Ellen

Ellen was born on August 29, 1940, less than 7 months after my parents were married. We always celebrated Ellen’s birthday on October 31. The story I heard from Joan is Ellen learned the truth when at nineteen she joined the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and she had to produce a birth certificate.

She was six years older than I was, a tomboy and the senior partner in “Ellen and Joan.” Growing up, we didn’t have much of a relationship. Joan and Ellen were in a different world, older, already the “big kids” by the time I started school. Ellen taught me how to ride a bicycle and once hoisting me up on her feet doing acrobatics, I fell and broke my arm. She was my big sister but far removed.

At school Ellen was the star and Joan was a year behind her. In 1955 she went on to high school across the street at Bellarmine Jefferson. At 16 Ellen learned to drive. She got a summer job at Local Loan downtown. She drove whenever she could. She was a driver from then on, willing to drive wherever and whenever she could.

She and Joan were involved in a youth group under Father Coffield in Boyle Heights, where she was part of an activist community organization. There were good things and bad things about the Church in those days. I think Ellen’s social activism began then. Coffield’s name was on the list of predator priests released in 2000.

In 1959 Ellen entered the BVMs; their Motherhouse was in Dubuque, Iowa. She returned home for a visit after the first year. She and another new nun in her class stayed in a convent nearby. They split time between families, us in Burbank and the Coughlins in Glassell Park. That visit set the pattern between Ellen and our mother. My mother treated her as a kind of saint and was desperate to tell Ellen how much she loved her and to hold her close, jealous of any time she wasn’t home. Mom couldn’t let Ellen be herself.

I think Ellen was desperate for our father’s love. There were flashes of affection, but mostly he seemed to act like we were all a burden he had to bear. I think he thought if we hadn’t come along, he would have been the star he should have been. To me it seemed he was never much of father. We had to be quiet when he was home, not to disturb him while he sat in his back room studying and listening to music. I think Ellen particularly suffered trying to please him, to feel the love he seemed to never show.

The summer of 1959 I got to go to Missouri with my mother’s cousin. We went by train and it took 3 days. I stayed with our grandmother in St. Louis. Ellen was on her way to the convent in Dubuque and she stopped by grandma’s house. We traveled together by segregated bus to visit our grandfather in the Ozarks. On the trip we were both shocked by the segregated bathrooms and drinking fountains, Colored and White. From California we thought we came from an open society; it wasn’t. Its racism hid beneath politeness. That trip was an early moment when Ellen and I saw the world together, two young people discovering harsh realities.

Our paths separated. While I went to high school Ellen taught in BVM schools for a time, including Wichita, Kansas, and later in Stockton. Teaching was never her love; she was a community organizer at heart. The BVMs were progressive, and by the late 1960s their habits had softened into simple skirts, white blouses, and comfortable shoes and Ellen was working as a Community Organizer in a Chicago parish.

When I returned from the Air Force in 1971, I visited Ellen in Chicago. I think she had left the nuns by then. She drove us to St. Louis and the Ozarks again, visiting our uncle in his tar paper shack. He was showing us his shotgun and accidentally blew out a window in the kitchen, an incident no one commented on afterwards.

Ellen went to work for Jenner & Block, the law firm that represented the Contract Buyers’ League pro bono. With community groups organized by the parishes they fought predatory lending and red lining in South Chicago and won major victories. She lived for a time in a Lakeside condo in South Chicago, where I stayed during the blizzard of 1978.

Our relationship became strained when my marriage to Cathy failed. In late 1983 Cathy and I were breaking apart and I was newly sober, Ellen and Joan sided with Cathy. For a time I was an outsider to my own sisters.

Ellen was working in Chicago for a few years and then sometime in the 1980s she decided to join a contemplative order of nuns in Iowa. There she met Karen. Karen was having health problems and Ellen took care of her and together they moved to Arizona for Karen’s health. It became apparent they were a couple and so no surprise when they got married in Canada in the 1990s. Karen and I never became good friends but she loved Ellen deeply. They built a life in Arizona, went to community college together and became nurses. They accumulated a modest nest egg, and created a home. Ellen became a hospice nurse and loved the work. Karen was a visiting nurse. In a conversation before their marriage, I asked Ellen if she was a lesbian.  She admitted she was.  I thought it would be good just to say the word, but she never said it again. Their relationship was loving and equal, and it was good for both of them.

