Thoughts From the Soul of the Tucson Kid

Follow Ernie McCray as he writes about his life as an educator, a father, a husband and a civil rights activist. We are blessed to have him here and find inspiration in him and his words.

Thumbnail image for Trying to Stay Wise at 75

Trying to Stay Wise at 75

by Ernie McCray 04.27.2013 Books & Poetry

By Ernie McCray

Just turned 75.
As I think about being a year older,
my first thought is
I’m so glad to be alive.
No jive.

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Thumbnail image for Kinya Letting Her Light Shine in Honor of MLK

Kinya Letting Her Light Shine in Honor of MLK

by Ernie McCray 04.06.2013 Activism

It was already a beautiful day as I observed the sun shining through the window and then I clicked into facebook where these words brightened my outlook even more: “Today, I marched with his son to symbolize that the struggle is not over and our will to fight has not died. You did not die in vain…R.I.P. Martin Luther King Jr.”

My granddaughter, Kinya, shared such sentiments after a march in Memphis where Martin was felled 45 years to the day. It warms my heart that she took part in such an assemblage, considering that my progeny, unlike me, are not among those who hit the streets with slogans and songs in pursuit of justice and dignity. They just don’t do that. But I don’t despair because I know they care and pursue a better world in their own ways – as loving people, I’m proud to say.

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The Two Ends of a Bridge (Seeking Environmental Justice)

by Ernie McCray 04.02.2013 Columns

I look at a picture of the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge emptying into the Crown City against a waning yellow and orange sunset and the word “beauty” sums up all that I see.

And as one drives into Coronado there’s more beauty to be seen, little plots of sand, the green colors of a park and a golf course; it’s pleasant to the eyes.
As I reverse the trip in my mind, I find the sunset and gentle setting fading behind me and I remember how just a few days ago I listened to a woman’s voice tremble and watched as she, in mid-muddled-sentence, fought back tears. She was sharing a story out of her community’s struggle for environmental justice on a “Barrio Live” bus tour which was put on by the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC). She so desperately wanted not to cry but her emotions couldn’t be put aside as she described a neighborhood where people have had to keep their doors and windows closed at all times because the bad stuff that is in the air is at levels way, way, way above what is considered “unhealthy.”
How does one tell about a little boy who lived in one of the homes and became seriously ill, remaining so for years, and not feel like weeping?

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Thumbnail image for Nay to Hate and Yea to Culture at ECC

Nay to Hate and Yea to Culture at ECC

by Ernie McCray 03.21.2013 Arts

Board meetings are usually not my cup of tea. But I attended one, not too long ago, at the Educational Cultural Complex (ECC) and as I sat there, anticipating data reports and budget considerations and other matters that might lead me to want to cop some Z’s, I experienced a few moments that absolutely captivated me.

Like, all of a sudden, from behind me, during a section of the meeting that highlighted “Community Connections,” I hear a woman walking towards the stage belting out:

“They call it stormy Monday

but Tuesday’s just as bad.”

And the next thing I know my shoulders are gliding from side to side and my head is doing likewise and my size 14 feet are patting along with my fingers that are popping to the beat and right away three more singers got me leaning forward in my seat with:

“Wednesday’s worse and Thursday’s also sad.”

Oh, such sweet music from my past. For a moment my mind began to stray to times when I had my moments up there where those singers stirred my spirit in song.

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Thumbnail image for “I Am a Man” at the San Diego Rep

“I Am a Man” at the San Diego Rep

by Ernie McCray 03.12.2013 Columns

A few of us actors got together on a Monday night to rehearse playwright Omayo’s drama, “I Am a Man,” in preparation for dramatic readings of the piece at the San Diego Repertory Theater on Monday, March 18th, and Tuesday, March 19th at 7:00 PM. The San Diego Rep is presenting the drama in collaboration with the Vagabond Theatre Project.
Each evening’s performances support “The Mountaintop,” a play by Katori Hall, which has been pleasing theater goers for weeks now at the Rep. It’s a must see about Martin Luther King’s last night before he was taken from us in Memphis.

Our play keeps Martin’s spirit alive as it is based on the travails of the black sanitation workers who, back in February 12, 1968, staged a wildcat strike backing their demands for equal pay, better working conditions and recognition of their union.

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Thumbnail image for In America We Have the Power to Change (Thoughts of Freedom)

In America We Have the Power to Change (Thoughts of Freedom)

by Ernie McCray 03.09.2013 Activism

Freedom. What a concept, huh? One of the sweetest words in the world’s vocabulary.

I learned a long time ago that the pursuit of freedom will make one do almost anything. Sometimes in the spur of a moment. I used to love to hear my maternal grandfather tell about how he woke up one day on a sharecropper’s plot of land in Hawkinsville, Georgia, thinking to himself, “God, I don’t know what all is out there in this world but I just know You created something better than this.”

At about the same time “big boss man” came riding up on his horse rallying what were supposed to be “free men” to the fields, “yelling and spitting tobacco every which-a-away” my grandfather would say and the next thing he knew he had snatched the man off his horse, gave him the ass-kicking of his life and then ran for that very life until he reached the Gulf of Mexico – to what, he didn’t know. He just knew he had to be free.

