It was so nice seeing my old friend, Whoopi, the other night. It had been a while. The last time I saw her was a few years ago when my wife, Nancy, and I, found ourselves standing in a line that can only be described as very long at a book store in La Jolla.

When we finally crossed the threshold of the building and got a glimpse of Whoopi, her head was bowed as she was intently writing her name with swift sweeps of her wrist. We just looked at her with deep admiration as she made so many people’s day, smiling at them as she scribbled.

In a moment she happened to look up and spot us, opening her eyes ala Mr. Magoo and she dropped her pen and came towards us like a Drum Major in a Black College Marching Band, calling out to us, “Ernie! Nancy!” and then she wrapped us in a hug that must have warmed the room.

On this recent occasion of visiting her she was appearing at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino in Indio and this time she knew I was coming but hadn’t heard that Nancy was no longer with us until earlier in the day.

It took a little doing to get to see her but I was determined because I had my twin daughters, Tawny Maya and Nyla Summer, with me and she hadn’t seen them since they were little, back when we were all living in a beautiful old historic apartment building near Golden Hill Park. And the effort was worth it since her love for us hadn’t changed as she demonstrated by latching on to me with a long affirming hug which I reciprocated with equal intensity and then she grabbed my girls and their aunt Diane in a nice tight “Just look at you” fashion – we were taking time away from others who wanted to see her but we wanted a picture with our camera and the official photographer was concerned about the time as the show was nearing and Whoopi nicely declared, “Hey, excuse us, this is family.”

In the spirit of Sly and the Family Stone, it was, indeed, a momentary family affair. We briefly saw Whoopi again after the show. And the show: Wow! It was Whoopi at her very best, weaving her stage magic, her gift at telling a story as only she can do – in stand up form. A lot of what she had to say was about growing older and not being able to do the things one used to do.

I could really identify because when I ask my body to perform something that’s a bit out of line, it says: “Hey, don’t even think about it! A cartwheel? Are you crazy?”

Based on her act and what I already knew of her, Whoopi and I share similar tastes in life: she likes the f word and so do I (hey, does anything cut through b.s. and allow one to express how they’re really feeling like an f laced phrase?); she loves parenting and grand parenting and nothing in life is more satisfying to me than being around my progeny; she likes to fart (hence her name) and to a dude expelling gas is right up there with sex (we’re finger pullers by nature). Sex, though, it seems, is where Whoopi and I are going in different directions. She says she is no longer interested in dating and her friend is menopause and I’m hornier than a jack rabbit, practically 365 days a year without pause.

Whoopi had me doubled over laughing a few times like the days when we’d hang out with friends in our apartment, clowning around, spoofing the likes of Ronnie Ray-Gun with sentences that began with “Well,” and doing Tricky Dick Nixon impressions in his “I am the president, make no mistake about that” manner. We were quite a group: actors, educators, a clothes designer and a famous mime who would stop by from time to time. We were truly of our time: into the music, Aretha, Elton, Stevie, Joan Mitchell, Jim Croce, you name it; into the interesting minds, Steven Spielberg, Richard Pryor, Gloria Steinem, Carl Sagan; into the events of the world, wondering if our country’s teenagers would have to go off to war in Iran, sitting in stunned silence with disbelief after the Old Globe Theatre had burned down…such cherished memories.

That was some weekend we had with my old friend and we did it with flair, renting a beautiful comfortable desert style Palm Desert home featuring a jacuzzi and a pool, just minutes away from our reunion.

And we didn’t leave our beloved Nancy, “mom,” out. We spread some of her ashes in a waterfall in the pool area at our time share in Palm Springs and sensed her presence, her spirit, her love of fun, throughout our little three day holiday. She would have loved it.

At one point in our visit Diane said to Whoopi: “You know Nancy adored you,” to which she replied, “Nancy was such a special person, I loved her too.” Well, it takes a special person to know one.