Ellen was Ted’s godmother and she took that relationship very seriously. Ellen and Karen helped Ted during his lost years after college in 1995 steering him toward language programs. Ted taught English in Japan and then in Saudi Arabia. After three years Ted came home and met Ellen Clancy in Monterey and Karen and Ellen came to the wedding. They gave them money for their first house. They told me to follow their example and make my intended loan a gift. Ellen and Karen came when Ted received his doctorate at the University of Oregon.

Ellen loved that I became a Park Ranger. Like Hopalong Cassidy I wore a cowboy hat and a gunbelt. Ellen and Karen visited me on Mount Diablo and later on Angel Island. When they came to the island crossing Raccoon Strait at night in a pontoon boat it was a moment of high adventure for Ellen.

After my retirement Ellen and I began to develop a closeness and a friendship we had never quite had. I would call her during my long commute on I-80 to Richmond to pick up Paloma. Those long unhurried conversations became a rhythm of our relationship.  We talked about everything: family, music, books, politics, memories. We became peers, not older sister and younger brother, two adults, brother and sister and friends.

When Ellen and Karen retired they moved from Arizona to Dubuque, Iowa. Karen was from Clinton down the river and for Ellen it was familiar territory near the Mother House of the BVMs and Clarke College where for a short time she and Joan had been students together.

One conversation stands out. A year or two before her seizures began, I casually said that if I had my life to do over, I would have more confidence and take better advantage of opportunities. Ellen said she would be more forceful and effective in serving the community. She wanted to be better at helping people, more focused on making things better for others. I was an ordinary guy with ordinary goals. Joan was a warrior. Ellen was a saint.

When they moved to Iowa, they joined the local Orthodox Church. Ellen found a deep spirituality in Eastern Christianity and the Orthodox traditions. When they joined a few members of the Congregation objected to Ellen and Karen’s membership together in the Church and the resistance had gone to the local Metropolitan. He had welcomed them when they came and when it became an issue later he told the objectors he had made his decision and it was final. God bless the Orthodox Church and its local Metropolitan.

In February 2019 Ellen had a terrible seizure. The diagnosis was Alzheimer’s. Paloma and I came to visit in June. She was still Ellen, I was relieved. She was shakier, less precise, but herself. She still belonged to a book club. She said they were reading Tommy Orange’s There There. It was very hard for her and she was having trouble making sense of it. I told I had read it and that it was hard for me too. Orange’s style is to tell fragmented stories that seem unrelated and confusing. And then he wraps it all up in the end. She was relieved, it wasn’t just her.

Her biggest disappointment seemed to be that she was not going to live into her 90s. She had really wanted to grow very old and 79 plus just wasn’t enough. We had a good time, going out to eat, long drives with Karen and her to show Paloma Wisconsin and a trip to a State Park with waterfalls and caves. The dementia she had wasn’t devastating; she still enjoyed life. Paloma and I enjoyed our time with her and Karen. So in February 2020 we visited again. I wanted to show Paloma Iowa in winter when it wasn’t so beautiful and green. It was cold, but it was beautiful and we had a good time with Ellen and Karen.

Unrelated to Ellen at the time the Covid-19 Pandemic started in China in November, 2019 and by February it had begun to spread worldwide. None of us thought much about it while we were there. At the Chicago airport on our way home a few people were wearing masks, but the Pandemic was far away and people didn’t seem concerned. Our flight was canceled and we stayed overnight in a hotel near the airport. From the airport we stuffed ourselves into a taxi with two other people, one a GI visiting home from Korea. A month later the lockdowns began and March 17 we began our Shelter in Place in California. That first weekend of concern I calculated the incubation time from our Chicago trip. At it passed we were OK.

