When the saints go marching in

May 24, 2019

“We can just stay open to what arises.”

This was the suggestion given to me this week by my longtime friend Leana, in response to my usual tendency to over-plan my travels and free time. In this case we were emailing back and forth to arrange our next visit, which happened to be the 50th anniversary of our serendipitous first meeting on a surreal Berkeley evening.

I wrote back to her approving of her advice, acknowledging that I need to be more spontaneous, adding, “The night I met you I was young and improvisational, and as a result I had a fun adventure. Age has made me more careful, but I’d rather be more carefree.”

I wasn’t exactly carefree on May 24, 1969, but I was 17, and bored. My high school buddies Ron and Dwight and I lived in suburban Lafayette, a few miles east of Berkeley, and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves on that Saturday evening. So since there were no appealing movies playing in nearby theaters, we decided to take Dwight’s Jeep into Berkeley to see if there might be a better selection of films in that town.

But we had forgotten about the soldiers.

Berkeley was an occupied city. On May 15 Governor Ronald Reagan had declared a state of emergency and called out 2,700 National Guard troops to support about 800 local police, sheriff’s deputies, and highway patrol officers in suppressing rioting by thousands of protesters at and nearby what is now known as People’s Park. I later learned that my uncle Johnny, an Oakland cop, was one of the police officers assigned to restore order. Many protesters, bystanders, and police officers were seriously injured in the violent confrontation, and one bystander was shot and killed by police.

People’s Park was and still is a vacant 2.8 acre plot of land owned by the University of California. The university planned to build an athletic field there, and eventually student housing, but in the meantime local activists had decided, without permission, to create a park on the site. The university and park activists were negotiating the future of the property when Governor Reagan decided to escalate the situation. Reagan, who had called the Berkeley campus “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants,” ordered the empty lot to be fenced off to keep people out and prevent any more flowers or trees from being planted.

Nearby at Sproul Plaza, site of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement five years earlier, about 3,000 people had gathered. A friend of mine, Montgomery, a Vietnam army vet who I first met not long after this memorable evening, happened to be performing as a drummer with the Golden Gate Jazz Band in lower Sproul Plaza. He and his band mates were asked by the protest leaders to stop playing, and when they did so, the activists used the band’s sound system to urge the crowd to march on People’s Park, about three blocks away. As the throng trooped off to confront the police, for some reason Montgomery and his band decided to play When The Saints Go Marching In.

For the next nine days Berkeley was an armed camp. And then three teenagers from the suburbs stumbled into the war zone.

We three were accustomed to seeing the war zones in far away Vietnam broadcast every night on the TV news, but this was different. Here were live soldiers in battle fatigues with bayonets affixed to their rifles in a California city, close to our homes. This was exciting! We decided to skip the movies in favor of checking out the action on Telegraph Avenue, a major street that dead-ends at the Berkeley campus.

As we walked along the sidewalk, staring at the soldiers, troop carriers, cops, and college students, the three of us were approached near the corner of Telegraph and Durant (two blocks from People’s Park) by a beautiful young woman in a miniskirt. Smiling, she asked, “Would you like to go to a Buddhist meeting?”

This was starting to feel like an episode from The Twilight Zone. What kind of preternatural world were we entering? Here we were in a tense urban environment where conflict could break out at any moment – and a cheerful, pretty white girl wants us to go with her to an Asian religious gathering? This was too weird, even for Berkeley. Ron and Dwight declined the invitation. But I took them aside and said something to the effect of, “Hey guys – it’s Saturday night. Didn’t we come to Berkeley to have a little fun? Maybe this Buddhist meeting will turn out to be a party. Maybe we’ll get lucky and meet some more pretty girls.” Eventually I prevailed, and off we went with our new friend Leana.

We soon learned, however, that the Buddhist get-together had been cancelled due to the highly-charged tension in the streets. So Leana and her comrade Jim drove my buddies and me to the nearby apartment of her boyfriend Mike, at the corner of Berkeley Way and Shattuck Avenue. There the three university students began their efforts to convince us to join their Japanese Buddhist sect, Nichiren Shoshu of America, now known as Soka Gakkai International (SGI).

In the middle of their sales pitch, one of Mike’s neighbors came to his door laughing maniacally. He was carrying a birthday cake lit with candles and laced with LSD, and offered each of us a slice. We decided to forgo this Alice in Wonderland birthday party, he cackled on down the hallway, and we somewhat disconcertedly returned to our bizarre trip down a Buddhist rabbit hole.

At the end of this Buddhist be-in, Dwight turned down the opportunity to join the religious denomination, but Ron and I signed up to receive a Gohonzon (sacred scroll) and begin chanting the sacred mantra Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. On our way home that evening Ron changed his mind, leaving me alone without my friends on that path to enlightenment. But now I had new friends: Leana, Jim, and Mike, and soon I was to meet Montgomery and his fellow Buddhist band mates in the Golden Gate Jazz Band, and many others. I eventually learned that I had signed up to be a bodhisattva of the earth, a Buddhist latter day saint, and I was expected to go marching into battle for world peace. Onward Buddhist soldiers. Onward Buddhist saints. I had just joined a Japanese mass movement, and I didn’t even know it.

Half a century later, having left that religious organization in 1984, I still do the mantra chanting. The Buddhist path hasn’t been a cakewalk, never mind a piece of an LSD-laced cake, but it has been an adventure.

And today, exactly 50 years to the day since I first met Leana, she and I went back to the corner of Telegraph and Durant for the first time (together) since May 24, 1969.

On this sunny afternoon, we reminisced about our youthful experiences in Berkeley, which for Leana are mostly a blur. I recall our first encounter in great detail, whereas she vaguely remembers it. So much for my youthful charisma and dashing good looks making a lasting impression. We noted the increasing gentrification of Telegraph Avenue and much of downtown Berkeley, along with the growing Asian influence noticeable in the types of shops and restaurants as well as the people on the nearby campus. Now in our late sixties, Leana and I have changed physically as well, echoing the impermanence of life that we saw all around us, though I’m not sure you could say that we have become gentrified. Wiser, I would hope, but not necessarily upscale. Maybe the renovations will come when we reincarnate into young bodies again.

People’s Park could also use some upgrades. It’s still a sad, derelict monument to a faded revolutionary ideology, known for its homeless denizens, crime, and drug use. It looked seedy as we wandered around the littered grounds and graffiti-marred facilities. Leana and I spoke with several people there, some of whom were suspicious of me taking photos of the site. Paranoia was rampant there this afternoon, perhaps in part a reaction to a recent shooting death in the park. Power to the people.

At a nearby Persian restaurant on Telegraph, I asked Leana about her current philosophy of life. She left the Buddhist movement before I did, and no longer does the Nichiren practice. At first she told me that she’s interested in balancing Eastern and Western philosophies, along with her interest in feminism and the Goddess. But then she put it in simpler terms. “I’m into making friends with aging. And having fun, with everything I do.” She loves her husband, her adult daughter, and her many friends. And she loves to travel.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect this morning as I left home for my rendezvous with Leana. I knew that we would be celebrating a half century of friendship. But as our afternoon together unfolded, I began to understand that what was arising for me was appreciation. We only see each other every few years, and while I’m not her closest friend, I’m her longest friend. I really appreciate Leana for who she is: smart, outspoken, opinionated, honest, funny, kind, and beautiful. Soon enough we both will fade into memory, just as for many Bay Area residents the drama of the People’s Park riots is ancient history. But right now I don’t care about the future or the past. She is my friend now, and I honor her in the this moment. I’m so grateful that saint Leana came marching into my life when she did.