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… [Read more…]
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. [Read more…]
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.
[Read more…]
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. [Read more…]
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.
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.
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.
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. [Read more…]
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?” [Read more…]
Looking through words about California history, my mind wanders momentarily, and a tall timeless man with reddish brown skin and long braids ala Russell Means, appears in the periphery of my daydreams. He says:
They, these conquering men, stepped from their boats
wearing more clothes than was necessary,
shiny metal hats and vests,
heavy leather foot wear,
bearing swords and knives,
boasting of braveries
and discoveries
and some day living in the memories
of civilizations yet to be
and when they gazed our way
they never looked us in the eye
with any deep sense
of wonder
or human curiosity. [Read more…]
I had no idea what we were going to other than it was a gala of some kind and we were expected to dress in kind. So I put on a nice outfit and admired myself in the mirror for a nice amount of time and then waited for a short time to be picked up by my beautiful sidekick. I didn’t need to know where we were going to know we would have a good time as that seems to be the only kind of time we know how to have. We like to joke, “Hey, we’re doing all right for old folks.”
I hop in the car (well, plop in the car, to be more exact for my age) and learn that our destination is the Port Pavillion on Broadway Pier, a venue at the very end of Broadway in which I had never set foot before this day. [Read more…]
One day I checked into facebook and found the question: “What if when we die the light at the end of the tunnel we see is just us being pushed out of another vagina.”
My first thought was “Oh, God, I hope not.” I mean if I were on Let’s Make a Deal and had in my hand a certificate guaranteeing me a rebirth in a new body, I’m going with whatever is behind curtain number one. Because when I depart I will have left it all in the Milky Way just like leaving all I had on the court in my basketball days.
So, I don’t care if Wayne Brady says “Oh, Ernie, you could have had another life but you’re going home with a one day supply of Alpo!” After jumping around like I had won the lottery I’d run off and rent a dog for a day.
[Read more…]