I thought of him a little while back at a forum at the Malcolm X Library that featured four of a group of people who stand tall in my mind and soul: The Freedom Riders.

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Yeah, I’m Bad! (Honoring My History)

by Ernie McCray 03.05.2013 Columns

Yeah, I’m bad.

That’s what I was thinking as two City College communications majors talked to me behind the camera that was focused on me in the Quad at SDCC.

And I wasn’t just thinking that I’m bad. No, not at all, for I am: Truly. Bad. And I don’t say that as a wolf ticket kind of brag. But as a black man you can’t reach 74.99 years of age, in these here United States of America, with all your senses, and not indulge in a little swag. So please excuse me if I break into a bee-bop stance with a little Bojangles tap dance and act out just how bad I am.

The reason I was on the premises was because I had been asked to speak at a ceremony that was dedicated to Black History. Now that invite, alone, sets the tone for how bad I am because they didn’t just ask anybody to address them. Can there be a greater honor than having someone think that you have something to say?

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Thumbnail image for Reflections from a Rally at the Hilton Mission Valley

Reflections from a Rally at the Hilton Mission Valley

by Ernie McCray 03.04.2013 Activism

Much has been made of Bob Filner crashing the City Attorney’s news conference a little while ago but we shouldn’t forget that in that flurry of feistiness he pointed out that there are people among us, fellow citizens, family, friends, you name them, who are paid tacky wages. Like hotel workers.

He made it clear that the tourist industry isn’t going to ply their trade with $30 million dollars of the city’s money unless they pay hotel workers what they deserve.

How refreshing is that, a mayor for the people, a man standing up for the folks who make visitors to “America’s Finest City” comfortable and well fed, with nice pools for a swim on well manicured hotel grounds. These people get out and about town and spend money by the ton and the people who added so much to the fineness of their stay don’t get anywhere near their fair share of this bounty.

The hoteliers, however, get way more than their ownership status should allow and around these parts they have historically treated their workers as though they don’t care about them. The reason being? Because they don’t care about them.

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Thumbnail image for North Park’s Seven Grand and All That Jazz

North Park’s Seven Grand and All That Jazz

by Ernie McCray 03.01.2013 Columns

I love me some jazz. I love all music actually: Patsy Cline is one of my favorite singers of all time; Symphony soothes my mind; R & B practically raised me; Marian Anderson is a hero to me; Corridos stir my soul; I can’t get enough of that Rock and Roll and I have danced in a park to Blue Grass. But I love me some jazz.

And speaking of jazz, the other night I caught some nice sounds at a new place in town. Seven Grand Whiskey Bar in North Park. 3054 University Avenue to be exact.

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Thumbnail image for Can We All Get Along? (Thoughts on Civility)

Can We All Get Along? (Thoughts on Civility)

by Ernie McCray 02.26.2013 Columns

So, if we’re really going to do this “civility” thing we have to understand that we’re not “restoring” something

“Can we all get along?” Rodney King once asked as the streets of LA burned as a result of LA’s Finest literally stomping him into the ground in sight of the whole world only to be found “not guilty,” free to go. Such is life in an uncivil world.

It’s nice to know, though, that in such an in-your-face world as is ours there are people who want to bring some degree of order to it. Like the people with whom I sat at a conference at USD, put on by a movement of people called Restoring Respect, that was all about “Restoring Civility to Civic Dialogue.” Restoring Respect believes that we, as a society, can get beyond today’s politics of incivility and work together to “make sure that our public discourse is worthy of a great Republic.”

I can dig it. But we have to be honest with ourselves and not get all caught up in the notion, as one woman did, that “We need to get back to a time when we treated each other with respect.” I almost said out loud, “When we did what? When was that?” Hey, we can’t make changes if we’re going to hallucinate mythical days that never were.

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Thumbnail image for You Got to be Yourself, Jack (Looking at the Likes of 5 Hour Energy by Keeping it Real)

You Got to be Yourself, Jack (Looking at the Likes of 5 Hour Energy by Keeping it Real)

by Ernie McCray 02.20.2013 Columns

I had a childhood buddy whose answer to all that we faced as growing boys, like how to hit on the girls and how to get Murray’s Pomade to turn our naps into waves or curls, was “You got to be yourself, Jack” which is old school for “Keeping it real.”

And I thought of my philosophical friend the other day as I watched a man on TV who said that he: played a round of golf; read a book while teaching himself to play guitar; ran 10 miles while knitting himself a sweater; jumped out of a plane; became a ping pong master while recording his, debut album, which he sings in an auto-tuned voice and then he says, “How you ask? 5 Hour Energy!”

The bit’s funny but, whoa, what is this fantasy really all about? The dude did everything but drop dead, which would have been real, and from a couple of articles I’ve read the product is alleged to have caused death. But the stuff sold to the tune of 1.3 billion dollars last year. Seems there are a ton of people not “being themselves.”

