My daughter Jane was going off to prep school;  we were in no way ready for this and Martha and I were driving her up to Massachusetts.  Michael was crazy about Martha and he wanted to drive with us.  He had us over to dinner at Monkeytop, Jane didn't really know Michael but  we decided we'd all go.  Jane was in the back seat alternately laughing and crying most of the way.  Martha leaned her head out of the window to see if we could change lanes on the interstate and her new glasses got blown away.  We stopped in Little Italy around midnight to do a little sightseeing.  We arrived at Andover in the early morning -- What a crew! Michael with his hair, Martha without her glasses and me with my very beaten up car that I'd traded for a painting and Martha and Michael had some breakfast while I went to the auditorium to hear the welcoming speech:  "You are the cream of the cream".  None of us had any business being there.  Michael was such a sweetheart!

We remember Michael's presence on Ninth Street in Durham as a co-founder of Ninth Street Bakery in the 1980's. He was always a calm soul and treated everybody with kindness. 

Michael had just purchased his (nearly new) 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air and wanted to take it for a test drive, so he and I jumped in and headed for his boyhood home Minneapolis, by way of the Palisades Parkway, Cooperstown, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. While visiting my elderly (in his 70s!) Uncle Irving at his home between Cedar Lake & Lake Calhoun, he invited us out to dinner, which we hungrily accepted. But while riding up to his club atop the tower overlooking the lakes & the whole city, and realizing our long hair & dirty jeans looked pretty scruffy for a far fancier place than we'd anticipated, we asked whether a couple hippies could even get in? Irv replied graciously, "No problem. I'm respectable enough for all of us." And he was.  Michael loved it.

   Mike and Peter and I developed a love of the board game Scrabble sometime long ago, and we would play as often as opportunity allowed for given our disparate lifestyles and responsibilities. Need it be said who the best player was? Well, to be fair, quite often it was Peter. He bested Mike on numerous occasions, but to keep us honest, I’d win the one-off now and then.

   Aside from putting words on the board, every game the three of us sat was also a trope-fest of puns, hyperbole, homophones, intentional malaprops, misquotes, odd referential apocrypha and general wordplay, but you didn’t need to tread carefully when you opened your mouth because there’d be a rejoinder, no matter what was said. Our repartee was as close as The Golden Rule cuts for the joy of our shared love of language and for each other.

   We tried out various dictionaries, but it didn’t much matter because challenges were rare, especially for me going up against either of those word wizards. We tried using timers for the player’s turn but in the end rejected them as intrusive. Mike’s turns could grow beards (there’s a trope!) during which his brothers would make snide comments while he moved his tiles around, concentrating, ignoring us. But when he gathered his tiles and played them, he’d be subtly triumphant as he tallied his score (my word!). Of course, he already knew how many points his word(s) had made, but he counted aloud for our benefit, and Peter and I would pretend to be offended: Why, never in all my days! The gauntlet is thrown!

   It’s hard to imagine playing Scrabble without Mike at the table, which may stand as a metaphor for so much more in our lives that is bereft of him.

   In this chronology, we have reached the dependent clause.

   In writing these memories others surfaced and some were added. We hope more will arise, but should they cease, and we stop looking backward, they are not all we have of Michael Thomas ‘Mahmud’ Mooney; we have our enduring and steadfast love for him to carry forward.

                     Dearest Michael, you were ever my guiding light. I pray you will so remain…

  For almost 20 years I worked abroad and only saw Mike when I flew back to the States, but that was sketchy because he was working two jobs, and his family made for a third. In 2018 and 2019 the extended family came together for Archie’s illness and subsequent passing, but in such visits the standout individual is the one in distress.

  But then in December 2020 I got a surprise. Mike’s order, Sufi Rifai-Marufi, would gather in Seattle, WA. He contacted me regarding that weekend, that he’d have limited free time but suggested we meet up nonetheless, and I was all for it. Dina and I were then living in Olympia, one hour south, so I was really looking forward to it, and I reserved a hotel room rather than commute. It’s a good thing I did.

