By TINA ARNOPOLE
DRISKILL
Ed Bearden
calls himself a humanitarian and feels “compassion is important.” In keeping
with his chosen journey, he has lived his life in support of the arts and local
human rights and environmental causes.
He attended schools in the Empire School District as a boy and was elected to the district’s board of trustees in 1983. During his 20-year incumbency he has been instrumental in securing a solar panel system for Norman Glick Middle School (see article in April Connections), worked to eliminate corporal punishment, helped to eliminate smoking on all campuses and in district owned vehicles, and spearheaded an AIDS policy two years prior to the establishment of a statewide ruling by the California State Board of Education.
Last year the amphitheater at Glick Middle School was named the Ed Bearden Amphitheater in recognition of his support of arts in the district.
Ed was inspired to write as a teenager following an older cousin’s reading of “The Highwayman” by Alford Noyes, which captured his imagination as if the words “were the notes of a song.” At 15 he wrote his first play and a few years later began a lifelong process of journaling, which is the source for most of his poetry and stories.
During his college days he was editor and publisher of the Stanislaus State College literary magazine, The Sentinel, and was published in the national college anthology, American Sings. Subsequently he has been published in Stanislaus Connections, Quercus Review, Penumbra, The Poets Corner, Song of the San Joaquin and In The Grove. His poetry has won prizes from The Book Store Ltd., the Acorn Review, California Quarterly and the California Federation of Chaparral Poets of which he is a member through the local chapter of Poets of the San Joaquin.
He also has been a regular contributor to The Modesto Bee’s “Our Turn” column, which has allowed him to write about his early years in Stanislaus County and experiment with writing humor.
He holds a Master’s Degree in Social Work and worked with Stanislaus County. He also earned a Marriage Family and Child Counselor license. Following retirement in 1990 he took on a second career with his wife, Roberta, as co-owner/operator of Choice Investments Realty, a real estate sales and property management company.
We are pleased to present Ed as one of our Gathering of Voices.
In a box of old things
I find a LIFE magazine
dated November, I983.
It's an anniversary piece,
twenty years since Kennedy
was shot. He is never just
killed, but shot always.
JFK looks straight out from
the cover. Our eyes meet,
lock for a moment, then I
blink and turn away, stared
down by a dead man. We
were both young in '63. Now
it's just me and the cover of a
magazine. Now, is November,
2002, not twenty years but
thirty-nine, and thirty-nine's
enough. It is time I turn away.
Recently released previously
classified material concedes
finally the truth of Jack's sorry
physical condition: his bad
back, Addison's disease,
ulcers, colitis and allergies.
It doesn't really matter now,
I tell myself, over and over,
over and over, over...
"It's
a piece of cake,"
he said, only
he was talking about
asbestos
and asbestos
as everyone knows
talks back.
"I was warm,"
it says,
"and snug
in my stone bed,
but now I am awake
and feel mischievous."
Because it was his turn to do his
duty he had shot him in the head,
and thinking nothing of it then
he had left him there for dead.
And surely that was true. For
even without his sad captors
he had laid down in moist earth and
bled. As long as men are living the
dead will be remembered and this
one is remembered plenty. His voice
recalled as thin, his face, eyes pleading,
remembered for an expression that
never changed… fear stayed fear.
The rest was supposition. He had
always supposed that because he
was young the man was young also.
Yet after so long a time, he still
wondered how many years of life
he had taken with his gun, finding it
impossible to admit what he knew.
It is fall, the pond which has been full all
summer fed by water from irrigation canals
and agricultural runoff is almost dry. Fish
which entered the pond as fry through canals
from nearby reservoirs have grown peacefully
in what must have seemed a large and open
body of water. The water level drops as the
pond is no longer being replenished. Fish
that in the beginning had felt secure now
cluster near the bottom in the deepest parts.
Food, which was hardly noticed, so plentiful
as to be taken for granted, is now shared but
not rationed. The larger fish take the larger share
and as remaining food runs low the larger fish
eat the smaller. On the edge of the pond wading
birds gather. Egrets stride, circling a declining
and shallowing body of water. Wading knee deep
the birds can be seen striking . Their glottis ripples
as the birds swallow. Their long curved necks
stretch and pull back. With the arrival of larger
birds, the Great Blue Heron, there ensues a feeding
frenzy. The herons have only to stride toward the
smaller birds and the egrets flutter and back off,
the herons claiming the surviving larger fish.
Suddenly there is a puff, the sound of air escaping
as the heron croaks and lumbers air-ward. The
bird doesn't fly straight-out but is making
irregular circles before landing, having failed to
gain enough height to clear the bank of the
pond. On the shore, hidden in the dry fall grass,
a boy with an air rifle takes aim a second time.
This time the heron will not fly at all.
This time.... nothing will be eaten.
We piled clods of hard pan
around the trunks of new trees.
Clods meant to keep
the trees upright.
Then we soaked the ground,
water wetting the clods as well.
Somehow they grew, the trees.
There must have been good drainage
even through we couldn't see it.
Over the years we hoed weeds
and with the tractor and disc
turned the ground,
turning it so often the hard pan
became broken and seemed
to disappear.
How hard we worked;
how little hope we felt
but worked anyway.
It was the only ground we had,
The only world we knew.
The June 11, 1999 NATO
suspension of the 78 day
air war against Yugoslavia.
You rise black smoke
with your tar black heart
your sticky hot
tar black heart.
You rise black smoke
with your stinking stench
and stinking breath
on the plains of war
on the plains of death.
You rise black smoke
from the black tar pit
of your tar black belly
inhaling hope, inhaling peace
inhaling the last bit of sanity.
You rise black smoke
from your undeclared war
and your black tar black reality.
I hear a sound, soft and wild,
my wife asking,
"Is that an animal?"
Outside, looking skyward
I see two flocks of geese;
Canada, I think. There is one group
of twenty-seven or twenty-eight
and a second group of six.
They might have been a half-mile high,
or higher as they circle making their
soft sound, a sound like cooing.
Below and behind a fallen comrade lies,
its migration ended.
As the birds circle they fly higher,
the circles becoming smaller.
Finally, they regroup as one flock
and continue flight.
The sound they make is sharper
now, the leader calling cadence
for the beating wings that follow.
We visit Dealy Plaza in the fall
of '91 and look out from the
fourth floor of the School Book
Depository. Then we look from
the grassy knoll, toward the
street and watch as the long
black Lincoln convertible
slowly makes the turn, but
it's not the street or the car.
It's the Zapruder film shot
at sixty-frames a second.
A home movie shown in
every home. Shown over and
over and as the movie comes
to its abrupt remembered
end we are encountered by
a black man on the hustle.
Even with our small town
background we can smell a
hustle coming, but he's a good
talker and claims to have been
here on that day when Zapruder
made his movie and Jackie got
blood on her dress and even
John Connelly learned who
John Connelly was.
