One of a kind

You can’t ever know everything about a person — the best you can do is to know a facet of them, one or two sides of someone, some handful of the pieces that make up the whole.

I’d be the first to admit that what I know about Randy Pittman — who died just over a week ago — is very much one small slice of the man.

Randy was working in the liquor store next to the Mount Cashel Sobeys when he found out he had cancer, when he was told that he probably had weeks to live. (He actually outlived the doctors’ numbers, something he said he would do.)

Taller than me, with greying hair, somewhere in his fifties and with bright eyes that he would lock right onto yours when he was talking to you, he was the kind of person you somehow couldn’t help but connect with — he connected with you, and you hung there.

I’d known Randy for years, because he was an avid news watcher and newspaper reader, the kind of reader who, if he agreed with something you’d written, he’d tell you — but if he disagreed, he’d tell you that as well, all with the same kind of friendly but intense tone, as if, as a professional in the media business, you were meant to expect criticism and praise evenhandedly, as if you owed him the time so that you could improve the work you did.

And he was thorough. Almost embarrassingly thorough.

If he buttonholed you in an

aisle, he could ask you about

an issue and then contrast your argument with something you had written several months earlier — all of this without ever knowing if and when he might see you. This

was discussion without deliberate preparation.

He knew details from other people who had written on the same issue, knew what was being said on the radio shows and what the general opinion was on issues when they spun by him at work.

He’d raise all of that in his discussion with you, always talking to you with a slight smile as if slightly embarrassed to be raising the issue, always with the same measured voice, never reverting to the easy escape of anger or a raised voice to make his point.

And it wasn’t just the media, either. Randy was quite comfortable contacting politicians directly to ask them about the choices they had made on issues, and I imagine that when he did, it was with the same direct approach he had not only with me, but with a whole host of other media people as well.

He’d always ask questions, always raise points, and occasionally, write about the issues himself, sending letters to the editor on issues where he felt he had something to add.

This is not a eulogy for a saint. Like I’ve said, I know very little about Randy Pittman outside of the face I knew. In the rest of his life, like with most of us, there were probably elements of saint and sinner, of angel and devil. That whole complicated mix that makes us all different and the same, that makes us people above anything else.

Engaged in the world

But what I do know is that, no matter what else he was in the rest of his life, Randy was a citizen —involved in and aware of his place in what functions as our democratic society. It’s a role that not many people are willing to take on anymore — a role that they often replace with simple cynicism and the glib, unresearched argument that “politicians are all crooks.”

Randy is unlikely to receive much in the way of fanfare, despite the large number of people who knew and liked him.

One thing is certain, though. His death is a loss, because there are altogether too few people who care enough about the way we are governed — and the way that government is covered in the media — to take the time and effort to examine it in reasoned detail, and to believe you have a right to take a deliberate hand in the process.

Sometimes he agreed — often, he didn’t.

Randy Pittman died too young. I’ll miss him.

Russell Wangersky is The Telegram’s editorial page editor. He can be reached by e-mail at rwanger@thetelegram.com.