  Our first meeting was at a house in the West Seattle hills that overlook the beauty of Puget Sound with Blake and Vashon Islands in view. I was allowed in the house for a short visit and was warmly greeted by Shirin, who I hadn’t seen in quite a while. Others I’d never met before were also kind and welcoming, but there were some objections to my intrusion. Mike was as pleasant as always, and it was great to see him. It was a good, if brief, visit.

  The following day began to snow in mid-afternoon and by the time the sun went down it was building up. I got a call from Mike. He’d been busy all day and there was an event later that night that I wouldn’t be allowed to attend, but that evening would be our only other chance to get together. The snow had let up but almost two feet’s worth had fallen. I had my wife’s front-wheel drive Honda, and so I drove without a problem to another residential neighborhood. Once again, I was invited inside over mild objections and even allowed to sit and eat at the dinner table where I met Mike's teacher, Sharif Baba (I’d been introduced to him briefly once before in Chapel Hill). I am grateful to have been given a tiny peek into Mike’s life as a Sufi. Having lived in the Middle East, I am (respectfully) aware of prohibitions on non-Muslims. I was disappointed to learn that Talat Halman’s flight from Michigan had been canceled due to the blizzard. After we finished with dinner, Mike walked me out into that winter wonderland. The snow was piled so high that cars were humps of white, and we used our arms to rake snow off several cars’ windows so the folks could leave. Then we hugged, and he gave me a smile and a little wave bye-bye and went back inside the house. 

Late 1990s: 

   Mike went to work for a software firm called Worden Brothers where our brother Peter’s companion Archie, our ‘other brother,’ was General Manager & Chief Programmer. Mike’s job title was Customer Service Manager, and I think he also dealt with public relations. Apparently, the job requirements were stressful, and perhaps it wasn’t a good match, but Scorpios are, if anything, determined and rather intense about it; the ‘I can handle it’ conviction would have prevailed. I understand that completely. Mike had never been into ‘working out’ per se, was averse to participant sports (aside from volleyball back in the past) and in general didn’t get much exercise. Added to that was his diet then, mostly fast food, and it was that combination of ills that brought on a heart attack in his late forties. I was overseas and shocked by the news, but unable to come back and see him. When his doctors recommended a job with plenty of exercise, he found one right there in the hospital that had treated him, UNC Memorial, where he was employed until he came home from work and laid down to rest, Friday September 6.

   In 1994 I was a student at UNC and Mike was the manager of Columbia Street Bakery in Chapel Hill. When he learned I’d be commuting from Durham, he graciously offered me a room in his quiet house on Kenan Street,  much as he had some twenty years earlier in Monkey Bottom. As housemates, we saw a good deal more of each other, but our commitments kept us busy. Two outstanding things I recall about that house was the front portico and steps were framed in holly bushes and trumpet vine. And our other housemate, Hugh ‘Talat’ Halman was a Duke doctoral candidate in Divinity. He's possessed of a welcoming nature and is one of the most articulate people I’ve had the pleasure to know. Talat wore green every day of the week which implied that he was a Muslim, for green is a signifier of Jannah, or paradise, in Islam. But every chance I thought up to ask him about it got sidetracked in wisecracks. Hugh, not unlike either of my brothers, is a punster par excellence, always working with words, and with the whole of the English language to deploy; when he and Mike got going, it was a cornucopia of the oral/aural!

  While living there, I worked part-time for Mike at the bakery until 1995 when I graduated with a B.A. at the ripe age of 43. In 1996 I went off to Graduate School and to teach in Belize, and Mike departed for Azerbaijan to get married and to bring Esmira into our lives. Our personal commitments would take us farther apart than geographical locations, and sadly, over the next dozen years or so we saw very little of each other. 