Ellen began to weaken in the fall of 2021 and in November she had hospice care. I came in November. Laurie, Joan’s daughter came and Ted. Ellen hung on longer than we expected and they had to go home to their jobs and families. Father John came from St. George’s Orthodox Church in Cedar Rapids and did a service for the sick at the foot of Ellen’s bed. For the time the service took, Ellen was quiet and at peace. I stayed on for a few more days keeping vigil with her but she just hung on and finally I had to leave too. I drove to the Chicago airport and Karen called me. Ellen had died.

I miss Ellen. Writing about her brings her back to life a little bit, the girl who taught me to ride a bike, the nun who searched for meaning, the activist, the driver, the sister who struggled for our father’s unreachable love, and the friend she became. I was very fortunate to have both of my sisters. Joan and I were close when she was young; Ellen and I became close in retirement.

We like to believe that how we die will reflect how we lived, that there is some moral symmetry at the end. My experience has been that this is mostly untrue. We have very little control over how we leave the world.

My father died peacefully. He was old, sober, reconciled, and surrounded by his children. He seemed ready. There was no struggle, no unfinished business he felt compelled to resolve. He let go when it was time. It looked orderly, as if dying were the final task of his life.

Ellen’s death was the opposite. She was younger, in terrible physical pain, and seemed unable to rest. Even as her body was failing, something in her would not release its grip on responsibility. Ellen had always been someone who took care of others, who made things okay for everyone else. Near the end, it seemed a compulsion that trapped her.

I believe she could not let go while I was there, and that once I left she died with Karen holding her.

We do not die as we deserve. We die as we are. My father’s gift was peace. Ellen’s burden was love that she could not stop giving. 

Google Jack Duggan

OK I admit it, occasionally I Google myself to see what people might find.  My favorite answer:

When I Googled "Jack Duggan."  

What happened to Jack Duggan?

Duggan died on 19 June 1993 at Toowoomba. His wife had predeceased him in 1984 and his son and daughter survived him. Following a Catholic funeral, he was buried in the Drayton and Toowoomba lawn cemetery. 

Now you know.  

Joan

Growing up it was always Ellen and Joan, the names, their stories seemed inseparable.

Joan and Ellen were a partnership forged permanently when they lived with our grandmother in St. Louis during World War II.  Joan was born in March, 1942, 18 months after Ellen.  It’s a tribute to Ellen’s generous nature that they weren’t competitive. Ellen was the senior partner but by the time I came along 4 years later Joan and Ellen were a given. They might have had their disagreements but it stayed between them. Ellen more than anyone else appreciated Joan.

Ellen was the star of the show, the strong character, the tom boy who could hold her own with the boys and shoot marbles better than any of us. At eight or nine years old Ellen wanted the full Hopalong Cassidy outfit and when she got it, wore it with pride. Joan was the background. I don’t remember much about her at all and in those days I think that was as much Joan as it was Ellen, Joan was in the shadow. Joan was a person of strong character and intensity, but she kept it to herself.

After the Barracks, the second bedroom was always theirs. At our new home on Magnolia Boulevard Ellen and Joan’s room was this pristine sacred space, with twin beds, bedspreads, curtains, a book case and a desk. The most precious object in the room was a turquoise Motorola Clock Radio which Ellen kept tuned to KFAC, the classical music station in LA. Today when I hear Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 I’m transported back to the sound coming from Joan and Ellen’s bedroom, The Gas Hour theme.

In school Ellen was everyone’s favorite. In the 8^th grade Ellen was the captain of the Bellarmine Jefferson Guards, Monsignor Keating’s doctrinaire and whimsical fusion of devotion and patriotism into a kind of World War I home guard. She and the boy captain led Flag Salute our morning formation, where at attention we recited prayers composed for the occasion and sang the national anthem while raising the flag. We sang Hail Columbia. Monsignor didn’t like that new fangled Star Spangled Banner.

I think by the time Joan started high school she had had enough of always being Ellen’s sister at school. She began to shine as her own star. We Duggans were a bright bunch but Joan was undoubtedly the smartest of us all. She played the clarinet in band, she roller skated at Harry’s Roller Rink, and she became the science teacher's pet, Sister Mary Paul Anthony (Catherine O’Dwyer).. The rest of the world was terrified of Paul Anthony but Joan flourished under her guidance.

