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Feeling a Need to Stand with Planned Parenthood After Watching “The View”

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I was watching the women on The View the other day talk about a video of John Kasich saying, in reference to a campaign he had won in Ohio years ago, that he had been victorious because “many women left their kitchens” to go door to door for him.

A woman didn’t take well to his remark and let him know that she would, never-the-less, come out to support him but wouldn’t do so from her “kitchen.”

“I gotcha,” Kasich replied, a bit embarrassed by his “a woman’s place is in the home” kind of faux pas.   [Read more…]

America Was Great at One Time?

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Making America great again
sure sounds like something worth doing.
But the word “again,”
implies that America must have been
great somewhere along the line –
and when I run the feasibility of that
through my long-active mind,
having not been deaf or blind
in my time,
a couple of questions come to mind,
on the fly.   [Read more…]

Grooving on a Saturday in a Child-Like State of Mind

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Oh, I had such a beautiful day the other day. It got underway with me sitting on the edge of my bed, yawning and stretching and making grunty old folk noises in rhythm with the popping of my 77-year-old bones.

With my querida gone to a mountain retreat I found myself reminiscing, remembering how, as an only child, I was often home alone.

And I would just pass the time letting my imagination fly and roam far and wide, past all the “Yee-Ha!” I had to deal with in a day – and I’d dream of a world that didn’t put up with any of that and then, depending on the mood I was in, I would often make up a little ditty about this society that was given life in my imagination.   [Read more…]

Making a Plea for Racial Harmony as Racism Rises from the Water

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All my life I’ve heard that there’s nothing more American than apple pie. Well, I see that as kind of a lie as, based on my life experiences, there’s nothing more American than racism.

If apple pie was in my face as much as racism has been I’d be a 500 pound black guy as racism is as ever present as oxygen in a black person’s life, from the moment you’re born until the day you die.

It’s been passed along in America as a stumbling block against our human hopes and dreams like a baton in a relay race, in so many forms: slavery; Jim Crow; the constant tampering with our voting rights; white flight; execution of unarmed dark-skinned people on the streets, on a whim; mass incarceration and on and on and on ad nauseam…   [Read more…]

Abe Ordover and Images of Beauty in a New Year

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What a New Year we San Diegans have had so far: a January filled with rain. Rain that has brought us both beauty and pain, blessing us with precious drinking water and boosting our wishes for a drought to end on the one hand, and then, on the other hand, damning us with devastating floods that have rushed through people’s living rooms and kitchens and dens, dimming their hopes and dreams.

And we, with no other choice, wade on, as life doesn’t stand still, come rain or come shine. In spite of it all, though, I’ve seen beauty all around me as this year unfolds.   [Read more…]

Rest in Heavenly Peace, Natalie

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I woke up on the first day of 2015 with a smile on my face and then the smile was replaced with laughter as Apricot (our grand-dog, Maria and I call her) jumped onto the bed and tongued my face with kisses dished out like machine gun fire.

I got up and, per my routine, checked my email and facebook and such, and no sooner than I did, I saw that Natalie Cole had passed away on New Year’s Eve. That was not what I wanted to see in 2016.

Oh, what a voice. That beautiful woman played a role in how I celebrated turning sixty.   [Read more…]

From Good to Bad and Back to Good Again

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I sat around last night trying to think of something to write and decided to click onto a page of prompts which gave me a choice of numbers between one and three-hundred-forty-six.

Sometimes just closing my eyes and moving the little arrow around on my Mac Os X and clicking randomly does the trick but I went, this time, with selecting number fifty-six.

Fifty-six is kind of a big number in my life. I had just turned 56 when Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. A Highway 56 is named after Ted Williams, one of my favorite baseball players. I was in the Tucson High Class of ’56 and my life changed massively that year, in the time it takes to flip a light switch.   [Read more…]

Once Upon a Christmas Day

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On the ninth Christmas Day of my life back in 1947 I spent the morning feeling both happy and sad.

Happy that I had gotten the usual things boys pestered Santa and their parents for in those days, a cowboy hat and some chaps, perhaps, or a soldier outfit, or a pistol and some caps, maybe some skates. A book and a puzzle or two.

Sad, in the selfishness of my youth, that I hadn’t got what I wanted most, expecting for some reason, to get it based on a conversation I had overheard.

So, what the hay, as they say, I went outdoors to play, any old way, boasting with my pals about the goodies I found under the tree that day, struggling mightily to show gratitude for all that I had in life, trying to follow lessons I had learned from my mom and granddad and my Sunday School teachers.

But as the morning progressed I began feeling betrayed, lied to, cast aside, forgotten, mistreated, disrespected, misled, unloved, jerked around by both Saint Nicholas and the Lord up above…   [Read more…]

A ‘Good Old Days’ Day

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Not too long ago I shared thoughts on Facebook regarding “The Good Old Days” being a sham and how I’d like there to be such days some day for my grandson, Lyric, and my mind stayed in the same kind of groove which led to the following:

As Lyric, bypassed the slides
and the swings,
deciding against those things
to shake and rock
the purple dinosaur,
my mind soared to a day
back around ’43 or ’44,
when my buddies and I made our way
to a park to play.   [Read more…]

“Those People”

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I just got back from a Paul Laurence Dunbar Junior High Reunion. Dunbar was Tucson’s first-thru-ninth grade school for “colored” kids aka Negroes.

Many of us show up at the school’s auditorium, the Friday after Thanksgiving, every two years. As black people and/or African Americans.

And let me tell you, it’s so nice to be among people who were at your side when you were a kid growing up trying to figure out how to make it in a world where you’re looked at as “Those people.” People to be looked down upon.   [Read more…]

Laffing it Up

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My mother used to say “Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying,” and when I think back on our days of second-class citizenship she sure wasn’t lying.

The other day Maria and I gave in to that old adage as we laughed about this and that, whiling the time away during her stay in a little two-bed hospital room at Scripps Mercy, worrying about what the doctor might say.

We started laughing ourselves silly listening to a woman’s (Maria’s roommate) emotional and animated conversation in Cantonese, with all the rhythmic inflections and rapidly changing nuances intertwined.

It was so beautiful and exciting to listen to, actually, but we couldn’t help but crack up when, at the end, the woman paused and said “Bye, bye” like she had suddenly become Lily Tomlin or Whoopi Goldberg. Looking for anything to cut into our anxiety we just lost it.   [Read more…]

Can Our Children Learn to Study War No More from Mice?

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By Ernie McCray

As we opened our hearts, this past Veteran’s Day, to our nation’s warriors with hearty “Thank you for your service” like cliches, alongside heaping praise on them for being strong heroic and brave – I kept thinking of two young men I met a little over a decade ago.

They were among the first to die in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I met them at career fairs at their schools, sitting at a table letting kids know that they (no matter what they might hear that night with recruiters of every stripe in the room standing erect and spit and shined with video games and gadgets glowing next to papers to sign) – well, I just wanted them to know that they didn’t have to join the military to learn valuable skills or find adventure or pay for college or serve others.   [Read more…]

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