Bakery days: One Christmas the whole extended family gathered at Mom’s (Alice Mooney) house on West Knox Street: Mike and his wife Laurie and her son Will; Maureen (better known as Mo) and her husband Frank and their kids Frances, Heather, (and baby Brian?); Peter Mooney and his boyfriend, Archie. Following supper, we sat in the living room for the ritual exchanging of presents. I don’t recall who gave the toaster cozy or who the recipient was, but soon after its unwrapping Mike put it on his head much to the delight of the kids (and the older ones, too!) and wore it as a hat for the rest of the evening! 

During Mike’s time working at the Regulator Press and later at Ninth Street Bakery, one of his favorite hangouts on Ninth Street, aside from the Regulator Bookshop (co-owned by Tom Campbell, who was a friend, housemate at Big Red, and ex-colleague on the Duke Chronicle staff), was just a few doors away, McDonald’s Drug Store. I think the reason he liked the place was because his disposition was as sweet as dear old Mrs. McDonald’s, and as erudite and genteel as her husband’s, the pharmacist. Also, he loved their milkshakes made the old-fashioned way, by hand!  

Mike’s Fondness for “Language Acquisition:”

A.  Mid-1970s: At the time that we both drove taxis for Broadway Yellow Cab, one Saturday Mike came by my apartment and said he wanted to show me something he’d seen but was mum to my inquiries as we drove down Main Street and kept going. When we crossed Alston Avenue I perked up as East Durham was so different from West. We kept going, further and further east until it may not even have been Durham County. He pulled into the lot of this ramshackle country store, featuring two old white men in bib overalls on the bench outside. I didn’t need to be told. Just over their heads and painted on the store's window: Ice Cold Beveges. Mike was beside himself with glee.

B.  One never had to go too far in Durham to hear the English language butchered. Mike and I took pleasure in relating to each other the latest travesty of pronunciation or spelling, and such foibles always pleased him. We were both working at Ninth Street Bakery, and one day he came downstairs from his office and said he’d take me to lunch. I clocked out, and we headed up Ninth Street. Where are we going, I asked. Whit’s Grill. What? Ninth Street’s very own Greasy Spoon! Have you ever read the menu there, he asked. The menu, such as it was, was posted on the wall behind the counter on one of those boards with grooves to slide the letters in and out. Well, no, I said. I’d been in there but it wasn’t exactly a health-food hangout. You’re in for a treat, he said, as we entered and turned to the counter, and there it was, as it likely had been for ages: Breafesk - $2.50. Mike was, as Mom was fond of saying, tickled pink. I can’t remember where we ate.

C.  In the 1980s I returned to Durham from a stint out west. In San Francisco, I’d worked at a shoe store where the sole advertising was to place one of a pair in the display window. An elderly gentleman came in one morning and said he liked that tassel loafer in the window. I went in back to retrieve the other. He appeared delighted after trying them on and walking about, but when he went to the mirror he suddenly yelled out, Not Same Culluh! The display shoe had indeed faded. When I told Mike this story back in Durham, he all but fell down laughing! And for many years thereafter, ‘Not Same Culluh’ was for Mike a catchphrase for anything off-kilter or out of whack; he cherished it.  

If you spoke with Mike while he was standing, he’d have one hand toying with a strand of hair while he lightly rocked himself back and forth, right leg locked and the left canted outward at about ten o’clock. When he was seated, some strand of chest hair, or when he wore a beard, was always in play. Another feature of his personality was that he wasn’t given to spur-of-the-moment answers or responses unless he was teasing you or joking around, then applying his quick, razor-sharp wit! But otherwise before speaking Mike always thought things out, and the rocking and the hair were a part of that process. It was like his signature. 

   After Mike moved out of his mill house on Case Street in Monkey Bottom, he and his neighbors Tim McDonough and Holly Curtis moved up to the top of the hill and with five others took possession of a run-down mansion at the corner of Swift Avenue and Pettigrew Street. Given that the big house overlooked Monkey Bottom, they named the house Monkey Top (there was no Durham freeway then, just a pretty tree-covered hill that ran from Swift Avenue down to Erwin Field). It was a communal-type living arrangement, at least as far as meals went, as wonderfully described by housemate Christy Lentz earlier {below} in her endearing eulogy.

