Wednesday's words, wrought with Wonder
[ Continuing Monday's story... ]
A letter arrived for me yesterday — one that had been lost and wandering the desert of the real for 40 years (just like the Israelites through the wildernesses out of Egypt and to Moab), a letter I had written to a young friend I had locked arms with at a Berkeley barricade on the early morning of April 3, 1986 — that, unbeknownst to me then, I had written to myself in the future.
Well, that future is now, and boy is it a gift.
I recognize my younger self, and at the same time find him different from the present me but in a way I can't quite put my finger on just yet. It's as if lloyd.1986 is a dream character for me now, both insubstantial and real at the same time. I can inhabit that moment rather easily, though.
This is how the letter begins:
june 8
dear Jeff ...
well, here they are. these grim reminders in berkeley khaki and oakland darth-vader blue, that all that happened in april was real. for me, the most chilling chant was: "U.C.P.D. Protecting White Supremacy!!" imagine, our school in some way complicit with what was happening in far-off South Africa. taken out of context, seemingly unimaginable; but for a few intense days early in the spring of this year, all too real.
it seems like a long time ago, considering that i've been busy with school and community work since, yet when i look at these pictures, it seems like just last week... all of a sudden, we are there again, it is 7:20 and there is no hope anymore of holding the attack back until 8 when many of our friends and classmates, unknowing reinforcements, will come streaming into the horrifyingly militarized campus.
in a gesture that is equal parts desperation and bravery, we sit in front of the small mountain of metal, wood and concrete that used to be well-ordered parts of our campus. when they finally attacked, things suddenly went into slow-motion - the legs and boots clambering over the debris, the arc of batons in air, us being shoved into the very asphalt. i can still taste the metallic harsh air of it all.
The event I was writing to Jeff about had taken place months earlier in April of that year, when the student-led movement to compel the University of California to divest its holdings in the government and economy of apartheid-era South Africa came to a head in Berkeley when students engaged in a days-long siege of California Hall (where the U.C. President's office was then located).
The end of the siege came with the combined Oakland and Berkeley police forces forcibly dismantling the students' barricades around Cal Hall early that morning. I was among the student protesters, as was my friend Jeff Chang, then a freshman at Cal. Like me, Jeff came to Berkeley from Hawaii.
As was my wont, I had my trusty Nikon SLR camera with me and had been documenting the event from the get-go. Months later, I'd had the film developed and a couple months later had sent copies to Jeff, along with this letter, when he was back home in Hawaii for the summer.
Forty years later, I am reading my own account again. It is me, and it is not me. A seeming eternity has passed, and both my young friend and I have gotten much older, each with our own grown sons — Jeff and Lourdes' eldest is 30 years old, just like my Pono. His boys are hapa Chinese-Filipino, my hanai son is Hawaiian-Portuguese. (Not incidentally, both of their sons attended ATDP, where I worked for the better part of a quarter century, but that's another story for another escarpment day.)
The wonder of it all is that it feels like yesterday and a dream ago.
I had no idea Jeff had saved these photos and the letter, and I am unbearably grateful to the universe that he did. When they arrived yesterday in the form of a Dropbox link, my astonishment and thankfulness was beyond any known depth.
Mahalo nui, hoaloha. I will keep these always now, like the homespun treasures they are. As you are.
[ This was 'the final stand,' when we had retreated from Cal Hall to re-form right underneath Sather Gate... ]
