Gloria, my dear friend, Happy Birthday!

Our birthdays are only three days apart, and during the years of our work together with homeless people, we always shared a meal to celebrate. This week I again remembered that and missed you all over again, Gloria!

I am grateful for those years of our friendship, Gloria!

Dear Connie, Chris, David and all the family,

Recently I was able to retrieve this poem (below) which I wrote for Gloria years ago. The writing followed a visit in her apartment there on Tennessee where she showed me pictures she had taken of, and told me stories about, various poor kids she had taught in the New York Public Schools …and of the great loving heart she had for them.

One of the photos was of a young teenaged African-American girl standing on a school playground made dangerous and ugly by strewn broken glass and trash of all sorts and sizes. An eight-foot cyclone fence surrounded the playground, and in the not-too-distant background one could see part of the side of a church with beautiful richly-colored and whitely-holy stained glass windows.

 This poem is written in the person of the girl in the picture as she stares directly into the camera...beyond to Gloria!

 Happy Birthday, dear Gloria. I recall with happiness when each year you and I celebrated with a meal honoring our September birthdays, yours on the 25th and mine the 23rd.  I miss you, dear friend. Until we meet again…

 -Sister Bernie

 The Lady Behind the Camera

Click. Click. Click.

The eye of the camera taking quick glimpses into our grim reality:

a small bleak world defined

--- by cruel, forbidding chain fences

tightly wrapping our scared tender hearts in despair;

--- by endless cold cement strewn everywhere with pieces of jagged glass

threatening to pierce any bubble of hope

                       that might dare arise out of our desperation;

… and even by the few incongruous stained glass windows

that rise high in hypocrisy and hold for us little comfort.

Yes, the bold eye of the camera sees all ---

our smiles and curses, our clowning and striking out,

all in denial of the harshness that envelops us.

But with equal boldness

we peer back through the camera’s clicking shutter

and behold the lady behind the camera.

We are at first confused by her eyes ---

so loving and understanding,

so genuinely caring,

instilling deep within each of us

a faint “I am somebody.”

 
Click. Click. Click.

Day after day the lady behind the camera

beckons us up and onward by her love,

now instilling a “I really am somebody!”

Our young hearts begin to beat with hope,

we dare to dream…

Thank you, lady behind the camera, thank you!

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­____________________________________________

-By Sister Bernie Galvin for my dear friend Gloria

I met Gloria in the headquarters of the Jackson for President campaign in Nashua, NH, in 1988. I say “headquarters.” It was an old beauty parlor that Gloria, two homeless guys and a whiz kid from Columbia U. had gutted and propped up a few sheets of plywood on saw horses. The homeless guys slept in the office while everyone else (others showed up in the course of the weeks) sacked out in sleeping bags in a dingy apartment above the office. We lived on donuts and coffee. Gloria liked to say that the entire town reeked of sugar. You could smell it in every shop, bar, office. I liked and admired Gloria immediately and relished driving around the state in her little tin can on wheels fighting a cause that surely seemed lost from the beginning. And JJ did lose but he made an incredible run of it and experiences like addressing the striking workers way up in Jay energized him as much as it did us. G & I were in awe, flying so high after that one. Wow. If he could connect with such lily-white, red-necked workers in boondocks, NH, then maybe he could really do it across the US. And he did.

Shortly thereafter I got a job at the Guardian Newsweekly in NYC and Gloria flipped me her keys. Typically trusting and big-hearted. Eventually she wound up back in the city and often came by the Guardian to proofread and/or hang out. She helped make NYC bearable before I finally ditched it for Europe, and she for SF.

 Great photos exist somewhere (once in my possession) of her seat-of-the-pants tour of central Europe in 1989/90, including an all-night party in a Budapest hinterhof. She was a photographer with a keen eye! She had a keen eye for life. I hope I absorbed some of her inspiration, curiosity, generosity. She touched the lives of a lot of people. Certainly mine. I miss her.