   They found a giant wooden spool about a dozen feet in circumference that the Southern Pacific Railroad had used to hold miles of wire. After umpteen coats of varnish, it was turned into a dining table that could seat all of them and a few more in the big room just off the kitchen that was all windows along one side.

   Mike’s room was the first one you’d encounter at the top of the front stairs just off the foyer (the house also had back stairs) and his front window looked out on the big tree out front, the driveway, and a slice of Swift Avenue, Main Street, and East Campus. His other window gave on the big magnolia in the sideyard and behind it the mansion next door (Sunnyside) and its carriage house in back.

   He began to tear out the plaster (there were holes in the walls when he moved in) because he intended to replace it with a more modern wall covering, and he did eventually, but for some time he lived in his own construction zone. If it fazed him at all, he didn’t seem to mind.

   The long front yard ran down to Pettigrew Street and one side of it was mostly bare. And so your intrepid Monkey Toppers put up a volleyball net, and volleyball became a big hit. Many Saturdays and Sundays Mike would be out there all day. It was a community event and the pleasure of that was evident in the camaraderie, all easy-going and open and loose and friendly, a good definition of Michael Mooney.

   It was also around this time that Mike sold his Chevy truck and bought him a 1955 two-tone (aqua & white) Chevy Bel Air. Where he got it perhaps doesn’t matter in the face of his love of/for classic cars at a time when driving old beauties or older clunkers was considered a class act by our peers. New car? Forget it! Mike loved the contoured styling and gratuitous chrome of the older models with their giant steering wheels and wing windows. And then at work, Mike drove a Checker Cab with its bulbous body and enormous back seat, a car that was considered a classic even then.

Mike began driving a taxi for Broadway Yellow Cab on Hunt Street in Durham (site of Vega Metals today). He encouraged me to apply and by 1975 I’d be driving too. The dispatcher and his boss, Mr. Jessup, had drivers they favored, a few older guys who’d been around forever, and Michael, who no doubt charmed the management with his benevolence and generosity. Favored drivers would get code call-outs on the car’s radio, and a 10-19 meant, give us a phone call, which usually meant that that driver would be given a special assignment. Here is a wonderful 10-19 memory.

Background: It was the summer of Mike’s first year at Duke (1969) that he and some other students rented an old mansion in Columbia, SC (or was it the family home of one of them but the family elsewhere?), and I was invited along. One morning I awoke to the most remarkable music I’d ever heard. It was instrumental guitar by some guy named Leo Kottke, and we would play the “Armadillo” album over and over again. Mike and I (& many others) became big Kottke fans.

I’m not clear on the date, it may have been 1975, my first year as a cabbie, but both of our (Checker) Cabs were in the taxi stand outside Duke Hospital when I heard the dispatcher call Mike’s cab number and say, “give me a 10-19.” So, he drove off to find a pay phone (he knew where they were around town, as any good cabbie would). Later on, I asked him about that call. Here’s Mike’s tale as I remember it:

The dispatcher told him to drive out to RDU and pick up item # such and such at Baggage Claim and take it to Chapel Hill’s University Inn (or was it the Carolina Inn?) and deliver it to such and such room number. The item he picked up at the airport was a guitar case. When he arrived at the Inn and knocked on the specified door, who should answer it but Leo Kottke! He was in Chapel Hill to play at Memorial Hall (we both went). Mike said they chatted briefly, and then Mr. K paid the fare and gave him “a generous tip,” (Mike didn’t say and I didn’t ask). Somehow the guitarist and his guitar had been separated by the airline, but they were reunited by Michael Thomas Mooney! Hurray!