In 1959 Ellen left for the nunnery. Joan got her own room and was on her own at Bellarmine Jefferson, winning awards and honors and a full scholarship to Clarke College in Dubuque Iowa. Dubuque was the mother house of the nuns at St. Roberts and Clarke is their college. In those days I filled in as Joan’s ally. Her little brother to Harry’s Roller Rink. She was very pretty. Ellen never had much interest in boys, but the boys noticed Joan and she liked the attention.

Before she started the college sent Joan a reading list of books they thought she should be reading. She shared it with me. I devoured it and let Joan know the ones I thought she should read. Joan was excited about chemistry and I wondered what it was all about so I read a chapter of one of her books. The chapter was Boyle’s law and when I took the entrance exam for high school, the science section was a paragraph on Boyle’s Law and questions on the reading. I was by that coincidence one of the smartest students to enter St. Francis High School that year Later I was a big disappointment to the science teacher.

Joan came home for the summers. She was a young woman, smoking, drinking beer and quite sophisticated. She got a summer job as an information operator at The Telephone Company. I was always struck by the fact that she was a Chemistry major with a Latin minor. Joan had learned to drive on an automatic transmission. The summer I was chafing to get my driver’s license having learned to drive in a few lessons earlier in the year. Joan was looking for a car and realized it would be good to know how to drive a stick shift. I had mastered the basics of driving on our 1948 Studebaker, our second car, our mother’s junker.

She asked me to teach her. Our exchange was after our lesson I could drive the car with her as my over 18 licensed driver. That exchange was a strong element of our growing bond. We had fun together. One time I was walking her through the sequence of making a left turn: slowing, clutching, downshifting. Just then I looked and we were headed directly for the house on the corner, “And steer! And Steer!” I shouted. We both had a good laugh and I had a story to tell.

I think at the beginning of grad school Joan bought an American Rambler. It was not cool or stylish but it was a good little car and had a stick shift. It was practical like Joan. It suited her. I don’t remember all the cars Joan had but they included a big Ford Bronco or Explorer and a big Ford pickup truck, macho cars. It was fun to watch her grip the steering wheel and use the step to climb into them. Joan was short 5 feet or 5 foot 1 but she liked the cars and she played Country and Western music on the radio sometimes. It tickled her sense of irony. Joan wasn’t macho but she was tough.

I began drinking beer at home when I was 16 and stopped hiding that I smoked. So when Joan came home in the summer before she graduated we drank beer together. That was another one of our bonds. I contributed and she bought and we’d bring it home and share with Pop including whatever he had at home. The three of us would drink together, we drank whatever was there and finished it off. These were convivial days and very social. For me and probably Joan too they were the first time that our father relaxed and talked to us. He was coming out of his PTSD shell that had lasted for over 20 years. We reveled in his conviviality.

When I started college, Joan generously offered to share an apartment with me and we lived in a furnished one bedroom apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard near Venice Boulevard in National City. I slept on the living room couch. I didn’t see much of Joan. She was studying Organic Chemistry and played bridge.  I was busy going to college on my own. When our paths crossed we both enjoyed Swansons Frozen Pot Pies. We did quite well together. We were good roommates. I have always been grateful for Joan’s generosity.

The next year she got an apartment near Culver City and I went on campus to the dorms.

And then I met Cathy and joined the Air Force and Joan finished her Masters at UCLA and went on to begin teaching at East Los Angeles College. I was in the Air Force, got married, and then went to England. Cathy and my first summer in Bedford Joan came to visit. I think it was her first time in Europe and before she came to Bedford she went to a language program in Spain. I remember we had another a coworker to dinner at our flat when Joan was there. I can’t remember his name, a little older than me. He commended Joan on being in college and that she should stay in school and work hard in chemistry. He deflated when she said she wasn’t a student in college, but a professor. Joan was very pretty but looked very young, not like most chemistry professors.

That summer Joan had met this guy in Spain and apparently they were quite taken with each other. Somehow we got the word that this guy Michael was desperate to call her and she was desperate to get the call. Using the phone in England in those days meant going to the red Call Box a block and a half away. Joan and Michael seem to take it personally that we didn't have a phone.  They managed somehow to reach each other.