So, now, it’s back to my morning visits with Whoopi via my tv as I check my email and news feed on facebook. When I told her of this little routine she asked, with a kind of “Fool, what’s wrong with you?” tone, “What are you doing watching The View?” My reply was “Because of you.”

I think we human beings have to stay connected with those dear to us in any way we can. And jump at the chance to say “Hi” in person. I can’t wait to see her again.

Woke up on April 18th
at about 9:04.
It was my birthday.
Number 74.
Stepped my big old feet
down upon the floor,
reached down to pick up
a paper clip or something
that caught my eye
next to my bedroom door
and all of a sudden I felt
a wee tug of my sacroiliac
and then my back
seemed like it was being attacked
by an alligator
in a biting contest, Jack!
I hit the deck
like a concrete filled sack,
writhing on the carpet,
moaning in tongues,
and somehow I struggled
and stood up
like a boxer trying to beat the count
and when I looked in the mirror I found out I was shaped like a seven and I thanked heaven it wasn’t an eight or a three and then I took me down the stairs, fully aware that if the seven happened to be top heavy that could be the end of me.
It was like trying to lean forward
and lean backward
at the same time -
hokey pokey like skills, to which,
I had never paid much mind
in my previous 73 years.
But I managed to
somewhat get myself together
and walk to Grant’s Deli
for a coffee with cream
as per my daily routine.
On this trek
my back played with my posture
like a hyper kid toying with an erector set.
After a couple of feeble
wobbly strides
I morphed into a crooked small case “r”
and when I stepped off the curb,
trying to wave at a neighbor who
drove by in a car
there was a pull
where my back
meets my left side
and an electric-like current
shot through my right side
and my lower body
did a left face
and my upper body
did a right face
and all of me yearned
to do an about face
and the pain just wouldn’t quit
and a car was coming
and I thought for a moment
it might feel nice to get hit
but some adrenalin
kicked in
and I got out of the way
as the driver texted away
and I made my way
into the store that day
looking like a tornado
had gotten a hold of my torso
and I walked home
holding my cup of Joe
like I was soliciting alms -
with burning palms
as I had forgotten to
wrap the container
with one of those heat shielding cardboard things.
I felt like Daffy Duck
having a bad dream.

Later, with my knees up
I lay on my living room floor
and then I forced myself up
and out the door
to do the things
that I live for:
      met with Seema Sueko,
      executive artistic director
      of the Mo’olelo
      Performing Arts Company
      about tying it closer
      to the diversity
      within the San Diego community,
      a goal she approaches diligently
      with tenacity,
      fully devoted to concepts like
      liberty
      and equality,
      always pursuing such
      interestingly,
      lyrically,
      cleverly,
      theatrically,
      ever so capably,
      effectively,
      and kinesthetically;
Later in the day,
I made my way
to a board of education
candidates forum
to see what they might have to say
about Uncle Sam
having his way
with our students,
our children, at their schools every day trying to entice them into the military like a hunter spreading honey leading to a bear trap; they answered with something about having to have parents involved with matters like that but nothing about if they would be willing to do that and I decided to leave it at that and headed to Chiquita’s to bring the day to an end with a whiskey sour and a dinner with Maria, my dear Chicana friend.

In the late hours
I laid in my bed and thought back on the day and the nice time I had celebrating my birthday with my kids on Monday as we couldn’t all do it on the actual day.
And I thought of my Nancy whose birthday was just two days away.
With a few tears in my eyes
I wished so much that she was alive.
Oh, she would have been such
a sexy 65
but at the same time
I felt so grateful that I was alive,
back spasms and all,
and I drifted off into a dream
and slept with ease,
and after rising the next day
quite gingerly,
realizing that no pain was descending upon me, forcing me to my knees, I decided that being 74 years old is going to be a breeze.

Roger Hedgecock. Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/n3tel/6360902369/

Oh, did the words, “We’re charging George Zimmerman with Second-Degree murder” ever put my mind and soul at ease.

