rants, reports, raves, and embarrassments from eric trules

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Echo Park

From My Front Door, Remembering a Time When Things Were Not So Sweet

There was a time – not toooo long along – probably about 4 winters ago around this same Holiday and Christmas time, when I was still morbidly stuck in the LA desert. I was perhaps 73 years old, had already retired from USC (the over-priced University of Southern California) as a theater professor after 31 years, had gotten married for the first time to an Indonesian woman, also 31 years younger than myself at 55 years old, adopted our 8-year-old Indonesian son at age 68, and was still renting at “Lucretia Gardens” in Echo Park, having been in Los Angeles…

Alley Pond Park, the Cousins’ Club, and the Loony Bin

I remember two things about Alley Pond Park from my early childhood in the 1950s. Neither was that it was the second biggest park in Queens County, one of the five boroughs of New York City, nestled at the far east borderline of Douglaston, Queens, just a stone’s throw from suburban Nassau County, where I grew up…. long before they built the east-west, Long Island Expressway right through the middle of Queens and Nassau. No, what I do remember vividly, is that Alley Pond Park was the green-grassed, red picnic-tabled immigrant park of my forefathers, where my helter-skelter Russian Jewish…

Vaccine Tale with a Twist

Also posted on the ” Cultural Weekly“: https://www.culturalweekly.com/synchronous-vaccination-tale/ ———- So I’m driving home past Dodger Stadium, perhaps the biggest Covid vaccination site in our country. And living in Echo Park, as I do, actually in the hills called Elysian Heights, I live only 4 stops signs away from the World Series Champs of 2020. Seeing a very short line of cars on my way home from grocery shopping with the Fam about 4:30 on January 19, I slow down near the entrance gate at Stadium and Academy Ways, and using my gregarious New York cab driver persona, I shout out to…

Turkey Day in the Time of Corona

        Frozen turkey’s in the oven since last night. Special Trules recipe. Last employed almost forty years ago, on 23rd Street and Park Avenue South in New York City, in my clown loft, when my parents were still alive, in the early 1980s. Slow roast. Get the bird to stew overnight in its own juices. Guarantees a moist, delicious feast. Or least it used to, as I said. Let’s see. Forty years is a lonnnnnng time. The times, they have-a changed. Indeed. Bob Dylan, the sage himself, is almost 80. I’m 73. I’ve lived in sunny California…

The Big Day, 6th Grade Graduation

The big day. Exsel graduates elementary school! He is in the last 6th grade class in Elysian Heights Elementary School’s 100 year history. (It will become a K-5 arts magnet next year) I remember the 1st day we got there, May 2015, the very end of the school year. I found out that I HAD to bring him to school, otherwise he would be “truant”! So we arrived just down the street from us on Baxter & Echo Park – to this sweet old school, elementary school. He would get to attend the last 2 weeks of 2nd grade –…

A Good Neighbor

Some people say, “Good fences make good neighbors.” I like to say, “you’re lucky if you find a good neighbor. Especially a good next door neighbor. Especially one who’s lived in the neighborhood longer than you have. One who will keep an eye on your dog when you leave town for a couple of weeks. And especially one who has fought Emile Griffith, ex-Middleweight Champion of the World. There he is. Gravel voice. Boxer’s pug face. One eye. Laugh like a happy machine gun. Eddie “El Gato” Gasporra. Echo Park resident since ‘81. Or was it ’85? Or ’89? He’s…

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