When Cathy and I returned to California in 1971, Joan and Michael were trying to maintain a long distance relationship between Monterey Park and the Bronx. Joan converted to Judaism and had a ceremony welcoming her to the tribe at a synagogue in Glendale. My parents and Ellen were there. We were all happy that Joan was happy, happy to be Jewish, and she had found her true love. Someone asked me how was it my sister converted to Judaism. I told them when you grow up Irish Catholic, it’s easy to convert to something else; Joan found an intellectual and spiritual home in Judaism.

She took a sabbatical and went to live with Michael in New York. She went to Hunter College for a year. And Joan and Michael got married in Connecticut, and paid my way to the wedding, I was still an undergrad at UCLA. It was a wonderful wedding with chuppa and Michael breaking the glass. It was at a cousin’s of Michael in Connecticut. Michael was very proud of the food, Middle Eastern, Sephardic, humus, pita bread and Michael’s favorite, baba ganoush. The caterer was Lebanese. Joan and Michael stayed in New York.

As agreed they came out to California the following year, just for Michael to try it. Michael didn’t seem very impressed by California and he didn’t think they would stay. I remember his conversion occurred with an Orange Tree he bought. When it first bloomed and had fruit during the winter. Michael became a Californian.

Cathy and I and Joan and Michael were friends, we prepared and ate dinners with wine together and cocktails or brandy afterwards. We were their guests for the Chanukah and Passover holidays. One day with satisfaction I realized my boys didn’t think of the holidays as exotic, just something we celebrated with Joan and Michael. They knew to set a place for Elijah, to ask the question and in December to look for Chanukah gelt.

In 1977 we went down to Brotman Hospital in Culver City to be part of their new baby’s birth. Being Joan and Michael I don’t think we saw the baby that day, she was born. Shortly thereafter we got to see Laurie Reyna Pessah. That was a big event. Laurie was Joan and Michael’s special child and very special she was. She was beautiful, talented, very smart and charming from the start and so she is today. She is Joan and Michael’s child and the best of both of them.

Cathy and I struggled in our marriage, there were good times and bad times and 1983 was a bad time. Cathy and I separated. I readily accepted the role of the bad guy and Cathy was the aggrieved party. She made sure all of my family knew my transgressions. It seemed Joan and Michael sided with Cathy and I was left out.

Eventually I was partially reinstated. At that same time I got sober and that became another barrier between Joan and me

Everyone in the family was pretty surprised. Cathy, now Kate, immediately joined Alanon and became a 12 Step Master though gratefully she didn’t have anything to do with me at the time. Her insights may not have been helpful to me at the time. Joan and Michael noticed it and were very interested. By this time, a lot of people knew Joan drank too much, including Joan. Not long after, I think it might have been the that summer when people began to realize not only had I stopped drinking but I was sober and getting more so every day.

One day Michael called and we had to meet downtown to “discuss” Joan’s drinking. Michael was very concerned that we should get Joan sober, she really needed to stop drinking. Around then I gave my copy of Alcohol Anonymous to Joan or for Joan. Of course, Joan and I never talked about alcoholism. It’s makes sense if you’re Irish. I was sober, she knew it and she knew she needed to stop drinking too. She had The Book and I think she had looked at it. Michael gave me updates on how Joan was doing. I learned Joan had tried AA but it wasn’t for her, too religious.

For Joan the Protestant sounding rhetoric of the Big Book was a deal breaker. She’d do it on her own. I was struck by the rhetoric, an artifact from the 1930s but it never bothered me. I was an atheist and just let it go. Particularly in California AA is strong on a Higher Power or “god as you understand him or her,” a big sidestep of the God thing for most of us. It is about surrender, admitting that we can’t do it on our own, that we have to give up trying to control it. Joan couldn’t do that. She tried. Alcoholism isn’t a lack of will power or character. Functional alcoholics are people of incredible character and strong will.

Trudging on, getting up, doing what has to be done instead of giving up, instead of letting go, takes courage and is an act of incredible will. Joan was a strong willed person. She did not give up. She tried and she tried. Joan fought her alcoholism up to the end I imagine.

