It has been 52 years since my father passed, three days after his birthday, in 1972. I had just turned 30. His birthday, December 8, was always a big deal to me. You may recognize the date. It’s the Buddha’s Enlightenment Day although I didn’t know that at the time, I didn't learn it until more than 20 years after Dad passed when I found my way finally to Zen practice.
Dad’s birthday was important because it landed the day after mine. Our birthdays were celebrated together, and it created a magical connection between us. My mother, whose birthday didn’t occur until January, was left out, although she never seemed to mind. Daddy taught me to catch and throw a ball. He taught me to root for the Dodgers. It was as if I always knew that the Dodgers had broken the color line in baseball. Mom and Dad took me to Ebbets Field many times to watch the Dodgers play. Sitting high up in the grandstand, we cheered for Jackie Robinson dancing off third base, threatening to steal home. I collected Dodger souvenirs from our trips to Ebbets Field. The place had an aura, a monument in the struggle for justice. I cried when the Dodgers lost the world series. I quit baseball when they moved to LA.
Daddy tried to teach me a craft. He wanted me to have something to fall back on in case of another Depression. But more than that he wanted me to go to college. Mom made sure that I did. After college, I kept going to school – if I didn’t I would have gone to Viet Nam – first to social work school and then to the doctoral program in sociology at NYU.
I was unhappy my first year in social work school. Home for a weekend – I was going to Columbia and sharing an apartment in the Village – I told Dad that I was thinking of dropping out. I expected a fire storm. When I’d talked of leaving college and going to sea – that’s what he had done – he saw red. He wouldn’t hear of it. When I threatened to drop out of grad school, he didn’t even look up from the book he was reading. His work, it seemed, was done.
Dad was always reading and painting when he was home, but he wasn’t home a lot. He was a political organizer. That was where his heart was. The struggle for peace and freedom was at the center of his life. He went to a lot of evening meetings. When I was little, I missed him when he was out. On Sunday afternoons, he made his rounds, checking in on his people and I’d wander around the house, asking Mom over and over again, “When is Daddy coming home?” He didn’t get around to teaching me to ride a bike until I was in my teens. There were so many years of shame and secrecy, trying to keep my friends from realizing that I couldn’t ride.
Secrets piled on secrets. I grew up during the anti-Communist wave of the 50’s, the heyday of Joe McCarthy. I grew up scared. I was haunted by the execution of the Rosenbergs – my mother had warned me that I might come home from school to find them gone; I knew what that meant; she told me not to worry, that friends would take care of me; I was terrified. And proud. Proud to march in Civil Rights demonstrations. I was in Washington for the first time, when Bayard Rustin spoke. Proud to be part of a group with college classmates maintaining a vigil at the white house, fasting three days to protest nuclear testing. I was proud to march against the war.
When I finally got to Zen and discovered that my father had been born on the Buddha’s Enlightenment Day, it seemed a coincidence, and a not particularly fortuitous one at that. The most important sesshin of the Buddhist liturgical year, the Rohatsu sesshin culminates on that day, the day after my birthday. I have always been intrigued by this sesshin. What I’ve heard but not experienced is that each day of the sesshin, you sit an hour later into the night until, on the final night, you are sitting until dawn — sitting into the moment of the Buddha’s enlightenment.
I have never been to a Rohatsu sesshin. My birthday is time for family and, now with our wedding anniversary on December 9, a week of family celebration. I wonder if I will ever get to a Rohatsu sesshin, but today the Buddha’s words, “I and all beings on earth together attain enlightenment at the same time,” has a revolutionary ring that Dad would have loved. Today, I am thinking that perhaps the timing of my father’s birth was not a coincidence at all. My father was tireless in his efforts for peace and freedom for all people.
I grew up in Great Neck, a wealthy suburb in which my parents made a modest living. Great Neck had a very strong progressive community. Dad loved the fact Great Neck once hosted Fannie Lou Hammer, leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and Martin Luther King on the same night in competing fund raisers and raised a lot of money at each. Fannie Lou could have been paraphrasing the Buddha when she declared, “Nobody's free until everybody's free.” When King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” he could have been talking about Indra’s Net. How Buddhist can you get?
It has always seemed a miracle to me that growing up in our non-religious, often anti-religious home, I had found my way to Zen. Now it seems that I had not travelled as far as I’d imagined. Dad was a bodhisattva although he would have rejected the label. This year I’m feeling very grateful for my Buddhist childhood.
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