I dropped out of college in 1973 and moved to Durham. Mike offered me the back room in his mill house one door removed from the corner of Hull and Case in Monkey Bottom (current location of Little School at Duke). His immediate neighbors were Kim Anderson and Bob Everhart. Three doors away was Hutch Traver, former President of ASDU. It was a mixed neighborhood of Duke students and working-class folks. Across the street was Erwin Field, the baseball park. Going up Case a few doors from the end of the street was old Mrs. Jackson’s home & store. She had some food stuffs for sale inside and on her porch was one of those early model red steel Coke dispensers that held the 6 ½ Oz. bottles. You’d slide the door open across the top and reach down inside to get your ice-cold Co-Cola. Mrs. Jackson got along well with Mike; he just had a way with people of any age. Additional memories: After he’d left Duke, Mike drove an early Fifties faded red Chevy pickup truck. His first job may have been at The Bluebird Café, but I know he worked at Somethyme Restaurant which followed on the heels of the Bluebird and in the same location. When I moved in with my backpack full of Beat literature, he was reading very different authors, such as  G.I. Gurdjieff and Sufi Sam and the poet Rumi. I remember the authors’ names because I inquired about them and we had some discussions. The others were too esoteric for me, but I identified with Rumi’s poetry.  

 Two funny memories of Mike at Duke:

1.  The comedy troupe Firesign Theatre was very popular then with their zany take-off spoofs and satires of old radio dramas of the 1950s and Mike and his Duke pals would memorize album tracks in their entirety (e.g. "Nick Danger, Third Eye," from the album 'How can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All?') and stroll about the quad together speaking the parts out loud but addressing no one in particular like some roving absurdist play rehearsal. It was wonderfully smart and endearingly funny.  -- Last year when I came back to Durham to visit,  Mike came over to Peter’s house to play Scrabble. As he came through the front door, I said, “You can sit in the waiting room or wait in the sitting room.” It’s a Firesign Theatre line, and he took off with it and ran the dialog through to the end!

2. Among my best memories of Mike’s two years at Duke are of accompanying him and his friends to concerts at Cameron Indoor Stadium, Page Auditorium, or the Joe College Festival in Wallace Wade. One rises above them all:  Standing outside Cameron in a crowd in winter rain waiting for the doors to open for the Grateful Dead (?), but there was some delay - with everyone wet getting wetter. Mike began singing aloud, to the tune of Oh Come All Ye Faithful: “Oh Why Are We Waiting, Oh Why Are We Waiting, Oh Whyyy Are We Wai-ait-ing, Why, Why, Why!” And immediately the crowd picked it up and the plea grew in volume as it wailed, over and over. I was laughing too hard to do much singing, and then they opened the doors! It was priceless!

1969-70 was Mike’s college freshman year. His dormitory roommate was Steven Ray Miller, a National Honor Society student who thought he’d major in Chemistry, just as Mike thought he’d go for Law. Both of their planned pathways would radically diverge, Mike’s perhaps the earlier of the two. Steven Ray (these days Durham’s Best Artist 3 years in a row) says that in that year Mike went from being an ROTC Air Force-bound straight arrow to something very different. We know he joined the Duke Chapter of SDS. Students for a Democratic Society was an American college student organization that flourished in the mid-to-late 1960s and was known for its activism against social injustice and the Vietnam War. Mike also joined the staff of the Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper, a professionally designed and run daily, and as a reporter, he filed this report about campus activism against the war in Vietnam: https://repository.duke.edu/d… The article is the lead story on the front page and then jumps to page 6: “Student Activities….”  - (Mike and Hutch Traver would later be neighbors in Monkey Bottom.)

(More Timeline than Memory) Up until April 1971, Mike held several staff reporter and editor positions at the newspaper. In that timeframe, he wrote on numerous topics, first as a basic reporter, then as an Editor for ASDU, Associated Students of Duke University, the student government body, and he finished as a Policy Reporter. His articles may be found in the University Archives Online, or contact me and I will happily forward the links to Mike’s digitally archived articles.

From Salisbury we hauled to Durham (100 miles) Mike’s suitcases and books and a giant steamer trunk that dad insisted Mike needed and Mike insisted he didn’t (from the beginning) and tried every way to get out of it. When we arrived at Duke, Dad grabbed the suitcases and Mike and I struggled to get that monster (with the books inside it) from the parking lot in front of Cameron Indoor Stadium over to Mike’s Dorm, with him muttering that as soon as we were gone, so was the trunk. When we got to the dorm there was so much activity of students moving in that Mike finally won him over. We left it in the hallway and Mike told Dad he’d figure out later where he would put it and gave me a big theatrical wink. When I visited several months later to attend my first Major Attractions concert, he said that as soon as we were gone, he’d asked if anybody wanted it, and then got some help to haul it outside and around the back where they left it next to the dumpster!