She was uncomfortable with my sobriety. When I visited she wouldn’t have anything to drink and that was hard. I’d stay for an hour or two. She shared her garden and water course. She showed me her book binding projects.

We were cordial but we were never close again. As we aged Joan had some health problems. We didn’t talk about it but I was very proud of my sister for being a leader and guide for people learning to live with colostomy bags. And then she began to suffer from dementia, I didn’t see that. Michael had problems seeing and driving, so they were a driving team, Michael navigated and Joan drove.

And then Joan passed away. I would have liked to have been a lot closer and there for Joan but it didn’t happen. And she died September 2016. And I miss her.

My daughter Paloma was in the first grade when Joan died. And then Paloma was having problems in school. We looked into it and she was grieving for Joan. We hadn’t thought much about it. We didn’t think Joan’s passing had been important in Paloma’s six year old world. I didn’t realize that Paloma and Joan had bonded. It happened one afternoon when Joan took Paloma aside and showed her all of her bookbinding work, the tools and what she did with them. I felt very bad for Paloma but it also made me feel very grateful that Paloma had experienced my beloved sister Joan and that she loved her, just like I did.

Timeline

 My timeline is to me like the Lakota and Park Rangers history on a buffalo hide at Agate Fossil Beds; not a grand account of every event, but a view of the world from my perspective. My timeline isn’t a record of all that happened in the world, but what was happening in my world. This is mine: how I saw it from my vantage point.

So alongside wars, assassinations, and political turns, you’ll find births, marriages, rattlesnake bites, new jobs, and losses. This is my life; a few broad strokes for the backdrop. Here is what I did and the times in which I did it.

Two notes to my Timeline, I’ve included the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Joe McCarthy, of whom I had no awareness growing up. I include the bombing because like a temple bell it resonated long after it was struck.

McCarthyism is an obvious inclusion but I want to note I had no knowledge of McCarthyism at the time. I educated myself on it as an adult well after college. The adults and teachers in my life who lived through those days never talked about it. In fact the spirit of McCarthyism hung like a cloud over American political life long into the 60’s and even into the 70’s where ideas like the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam dissent and Nixon’s humiliation broke it’s power over American intellectual life.

My Timeline

1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed
1946 I was born
1948 Marshall Plan enacted
1950 Korean War begins
1950 Cathy was born
1952 Tehachapi Earthquake
1953 Eisenhower negotiates Korean truce
1953 McCarthy chairs an investigative committee
1957 The FLN insurrection in Algiers
1957 Sputnik launched
1960 Graduate from grammar school, start high school
1960 John F. Kennedy elected president
1963 Kennedy assassinated
1964 Civil Rights Bill passed
1965 Start college
1965 Rhodesian UDI declared
1966 Join the UFWOC march to Sacramento
1967 Larry Stephan, St. Roberts classmate, killed in the DMZ
1967 Join the Air Force
1968 Married Cathy, go to England
1968 Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinated
1968 Year of upheavals worldwide: Allende rises, Tet Offensive, Dubček and Prague Spring crushed, Brezhnev Doctrine, Nixon elected, Tlatelolco Massacre, My Lai revelations, Paris demonstrations, Northern Ireland Troubles intensify
1969 Sean born

1969 Apollo 11 moonwalk

1971 Ted born

1971 Honorable Discharge, start UCLA

1974 Nixon resigns

1975 Benjamin born

1975 Fall of Saigon

1977 Laurie Pessah (niece) born

1978 Benjamin bitten by rattlesnake

1980 Ronald Reagan elected president

1983 Separate from Cathy

1983 Get sober

1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre

1989 Berlin Wall falls

1990 Nelson Mandela freed from prison

1991 Rodney King beating

1995 Move to Bay Area

1995 Oklahoma City bombing

1996 Marry Susan Walters, Caius born

1999 Vida and Misia born

2001 The World Trade Center attack and collapse
2001 Start work at Juvenile Hall
2003 My father dies
2004 James born
2005 Start working at State Parks
2005 My mother dies
2005 Ami born
2006 Molly born

2008 Obama is elected President
2009 Paloma born
2011 Retire from Parks
2012 Marry Suzette Anderson
2016 Joan dies

2016 Trump is elected
2020 COVID-19 lockdown

2021 Coco born
2021 Ellen dies

2024 Trump is reelected President

2025 Paloma starts high school

Meditation at Bishop O'Dowd High School

 The Sound of Awakening

The Buddha teaches that enlightenment is not a distant mountain to climb, but the realization that everything—every person, every sound, every breath—is already part of the sacred. The Eternal Buddha is here.