His walking free said to me that Emmitt Till, a 14 year old black boy who suffered a cruel death when I was 17 — for basically saying “Hello” to a white woman — had died in vain. This tragedy, for a while, practically crippled me with intense emotional pain as a result of my thinking that what had happened to him could happen to me — as my mother and I travelled down south rather frequently. Mississippi, specifically.

I carry within me images of both Emmitt’s battered body looking out at me from a page in Jet Magazine and a sickening scene featuring the men who killed him. A jury of their “peers” found them not guilty in a horribly absurd trial and they mugged in front of a camera smoking cigars and kissing their wives, looking as though they were ready to go out on the town and do-si-do. I imagine it was one big party behind bars also but they did spend time in jail. They sat in the hoosegow. They had some slammer time.

So the reason I was so relieved when Zimmerman was put away was because now things seem to be falling in line. I mean isn’t it routine that when an alleged perpetrator commits an alleged crime he is handcuffed and patted down? Isn’t he plopped down in the backseat of a cop car with a little downward shove on his head? Aren’t his rights read, his prints taken and his body adorned with orange clothes and orange shoes? Or blues? Isn’t a jury gathered for a trial wherein a story is told from a variety of angles with one considered innocent until proven otherwise all the while? Isn’t this justice, American style?

We should all be sleeping a little better with this man in jail and hopefully the rules of “fairness” will prevail and Emmitt will not have died in vain. But in the meantime, based on all the conversations that took place around this Trayvon/Zimmerman case we, as a society, have some serious work to do if we’re to ever find ways to understand each other; if we’re to ever treat each other with compassion.

We, each of us, whether we’re regular Janes and Joes or the powers-that-be, need to take responsibility for creating a social and political environment wherein we can learn to become more accepting of the range of ethnicities that enrich our lives as Americans. Along these lines some of us are blessed with an opportunity to promote togetherness and goodwill in ways most of us could only dream. Like, for instance, San Diego’s Mr. Radio, Roger Hedgecock, a man with multitudes of followers.

But for goodness sake, what will it take? This man took my breath away with his claim in the U-T (San Diego Union Tribune) that Obama was playing the “race card” when he declared that if he “had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Say what? A man speaks from the pain he’s feeling, an immense pain that was felt deeply by millions of African Americans, based on the horrors committed against us in our collective history, and that is summarized as playing the race card? How trivializing and mocking is that? Come on, who’s really playing the race card here? Not to mention that Trayvon does resemble our president.

How do we become more sympathetic towards one another with attitudes like his at play? But this isn’t new for ex-mayor, Hedgecock.

We should never forget how, a number of years ago, with people crossing our border out of Mexico after having trekked miles upon miles upon miles, looking for jobs, struggling to survive, to stay alive, to house and feed their families – he along with hundreds of others turned their car headlights on these hurting human beings’ hopes and dreams. “Light Up the Border” was the name of their shameful scheme. Who did that help on either side of the demarcation line that separates us?

And we should never forget a time when young gay students and their allies observed a day of silence in protest of the discrimination and harassment they faced in the Grossmont School District. They were struggling to survive emotionally in their schools day to day. Instead of using the power of his radio show to make these young people feel wanted and loved, Hedgecock denounced them as “Storm trooping fascists” and “Gay Nazis” and bad mouthed their schools for “advocating the homosexual lifestyle.” My great-aunt, Lillie, would say: “Sumpin wrong with that man, honey child!”

Now, as though he’s not doing enough harm in our city ala Rush Limbaugh via Talk Radio he’s been given a voice on the Union-Tribune’s op-ed pages.

I don’t expect the paper, with its conservative bent, to cease sharing it’s right wing thoughts about politics and life, in general, but there must be somebody who can express such views without dealing racial, xeno and homophobic “cards.”

With Roger Hedgecock contributing regularly to our daily paper with his wealth of hateful card tricks I don’t see how we can build a better community, a better world or, since this discourse began with words about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman — a more just world.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/flickcoolpix/4696719270/

Sometimes I get dancing feet.
I’ll hear a song
and can’t help but want to move
to its rhythm,
to its beat.

