"I Wish I Could Do This Forever..."

The words in the title of this post are among the last that Andy Rooney spoke to the world on "60 Minutes" just a few short weeks ago.

They are words that gave me pause. Andy Rooney had... for lack of any better term... a point of view about the world that amazed me. It was so many things at once: poignant, curmudgeonly, charming, hysterical, and wise. Rooney himself even said that he had a way of expressing ideas that made people go "Hey, yeah, he's right" and that made him feel good.

"A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney" always made me think. Not always hard, not always deeply- but that wasn't always the point. He wanted your attention and he knew how to get it- by sharing ideas on topics both minute and grand that made you stop and rethink things (or, on some subjects, form opinions for the very first time). No matter what I was doing during the broadcast of "60 Minutes," I always stopped to listen to Andy. Sometimes he made me laugh and shake my head, sometimes he made me sneer and sometimes he made me just go "Awww, you're old." But he made me think and he made me feel, and in this day of loud, obnoxious 24-hour news networks that have turned journalism from a noble profession into a trashy one, that is a treasure.

One can hope someone else like him will come along, but I doubt it.

If I had known Rooney's "final regular appearance" on "60 Minutes" would actually be his last, I would not have erased it from my TiVo. Instead I would have listened closer to a man who had a wisdom and oddball relevance that meant a lot to this country throughout the years. I would have soaked it up more, because I will certainly miss the few minutes a week he came into my home on Sunday nights.

But I guess that's what YouTube is for.

"I wish I could do this forever..."

I do too, Andy.