Students are buddhas becoming. The teachers, administrators, security people, groundskeepers, counselors, and parents; we are bodhisattvas showing our children the path. This place, this chapel, this school, this morning is our Deer Park. Sacred not because it is quiet, but because it is alive.

Outside, the school starting another day; buses beeping in reverse, students chattering, cars coming and going, crows calling, bees buzzing. It is not a distraction. It is the dharma in motion.

So we sit. We breathe. We listen.

We are in the center of the world—Bishop O’Dowd at 8:15. It is the music of awakening. Not a moment to escape, but a time to immerse ourselves in the sound of buddha everywhere around us.

Let the breath come in. Let it go out.

Let the beeps of the bus be our temple bell.

Let the laughter be our mantra.

Let the crows be our choir.

Let the quad be our sound of now.

And for this moment may we be present.

The Bellamasue and the Tiendita, A Maiden Voyage with a New Kayak in Oakland

The maiden voyage of the Bellamasue—my $299 Pelican kayak—was a quiet success. I’d finally gotten the roof rack, the cradles, the cotter pins, and the straps to work. I slid it into the water at Tidewater Boathouse near high tide and paddled slowly out toward the channel marker. I felt the old muscles in my shoulders wake up as I feathered my strokes. Everything worked. The kayak tracked, it felt right.

Getting it up and down from the car turned out to be easier than I expected. Carrying it from the parking lot to the dock was hard, but manageable. 78 year olds are weaker than we used to be and 10 feet of 40 pounds lugging a distance is pushing it for me now. I wore my wide Mexican gardener’s hat and a neck bandana from Tepoztlán, for sun, sweat, and maybe blowing my nose. Water people don’t look cool but we look like we belong.

A woman at the water on a stand-up at first seemed standoffish, but then a tentative greeting and we had common ground, She’d gone up the creek and seen a big crab, grasses, and other signs of wildness hiding in plain sight. Had I ever done that? she asked. And we swapped quiet stories of urban waterway magic. Junky from the road, beautiful from the water. For a moment we shared an understanding. 

Later, I parked in front of a small tiendita in East Oakland to pick up pozole ingredients. The Bellamasue was still on top of the car. The girls at the butcher counter were Salvadorean, the clerk Honduran. They saw the kayak, maybe the hat, definitely the güero. But the moment I asked for pork neck bones and maíz para pozole in decent Spanish, the whole vibe changed. Now I was the local oddball—not a stranger, just another Oakland type. We all belong in one way or another, East Oakland near the Estuary. There’s almost nothing that doesn't fit in Oakland, there's space for all us and things we haven’t seen seen before, like güeros in big sun hats with kayaks outside who speak Spanish. 

On Becoming a Buddhist

 

It was a Jesuit who first opened the door to Buddhism for me. I was a freshman at Loyola University in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1966. One evening I attended a lecture by Father William Johnston, SJ. He was professor at Sophia University, the Jesuit school in Tokyo, a scholar and a mystic who had lived in Japan for years. He said he was a Buddhist and a Jesuit priest and that the two were compatible, that Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion.

It was the first time I encountered Buddhism as a valid belief system instead of some foreign and mysterious religion. I do remember the premise during the Vietnam War that because of Buddhism the Asians didn’t value life the same way Westerners did and why so many died willingly in our war against them, a very Western imperialist attitude toward Eastern philosophy. Fr. Johnston seemed quite alive and in this world as I remember. Sharing his Buddhist insight he planted the seed of Buddhism that grew and flowered in me.