It can be
Gene Kelly
on Turner Classic Movies
Singing in the Rain
and my big old stompers
will just about go absolutely insane.
Let me see a scene
with Ginger Rogers
swinging and swaying
and floating through the air
with Fred Astaire,
seemingly without a single care
and, man, I can’t keep my feet still.
Bojangles and Shirley Temple
scatting and tapping up and down the stairs in The Little Colonel gets my feet to moving against their will.

And it’s not always
old school
that gets me in
a dancing groove.
I mean Chris Brown makes me
hurt myself
when I forget how old I am
and try to copy one of his moves.
It’s hard being
Hip-Hop smooth.
But I’ll put a chiropractor
on speed dial
before I give up
my dancing feet.
Oh, you play the music
and I can’t sit in my seat.

Sometimes there’s no music playing
and I still get dancing feet
like when my team
is up against it,
facing defeat,
coming from behind
just before the game runs out of time.

Like when my daughter
says “Hi, Dad”
after being in a coma
for a long time.

Like when reading
a Langston Hughes rhyme
or getting out of a bind;
walking through a forest
under a sunny blue sky
among oaks and pines;
being toasted by dear friends
with a fine wine
aromatic and refreshing
in its character,
winding
around my taste buds,
a credit to its vines.

But, Lord, sometimes,
my dancing feet
drag,
ever so slow,
reflecting a spirit that’s
agonizingly low,
weakened by life’s cares and woes:
A 17 year old boy
falls dead from gunshot wounds,
skittles and tea
flying from his hands,
his life taken in a
horribly frightening moment
by a man
who dances to music
so discordant
that it poisons his mind,
causing him to surrender to his fears
and his suspicions.
And I wonder, having seen
this terpsichorean routine
too many times
if I will ever really
cut a rug again
in my lifetime
with any amount
of zeal.

Oh, of course I will.
I’ll just have to weather
the storm
of despair
and before I know it
Gene and Ginger
and Fred and Bojangles
and Shirley and Chris
will break through
the heaviness in the air
and ease the pain
and I’ll be singing
and dancing
in the spirit that I always have
rather than weeping in the rain.

I’ll just have to listen for the beat
and leave the rest to my dancing feet.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/couscouschocolat/6460530313/

When asked to write a piece for the Rag’s Sex in San Diego column I jumped at the chance. Then I panicked, wondering what the hell I was going to write since, when it comes to sex, although I’m still very much a sexual being, my sex life has boiled down to me “being” the only one in the room during the act. It’s like I’m in junior high.

April, in 2011, was the last time I had company sexually, after nearly a year of fun in the hay – with a beautiful woman I met a while after my wife died.

This has been some kind of experience because I have always very much enjoyed “doin’ the do.” And so did, Nancy, my sexy soulmate of 34 years, through and through. She was 62 when she left and I was 71.

We had such a rich sex life. Both of us were fit and young in spirit, still eager, up for it (pun somewhat intended) both on planned date nights, a couple of times a week, or spontaneously. Which ever came first.

So many memories, rising like silhouettes in a distant past, going back to our first time in ’73, in the front seat of her Nash: after tennis in the parking lot of the courts off Kelton Road, sweaty, eager, groping, poking, toking, losing ourselves in the ultimate of intimacies, her and me, with her mounted above me and I, due to our long legs, only able to receive and there was absolutely not a single complaint from me; I could have stayed for an eternity. I can still feel the explosion, the quivering of thighs, sighs. With the obligatory “Whoooo, Man!” whistle at the end. Then we were at it again. Those were the days, my friend.

