Laughing Buddha

June 30, 2022

When I found my old friend’s lifeless body lying on its side on his living room floor yesterday, I shed no tears. Instead, I was struck by his stillness, the coldness of his skin, the lack of any spark of energy and warmth that might suggest that Joseph was merely asleep.

I went to check up on him yesterday because he hadn’t returned my phone call, and when I called again a couple days later his message box was full – both signs of something amiss. While waiting for the owner of the apartment building to show up with a key to Joseph’s apartment, I chatted with Azami, the friendly and helpful apartment manager originally from Bangladesh. Azami lamented that families in Western societies don’t have their aged family members live with them, tacitly acknowledging that 78 year old Joseph was at times a lonely, isolated shut-in, with no car, limited physical mobility, and a widely scattered family. Old people in traditional societies like Bangladesh don’t live in nursing homes or alone in apartments, they live surrounded by multiple generations of family members.

Joseph would have thrived in a more communal setting, but that wasn’t an option. So he lived alone and made the best of it, never complaining, always happy to see or speak with friends and family.

At least our modern society ensured that his basic physical needs were met. As an Air Force veteran, he received free medical care through the Veterans Administration, and he lived in a decent, federally subsidized apartment. He had income from Social Security and a small pension, and he was provided with free dinners three times a week through Meals on Wheels. So in spite of his numerous ailments mostly caused by prior decades of smoking, he still managed to live far better than most people on this planet, and he was grateful for that good fortune.

I first met Joseph Grumich in 1969 in San Francisco, when he was 25 and I was 17 and we were both new recruits in what is now called Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a Japanese Buddhist movement. He was a short, cheerful, talkative, coffee drinking, cigarette smoking character who joyfully marched with me and other young men in the San Francisco Brass Band, a Buddhist marching band tasked with instilling religious zeal in its youthful members while we attempted to play instruments in Buddhist parades. Most of us couldn’t play our instruments worth a damn, but we made a lot of enthusiastic noise just as we did at our gung-ho proselytizing meetings. It took both of us several years to realize that we were in a Japanese cult, but after we left we both continued our daily Buddhist practice of chanting the mantra Nam Myoho Renge Kyo and reciting a portion of the Lotus Sutra. Joseph was proud of the fact that he never missed a day of chanting for 53 years, and he honored his commitment until the day he died.

As friends we were an odd couple. A few years ago I portrayed the fastidious, hyper-sensitive character Felix Ungar in a community theater production of Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple, so I can say with some authority that Joseph played the part of the easygoing, careless Oscar Madison character quite well. At one point, while he was on his third marriage, and after he had five kids, I asked him why he continued to beget children when he was unemployed and his family was living in poverty. I was being judgmental, and he knew it, but instead of taking offence he joked “They (kids) just keep coming,” as if he had no say in the matter. I felt that he was being irresponsible, but his jovial personality was infectious, so I let go of my opinions and just let him be himself.

But being himself had consequences. After his third divorce he was homeless for several years. He never had to live on the street, though; he couch-surfed and also lived for a long time in a friend’s warehouse. So his positive spin on the matter was that he wasn’t homeless, he was houseless.

Our origins were quite different. I came from an educated, middle class Bay Area family, whereas Joseph was from St. Louis and a working class background – except that he didn’t like to work. He was frequently unemployed by choice, and when he “retired” many years ago, his numerous friends humorously asked him, “Retired – from what?”

And he did have many, many friends.

Why was Joseph so popular? Why did I remain friends with a guy who was so very different from my more focused, serious, opinionated self?

In a word, laughter.

In addition to being down to earth and unpretentious, Joseph had the gift of making people laugh. He didn’t take himself seriously, and his good-naturedness put people at ease. We had a mutual friend who much preferred Joseph’s company to mine, even though on paper this friend and I had more in common with each other than either of us had with Joseph. For this mutual friend, Joseph was simply more fun to hang out with.

Jolly Joseph joked about everything, including death, and refused to take it seriously. In 1971 he drove me in his VW bus to a memorial service for a young Buddhist woman who had been killed in a car crash. She was a good friend of his, and a former Catholic as he and I had been. But instead of wallowing in sadness, his natural irreverence expressed itself when he joked that his friend “Kathy died for your sins, Dave.” He would have been amused that I was the one who found his dead body, and would have found a way to find humor in the manner of his sudden passing.

He poked fun at my spiritual earnestness, saying at one point, “You’re like a dog worrying a bone.” He didn’t criticize my seriousness, he just laughed with me at it.

Joseph loved to hug people, and bear hugs were his specialty. He sang in Sebastopol’s Love Choir for more than 20 years, and what an appropriate name for someone who loved everybody and judged no one. He would usually end our in-person or phone or Facetime conversations by saying, “I love you, Dave,” or “I love you, buddy.” How rare for a man to say that to anyone, let alone another man. No wonder everyone loved Joseph, not only warts and all, but especially because his faults gave all of us permission to be more human.

So to my old friend the Laughing Buddha I say: Congratulations on a life well lived. I’m glad that you died for my sins, and I look forward to our reunion in Buddhist heaven, whatever the hell that is.