RIP Saul Bloom

Yesterday my brother, Saul Bloom, passed away. He died as a result of a 2 year long battle with brain cancer…He lost.
I wonder if anybody actually wins this battle, regardless of length of survival
it is a bitch of a disease and leaves only a trail of hurt.
But I digress into the technical.

Saul Bloom, nee Donald Ira Saleman, died in the loving embrace of his family and friends. He was 62 years old.

I pulled this off of a website…
Saul Bloom was the director of ARC/Ecology in San Francisco where he has been deeply involved in local military base decommissioning, ecological and economic agitation, and working for environmental and social justice.
Arc Ecology is a public interest nonprofit organization providing technical assistance and advocacy work on behalf of poor and disadvantaged communities in the areas of the environment, public health, economic development, urban planning, housing, military facilities and policy in the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally.
He got his start with Greenpeace in the late 1970s and was instrumental in the fight against the home porting of the USS Missouri in the 1980s. Part of the Shaping San Francisco “Ecology Emerges” oral history project, documenting the arc of environmental activism from conservation to environmental justice, 1960s to the present.

It’s concise and covers the salient points of his life,but he was more. Saul in his heart, was a musician, a guitar player and composer. He played around San Francisco with his band “The Blooms”,  which he loved almost much as his family. It gave him an abundance of pure joy.
He started out playing in the coffee house scenes in NYC in the 70’s. Big head of hair and a feather in his ear. He would play wherever they would have him. He was good.
When I was young, I wanted to be him-minus the hair and feather of course. He seemed to me to be like a modern troubadour hitchhiking his way across the northeast with a backpack and a guitar.
While my love of storytelling and music came form the heavens and hells,  my love of guitar playing came from Saul-he bought me my first guitar.

Saul is survived by his family- his wife Nehr, his children, Maria and Sarah, his mother Charlotte, oh and his cat, Sunny. Saul loved his cats!

But to be honest, I’m not really sure how to write one of these things. How do you encapsulate 62 years of affecting the world around you into a page? So let me just say this:

I loved and hated Saul, which is appropriate for brothers of the blood.
He had the ability of making me see red with just a look. He also was a huge force in shaping me to be who I am.

I will miss him more than I can fathom.

He took the mouse.

Selah
the rev

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