Oh, God, the silhouettes: At the top of Sunset Cliffs under a full moon, listening to Al Green sing “Here I am, baby, come and take me, take me by the hand” with more than our hands at play, our bodies giving sway to nature’s precious gift to animal beings; near SDSU in a friend’s pool; on the sand between dog beach and the Hotel Del Coronado; off a trail, in the chaparral, on Cowles Mountain before it became the place for everybody to go, paying lizards and rattle snakes and rosy boas no mind, leaning against a rock that conformed to our bodies as though we had sculpted it with our love making in mind…

Oh, I miss that woman so, her loveliness, the fullness of her breasts, the slight curvature of her flat behind that she hated but I thought was so divine because it was mine, the strength of her swimmer’s arms and legs and body, the sturdiness of her bones, the texture in the tones of her moans, the very sensuality that defined her sexuality, the range and depth of the ways she pleased me and allowed me to please her, her commands “Yes, baby, right there, don’t stop, ohhhhh,” the way she could just give it up, let it go, and then ask for more. Whoo, doggie, it was never a chore. Never. No “I’ve got a headache” in her make up. I remember only being too tired just once and went on and did it anyway. I wasn’t going to deny her in any way, her love of massages, bongo beats on her derriere and “liqueurs,” our pet name for oral delights. Ah, what was there not to like? We’d drift to other worlds. Our desires unfurled. She was my girl.

But all that is no more. I now not only don’t have a sex partner but when that incredible woman left these shores, she left me with indescribable emotional pain in that I was left barely standing without my best friend in the world, my most trusted confidante, my shoulder, my shelter from harm, my children’s mother, the editor of my every written word, practically, my mentor in so many arenas, looking out for animals, appreciating the environment, helping those in need. She was the most loving and giving human being I’ve ever known.

However as crippling and stunning and numbing as losing her has been, I never lost my sex drive as it was so alive with her to the very end although when I laid down with someone again I needed a little help and that surprised me to no end. But the night of the same day she died I could have gone to bed with someone, anyone, I think, just to determine if I was alive because I wasn’t sure I, too, hadn’t died.

It wasn’t until eleven months after her passing that I found someone to hang out with and do fun things with and the sex was delightful, needed, but I discovered, after a while, that I had no idea what path I wanted to embark on and I pulled away after nearly a year, withdrawing into myself a bit. I now count her as one of my dearest friends.

Hey, I was with a true soulmate, for over thirty years, fully satisfied, never thinking that I would ever be out loose on the dating scene. “Date nights” have come to mean me and me alone and I am horny to the bone. But I have no game. Never did. Not bragging but I didn’t have to. It always seemed presumptous to me to say something like “Hey, bartender, give the woman down at the end of the bar what she’s drinking” or approach a woman with some lame nonsense like “If God made anybody lovelier than you, He must have kept her for Himself” or “Baby, you look so fine, you make me want to throw every dollar I own up in the air and all that stays up is mine and all that falls down is yours.” That’s not for me.

Now, I’ve had a few chances for one night stands but I’m way past “Bip, Bop, Bam, thank you, ma’am!” although it’s tempting. I will tell you no lie. But I’ve been there and done that back when I was a young buck on the go, “going for what I know” as my boys and I used to say thinking we were the hippest thang goin’ on in the whole wide Milky Way. I guess I have morals or something or another today.

Having a special woman in my life, for companionship and I’m not just talking about sex, will probably happen for me and, no, I’m not comparing women, other than what would be reasonable, with Nancy. She wasn’t the only incredible woman in the world. I know a few. Women I like and respect and enjoy being around but I’ve always relied on my instincts in just about everything I do and whatever it is I’m seeking isn’t quite coming through – with an exception wherein there was a woman who opened up some places in me that had seemed closed and dormant, letting me know that I can and need to love somebody with all that’s in me like I loved that tall drink of water I adored. But this wonderful woman shushed that ever so quickly.

So what can I say other than my sex life consists mainly as shadows in the places where my recollections are stored – for a while, at least – and with that I’ll make like I’m Bob Hope on stage or on TV and sing to my Nancy, my love: Thanks for the memory.