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I met Harry Kinney the day he started his first cab driver job. He had been mayor of Albuquerque twice. I walked up to his cab, where he sat reading a newspaper in front of the Marriott at Louisiana and I-40. I was writing a Journal column back then.

I will never forget what he said when he looked up and saw me: “Oh, no, not you.”

On Sunday, the usual luminaries dedicated a statue to him on Civic Plaza — or more properly — Harry E. Kinney Civic Plaza.

That day I saw him in the cab, he said, “You’re not going to write about this, are you?”

Who? Me? Write about a twice-elected mayor now driving a cab because he thought it would be fun and he’d get to meet a lot of new people? Write about that? Nah, why would I write about that?

An old friend with a penchant for wisdom and an unerring eye for the real McCoy once said of Harry Kinney: “It makes me feel good to know that people like Harry live in Albuquerque. He makes it a better city and a better place to live.

He did, too.

On the front page of today’s Times is a remarkable story.

From the story: “As a member of the only all-black unit in the D-Day landings on Omaha and Utah, the two beachheads assigned to American forces, Corporal William G. Dabney was a rarity in a European war that in its early days was fought almost entirely by whites.”

We tend to forget what these then young men did. We rarely, if ever, consider the notion of “all-black” units, and then realize what they faced when they came home.

Mr. Dabney is the last of his D-Day kind. I’m glad to see him on the front page of the Times.

This is a story about feeling good about where you live.

Nobody gets killed; nobody gets shot; Bill O’Reilly wouldn’t be the least bit interested in it, though Dan Barry, the Pulitzer winner at the NY Times might. (If you don’t read Dan Barry, you should. If you are a fan of good writing and good storytelling, you should be reading Dan Barry every chance you get. Go look for him at the Times as soon as we’re through here with the Corrales story.)

The story is told by an old friend and one of the founders of a weekly poker game I play in. It began on a Tuesday in 1975 and has been played every Tuesday since. He retired from UNM and built a house in Corrales. Eventually, he came to see there was a problem with the house: A lot of people couldn’t tell the front from the back and most of them thought the back was the front. So he hired a crew to put in a proper entrance to the back of the house.

On Tuesday, he went out to see how things were going with the new entrance. That’s when he saw the 20-foot flames and the column of smoke rising from across the street.

“It was impressive,” he said.

All the more so when you consider the whole thing began with two kids, the New Mexico sun and the classic kid experiment: Let’s see what we can burn with a magnifying glass.

Kid #1 said: “Don’t. You’ll start a fire.”

Kid #2 said: “It’ll only burn a leaf.”

Points to Kid #1.

Dick pointed out the fire to the guys laying pavers at his house. The four-man crew grabbed their shovels and started running toward the fire.

“That, too, was impressive,” he said.

Dick’s wife called 911 and soon the Corrales Fire Department was on the job.

Two of the workers from Dick’s house were throwing sand at the base of the fire to stop its spread. Another worker got a hose from the house of a neighbor and they quickly knocked the fire down.

“While they were spraying, I went over to the mother to see what had happened,” Dick said. “She said the boys had been playing with a magnifying glass.”

Then the FD showed up, four vehicles. The area burned was only about 100 square feet, but it was close to the house.

Then the thank you’s began.

“The father of the boys brought his kids over to thank the paver crew that knocked down the fire,” Dick said. “The Corrales fire chief called the workers’ boss, the owner of the company, to thank him for the work the paver crew did. The mother gave a thank you note to each guy in the paver crew with $100 in it. I asked her if the fire department had given any grief to the kids. No, she said, they were very nice to them. Good, kudos to the fire department!”

A friend took a walk on a Corrales ditchbank. She had her camera phone in her pocket. Ditchbanks are one of the many free amenities of life in Corrales.

Because it’s Monday, my mind turns to the working stiffs of the world and the need to get the week off to a good start.

On that count, I give you “potatoness,” an Aristotleian construct at the heart of a British high court case in which the question at hand becomes: Are Pringles Potato Chips?

The court says yes. So there you are.

It’s always nice to see another columnist come along and underscore what you’ve already argued. Mark Morford, in his usual inimitable San Francisco Chronicle style, makes the argument in “The Big Gay Shrug — Sorry, Enemies of Gay Marriage. Prop 8 or no, you’ve already Lost.

Why? Their own kids, that’s why.

Morford writes: “Gay marriage is a foregone conclusion. It’s a done deal. It’s just a matter of time. For the next generation in particular, equal rights for gays is not even a question or a serious issue, much less a sinful hysterical conundrum …”

It’s a generational thing and there’s no way anyone will stop it. I made much the same argument when I was writing a column for the Albuquerque Journal and several people got their shorts in a twist when a kid in Clovis included a picture or two of gay kids appearing to like one another in the high school yearbook.

In that column I wrote:

“My money is on the Clovis young’uns. Not all of them, of course. Nothing is ever 100 percent. But I’m betting there’s a slowly emerging majority, just as there is in other Clovises around the land.

“The Clovis young’uns find themselves in an argument with their elders, a not unusual generational occurrence.

“Their elders are going to lose the argument. They may not lose it today or tomorrow or next week or next year or the next 10 years.

“But lose it they will.

“The world is changing, even in Clovis.”

Writing in the Chronicle, Morford makes a similar argument. He’s right.

In the Times today is a story that underlines the old saw about politics making for strange bedfellows, and just maybe opens a small window into a few common human touchstones. The lawyers who argued Bush v Gore in 2000 — David Boies for Gore and Ted Olson for Bush — are now on the same side in one of the more touchy questions in today’s culture wars — same sex marriage, specifically Prop. 8 in California. The lawyers have teamed up to have Prop. 8, passed by referendum to ban same sex marriage, reversed.

This turn of events caught the eye of Mary Ellen Capek in Corrales. She is the principal at Capek & Associates, a Corrales resident and author (Effective Philanthropy — Organizational Success Through Deep Diversity & Gender Equality). She is married to Sue Hallgrath and former board chair of the Equality New Mexico Foundation. When she saw that Ted Olson had joined forces with David Boies, it made her sit up a little straighter in her chair.

“This Ted and Dave Show blew me away,” she said. “I think it was Ted who lost his wife in the Pentagon 9/11 crash (this is correct). That’s the kind of tragedy that will either make or break most people. So maybe that has something to do with softening him up. I keep looking for the downside myself, but can’t find it. The biggest fear of the national groups is losing in the Supreme Court, and the one federal suit they’ve filed is very narrow, surgically aiming at only a piece of the federal DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act.) It will be interesting to watch, to say the least.”

She said she’s not privy to the national gay rights organizational debates on the subject, but that a lot of her friends have asked the same questions.

“They have wondered why the caution, citing the same argument Ted and Dave do about having the same majority that won the other two major cases,” she said. “And speaking personally, with the obvious caveat that they are on the level, it feels quite wonderful to see two straight, white guys taking up this cause with the visibility and timeliness that they have. It feels so good. I’m concerned about the risks of losing in front of the Supremes, but can’t see the logic that it would take another 20 years if we did. We’ll learn from it and come back with better arguments.”