Cobb Manor sees its share of divorces

Yes, there are dull moments at Cobb Manor. But they are few and very far between.

I purchased the three-bedroom house at Cobb Manor to make a home for my three darling daughters. That never worked out, so I was blessed-cursed with at least two empty bedrooms and a fat mortgage. To fill the rooms and pay the bills, I took in the flotsam and jetsam of recent divorce. It has been an interesting experience.

Take this week. Please.

Big Pete, the actor-author-lawnmower was discarding his latest tragic love, inadvertently. To say her special goodbye, she put Big Pete’s big duffle bag behind the wheels of her car in the driveway and backed over it. She crushed the suitcase, the Apple computer, the shaving kit and of course, Big Pete’s big Irish heart. It has not been determined whether the tire tracks will ever be successfully removed from the duffle bag.

It has not been determined if Big Pete’s movie scripts can be extricated from the shattered computer. The Apple actually fell out of the computer.

We now call this the Big Goodbye.

This was just the latest in a very long line of contretemps at the Cobb.

The names will be changed occasionally to protect the very guilty. Most of the transients were staggering survivors of recent divorces. My dear daughter Bridget dubbed the house “the home for broken men.” Appropriate.

But the stories have starred a woman or two. Let’s call her Becky. She was dragged, kicking and screaming, from under the deck by the Camden Police Department for trying to break into the Cobb. Most of the women in these stories were trying desperately to escape the Cobb. Becky was always different.

Let’s call her Siobhan. She was a Cobb manor original and an original in every other sense of the word as well. She emerged from the Cobb shower one morning to find that the stairs had been removed by some exuberant carpenter.

Larry was a Cobb favorite and another original. Not only for washing his infected feet with the dish sponge but cutting the insulation at his new house using my best bread knife.

But Marky Mark was the king of them all, y’all. The Cobb was filled to the brim at the time of his most recent divorce and he was so anxious to join the fun that he threw up a tent in the backyard and strung an extension cord to his new abode for light and the alarm clock.

I, understanding the fragile nature of divorce survivors, would never have charged the poor boy rent. But the habitues of the other bedrooms insisted. He was using the shower and kitchen after all, and he should pay too.

They talked me into it.

He decided to buy a particularly fierce Harley and terrorize the neighborhood and half the damsels in Rockland. He always came back from southern trips with enough fireworks to blow up a small bridge. More than one Cobb Manor party broke up after the scanner reported “a shooting on Cobb Road.”

I think we once set fire to a neighbor’s house with a bottle rocket, but it was quickly extinguished.

Over the past 24 years, there have been remarkably few casualties, if you don’t count Big Pete’s duffle bag … and his big Irish heart.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as my mother would say. What’s next?

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at

emmetmeara@msn.com.