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Thumbnail image for Bonny Russell, a Woman for our Times (December 23, 1943 – January 14, 2013)

Bonny Russell, a Woman for our Times (December 23, 1943 – January 14, 2013)

by Ernie McCray 02.17.2013 Books & Poetry

For Bonny Russell’s Celebration of Life on 2-17-13 at the Unitarian Universalist Church

Jan says about Bonny,
her wife, her love:

“She brought with her an open and loving heart,
the ability to listen deeply,
and a passion
for addressing injustice and inequality.”
…
Come Inside for the rest of Ernie’s beautiful poem…

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A New “When Sunny Gets Blue”

by Ernie McCray 02.08.2013 Columns

I like days like today, days when you find yourself in a nice groove, where your every move is smooth, where you walk whistling with a cup of coffee from the Deli to your home and turn the radio on and sounds come out to where you are and take the already mellow mood you’re in to another place, another dimension.

I mean Jazz 88.3 was pouring out some lyrics in my living room that stopped me in my tracks: “When Sunny gets blue, she breathes a sigh of sadness” and it was sounding so good I couldn’t feel anything but gladness. One of my all time favorite songs; I’ve heard it most of my life by some of the greats. Johnny Mathis did it sweetly with strings. Sarah did it sassy the way she did everything. Anita O’Day swung it in her inimitable sultry way. Barbra did it. Nat did it. Mel Torme.

It was Steph Johnson hanging out with Claudia Russell on the Jazz Ride Home – and, oh, she sang the hell out of that song.

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Enero Zapatista

by Ernie McCray 02.04.2013 Books & Poetry

Someone posted it on facebook, a picture of me silhouetted in a vision of rich colors, sharing a poem. I wanted to write about the experience when I first saw the striking image but didn’t know how to go about it right away.

Then it came to me as I was reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony,” a masterpiece about the Native American world, a brilliant tale about Tayo, an army veteran of mixed ancestry who returns to the reservation, scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II.

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Thumbnail image for Playing with Thoughts of a Better World in Sabino Canyon

Playing with Thoughts of a Better World in Sabino Canyon

by Ernie McCray 12.07.2012 Columns

I don’t know if whoever is reading this has a place on earth that’s really dear to them, a spiritual place, a place that invigorates them. But I do have such a place, Sabino Canyon, in Tucson, my birth place.
Mi querida and I hiked there just the other day, the first day of December, in fact, the last month before doomsday if you want to listen to what a number of very spooked people say.

But an apocalypse was far from my mind on this soothing sunny day. I entered the grounds in a very good mood and that mood grew with each step I took as I ran the images of my stay in town through my mind.

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Dancing on the Playing Fields

by Ernie McCray 11.28.2012 Columns

The other day I turned a game on just as some dude was standing over a quarterback he had sacked and before I could sit down he commenced to prancing around like James Cagney portraying George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy or, to the young crowd, like Chris Brown doing the James Brown. Then I saw the score and this guy’s team was about 30 points down.

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The Sun Peeking through the Clouds

by Ernie McCray 11.26.2012 Activism

I’m still riding high as a result of the elections. It was so great seeing so many propositions that I like pass, so satisfying having the president remain where he is, so refreshing having a mayor who is a friend. I mean, hey, I’ve been voting since 1959 and this has been a real new experience for people of my voting kind.

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Rules! What Are They Good For?

by Ernie McCray 11.05.2012 Culture

The other night I sat with other writers, in a workshop, to consider how the rules that guide one person might contrast with rules somebody else lives by. Like a man who has grown up thinking women should be barefoot and pregnant, always with a pork chop ready to put on the stove, might have a problem with a woman who is of the thinking that she should always be treated like a queen, with doors opened for her and a coat set down for her to walk on in a puddle in the rain. How could they come to co-exist was the gist of this exercise.

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Sandra Fluke, My New Hero

by Ernie McCray 10.31.2012 Activism

It was so nice at Balboa Park the other day. Sunny. Warm. Bright. People wearing smiles every where I looked. We were gathered at 6th and Laurel for a Rally for Women’s Health, featuring Sandra Fluke, a woman who gained fame for being shunned by a group with no shame who ran a sham they call the United States House of Representatives’ House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

These Big Time Charlies wouldn’t let her speak to them about reproductive freedom for women because, according to them, she had no “expertise.” And she pretty much had to tell them “Hello! I’m a woman, you know, and how much ‘expertise’ y’all got regarding a woman’s needs, I might ask, considering that every single one of you is a man?” Not to mention, (to counter what their smartassed answer to the question is likely to be) men who have not evolved much when it comes to ways of thinking things female beyond their junior high days.

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Mitt Romney, Serene and Credible?

by Ernie McCray 10.29.2012 Activism

After the last presidential debate the San Diego Union-Tribune waxed romantically about how serene Mitt Romney appeared to be and all I could think was:

What kind of HD do they have that can make a man who looked like he had chugged some unsweetened lemon juice, seem to be serene?

Wearing an expression on your face that’s like a cross between a smile and a grin – a “smin” perhaps – is not a picture of serenity. A bit too Cheshire Cat for me.

They followed that up by citing a poll that showed that 60 out of a 100 voters thought Romney had looked credible, aka pretty good, on national security and I wondered “Should these people be voting?”

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