Getting Out of Church: It was 1968 and Mike was a high school Junior when one weekend he told mom he didn’t want to go to church anymore, and he gave her an eloquently expressed set of reasons that bowled me over. I don’t remember the points he made, just the general thoroughness of it. They were in the hallway area outside the bedroom Mike and I shared. It knocked me out how bold he was to confront her because he was so gentle and she so devout and pious. But she had an open mind. Mom accepted his decision and said that it was fine with her since he had so clearly thought it all out. Another reason I retain this memory is that I too didn’t want to go to church (following dad’s lapse in faith) anymore and be forced to wear that scratchy suit, very different reasoning than Mike’s. Less certain than my brother, I waited a year before asking to be excused. 

In the popular culture of the mid-60s reined two cartoon ducks, Donald & Daffy. At the dinner table one evening, Mike laughed as he looked into his milk glass. I said what’s funny and he leaned over and showed me that by tilting the glass with a couple of inches left the milk along the forward edge resembled a duck’s beak, and when I tried it with my glass, there was a duck there too! We showed it to Mo. Our brother Peter was at the table too but at four, into other stuff. The duck wasn’t funny so much as it was a differentiation, a shared vision of here we are, and there they are who don’t get it, the hip & the square. A day a week a month later, we three bigger kids were giggling about the duck over dessert when dad got upset, as he often did at the table if décor was spurned. As a result, our ducks became a kind of talisman, known only to a privileged few: The duck in the milk. Thank you, Mike, for articulating the generation gap! Years later, I wrote a short story about a family whose kids found ducks in milk. Now I see that I wrote it for Michael.

I love reading all these stories.  I always called him Michael.💜

The Northside Highlander Elementary Band was a regional band based out of Northside Elementary in Atlanta, Georgia, but its musicians were kids drawn from all the Elementary schools throughout the city. Mike was a student at R. L. Hope Elementary. Its makeup resembled an orchestra but without string sections or tympani other than a single drummer. On stage, they formed an arc of several rows with the conductor front and center the way orchestras do. The band members dressed in uniforms of Scottish Tartan complete with kilts, tams, and knee-high socks. They gave public concerts at civic locations around Atlanta, but they also traveled. For example, they played at Busch Gardens. The band read from sheet music on their music stands and followed the conductor. They were disciplined players, and as a result, popular. Mike Mooney was the First trumpet—he sat at the front of his row just to the conductor’s left. The band made a big impression on me. Their attire created on stage a kind of magic, but my clearest memory is of feeling excited and in awe of my brother when we all attended a concert at an auditorium downtown.  

So sorry to hear of Michael’s passing, I have many fond memories of him . He was always a sweet and supportive spirit at the old Ninth St Bakery . His door was always open and took time to listen . He will be greatly missed. 

Mike got a newspaper route with the Atlanta Constitution when he was twelve years old. It was his first real job. He had to get up early to meet the delivery truck that threw the stacks to the sidewalk as it passed by. His route was near to where we lived on Dale Drive close to Lenox Square. Sometimes he enlisted my help to roll up the papers and rubber band them before packing them into his double sling bags to load onto his bike. On Sundays, I would also take my bike because the paper was denser, and we would ride his route together. -- Mike and I stood on a corner of a busy intersection on the day after President Kennedy was shot, and we sold the papers hand-over-fist until they were all gone. Every car that stopped for the light wanted a copy, and all weren’t interested in taking their change. That paper must have been a Special Edition because that was a Saturday (I looked it up) and there was no newspaper on that day. I remember a white convertible with red seats pulling up right next to us and the driver handing Mike a five-dollar bill and saying something like, here, kid.