It was nearly two decades later that I got sober using the 12 Steps of AA. Meditation is an important part of the daily AA practice and I began meditating as encouraged by the other members. I heard that “prayer is when we talk to God; meditation is when we listen.”

For years, my meditation was brief. I would tell myself I will do this for at least five minutes or more, and usually it was just five minutes. I used the Hazelden book Twenty-Four Hours a Day: A Meditation Book for Alcoholics. I have continued to meditate off and on using different books for inspiration and adapting it to different opportunities and situations, but meditation has been a part of my life.

In 2012 I made a trip to Japan as a guest of my old boss from Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank. Hayashi-san made sure I visited shrines and temples. It was my first direct encounter with Shintoism and seeing Buddhism in its own environment. I found these places moving, and my Japanese friends laughed at what seemed to them my belief and devotion, but really it was just practicing like the Japanese seemed to do—not worrying about what it meant.

In my hotel room the Buddhist text The Teachings of Buddha was in a hotel drawer like a Gideon Bible. It wasn’t particularly profound—mostly short parables and sayings—but when I returned home I used it for daily meditation. The structure of reading something short, then sitting with it quietly, suited me. Without really studying Buddhism, my daily reading familiarized me with Buddhist thinking.

A few years ago, as I periodically have done, I wanted to renew my meditation practice, to try it more faithfully, and for my daily reading I picked up a book by Thich Nhat Hanh. Years before, I had heard not to fight the “monkey mind” that so plagues us all—particularly when trying to meditate—but to let it be and not follow it or fight it. Thầy Nhat Hanh taught me to refocus on my breath. That was a big help in not getting lost with my “monkey mind.” His gentle and wise discourse opened the door a little wider and made me more curious, and I decided to learn more about Buddhism itself. I realized I didn’t really understand Buddhism in any systematic way. I’d read Alan Watts, Jack Kornfield, and others. I had a sense of the teachings—but no framework. So I bought The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism. It seemed a little silly to be using that series, but I remembered Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and the title seemed right.

I studied the lists—because Buddhism, as an oral tradition uses lists: the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, Sangha), the Four Noble Truths, the Five Hindrances, the Eightfold Path, the Six Paramitas and more. The lists helped me structure my understanding and gave me language for what I had already begun to feel.

Another breakthrough came to me at my congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley when Susan Mashiyama gave a talk on Buddhism during a summer service.  She told us about the Metta Prayer. I had heard of metta, but I didn’t understand it and had never heard the prayer before.

May I be peaceful.

May I be happy.

May I be safe.

May I awaken to the light of my true nature.

May I be free.

…and repeating the same phrases with You, Them, and Us.

It was simple but moved me deeply and added so much to my practice. After meditation, I recite this prayer, first for myself, then for others—my sons, my daughter, their mothers, my niece, and friends, I’ve added names as needed, including the children of Gaza and people I’ve promised to pray for. I repeat each line until I truly hear it. When my mind wanders, I gently bring it back—no self-scolding, just redirection. Like returning to a trail over and over.

I also began reading The Lotus Sutra, guided by Nichio Niwano’s commentary. I’m now on my second or third pass through Niwano’s book Buddhism for Today. It’s dense and poetic, and I suspect I’ll never fully absorb it. But it deepens my sense that the Dharma is a flowing, living river.

I tried going to a Chan monastery in Pleasant Hill—beautiful grounds, impressive land—but it felt distant. Formal ranks, color-coded robes for the neophytes, a kind of organizational structure that didn’t speak to me. The nuns were kind, but I didn’t feel invited. I didn’t want to be part of an institution. I wanted community. And it was a long drive.

I’ve realized my community, my sangha, is already at UUCB. Twenty years ago I found a liberal community of searchers, wanderers, and misfits like me. People who hold beliefs gently and believe in practice. People who are trying. And it still works today.

Midway through this process I began to describe myself as a Buddhist, a Unitarian Buddhist, but a Buddhist. I study Buddhism and I practice daily, and for me my practice often moves me to be a better person, kinder and more present. I am not yet the Buddha, completely one with all, but I am beginning and trying. And I’m a nicer driver.