’ll set that up. I would love to do that.
2
0:14:32
Yeah, hopefully I’ll be de-bloated by then. I’m not doing so good right now. I’m bulking
3
0:14:36
up.
1
0:14:37
Listen, you’d be beautiful if you were 700 pounds.
2
0:14:40
Yeah, keep that in mind because I’m heading that way. All right, Monty Delaney, my dear friend, good to have you on my show. And everybody listening, I’d love you to reconnect with somebody that’s meaningful in your life. You haven’t talked to a long time. Just like this somebody that’s meaningful in your life. You haven’t talked to a long time. Just like this Okay, Monty. See you next time. I love you, Deb. Merry Christmas, honey. You too.
Transcribed with Cockatoo
