By Richard E.

Hey, Dad, do you want this? Mom says I can have it if you don’t want it.”

I shuddered. This was a new ploy on my wife’s part. Every year, as she put the house through its spring metamorphosis, bringing summer clothes out of hibernation and dragging winter coats and ski boots down to the basement, she sought to coerce me into giving up some beloved old things. In the past, her approach has been more direct.

She’d appeal to my sense of responsibility for the poor and  the victims of earthquakes, floods and revolutions. We both knew, of course, the real reason she wanted me to relinquish my favorite old clothes was to afford her more shelves for her favorite new clothes of the future. But who among us can face down another’s pretense of social righteousness with weak accusations concerning their ultimate selfishness? No one who wishes to escape with his lucky pants intact.

So I’d whine and paw through the selected “donations” and make myself feel better by knowing I’d at least managed to save my treasure box, as she calls it, for another year.

Inside the treasure box are old shirts from my stint with the U.S. Marine Corps, yellowed, aging pictures of buddies whose names I’ve forgotten, a few medals and my Judo Book.

Now there stood my daughter, eyeing me excitedly, holding my Judo Book. To what new lows could my wife sink? She was using my kid!

I took the precious old book into my lap. As I began to look through its brittle pages, I told Katie to let me think about it.

Memories flowed through me so powerfully that they produced physical sensations. I was transported back thirty years to a small island in the Pacific Ocean. I could smell the salt and feel the air and see the beauty of Okinawa. What became most vivid, though, were the smile and grace and love I saw on my old teacher’s face.

In the intense glare of one morning after, when I was particularly suffering the effects of the night before, a friend had said, “You can’t be enjoying yourself staggering in every night. It hurts just watching you. Why don’t you join me at the judo school in town today? Just check it out.”

His suggestion appealed to me. A major part of my life in the Marines was taken up at local joints, drinking. Drinking often led to arguments, and they led to fights. More efficient fighting was a great goal for a street-smart Brooklyn guy. I accepted.

That day I met my teacher, Iko Onaga, who instructed us to call him “Sensei,” the ancient word meaning “venerable teacher.” He looked so small and unassuming that there was no way on earth I could have foreseen that this man would alter the rest of my life.

He began to explain that judo was an art and that its name meant the “gentle way.” He told us that, “If a robber approaches and demands your money, you give it to him.” No one of us was ever to use judo to hurt anyone else — or he’d be banished from Onaga’s dojo. I remember thinking, “How’s he gonna know?”

A few weeks went by, and I was surprised to find myself looking forward to every day’s lesson. The practical aspect wasn’t lost on me, for I was saving a bundle going to judo class in the evenings, rather than to the bars. I was more excited, though, by what I was actually learning and doing, how my body was feeling, and how much I was beginning to admire Onaga.

Our relationship grew into something I’d never experienced with another. We weren’t friends, for that would imply an equality we’d never have. He was my teacher, my mentor, my leader. I was his student and I’d have followed him down whatever course he led me. I loved him and I felt his love for me, too.

I remember walking with Onaga to the dojo and from there to the public bath. He didn’t walk as much as he seemed to float in a serene dance, the steps of which only he knew. His head was always high and never bobbed with his steps. His shoulders were square, his back straight. His eyes lovingly took in all around him. He was self-confident without a hint of cockiness, and he always had a smile on his round face under a helmet of steel-grey hair. No one passed Onaga without executing a deep bow.

In the beginning, the strangest aspect of these walks with my teacher was that he held my hand along the way. Now, my crowd in Brooklyn did not hold hands — not with anyone and certainly not among ourselves. A kid who reached out for another guy’s hand had better know at least judo, for he’d have been set upon, pummeled and left for dead. But holding Onaga’s hand became so natural and always filled me with a  warmth that I felt sure it radiated directly from within him. I was proud to walk with him, pleased to hold his hand, and I was on my way to becoming a different man than my seventeen years in Brooklyn had destined.

On my first visit to his home in the farming village of Agena, I passed rice paddies and neat little houses on postage stamp sized plots, and I saw old people delicately balancing honey buckets on their shoulders. I was astonished at the children who would run away, screaming in terror at my approach. I realized that their only experience with Americans was when soldiers would wander through drunk and abusive. I was embarrassed and ashamed. After the locals had seen me with Onaga, I became a friend. The respect they accorded him was mine now, too. On my last visit there, as I crossed the little bridge that led out of the village, those same children came to say good-bye with bows and waves. I cried because I knew I’d never return — never again to see that beautiful place that had become home to me.

I cried, too, because I was leaving behind the man who’d taught me that strength was found in gentleness and that love and respect were far superior to fear and bravado.

I’m still intimate enough with that young man making his journey home to be aware that these realizations were only vague impressions. He was aware that the life he’d led and the glimpse he’d been allowed of a truly new vision for the future would be tested back in New York. He wasn’t accustomed to passing tests using this new vision. No one who challenged him would understand that they lost if he were to walk away from them. He himself had wrestled with this concept in the surroundings ruled over by Sensei. How could he triumph in Brooklyn on streets lined with rough bars, tattoo parlors and punks whose only vision was the primitive insight of survival? These were streets whose rulers could sense indecision as though it were blood streaming from a wounded animal. Again, the question, “How’s he gonna know?” occurred to him — and then he was home.

And so he took on those who dared him. He fought often and to kill and it became clear to him that he had acquired a deadly weapon. He fought to hurt others, to fit back in and to prove himself to primitives. His body wrenched in the middle of a fight with the old anger raging against the serenity of Sensei. But the congratulations from others, the free drinks, the hilarity following a confrontation grew less exhilarating and, finally, left him empty and sad. His body and mind ached.

Sensei knew. Truth recognizes itself.

After months of struggling to recede into the old skin, the young man relaxed in the truth and the new growth took hold. He aged and acquired the insight needed to fully appreciate what Sensei had toiled to convey. The gentle way was made part of him and influenced the whole.

Years later the not-so-young man would learn that Onaga-san had denied him the rank of shodan, or black belt, which he had earned with his physical skill because he failed to accept that at its heart judo is spiritual.

Some would argue that maturity, natural and always slow, had taken root.

Yet his contemporaries are occupying the same bar stools, fighting in the same arguments and drinking the same beer. He knows this so clearly because, much older and a family man now, he took his daughter on a tour of the neighborhood and learned of the lives lived by these perpetual boys with swollen bellies and old men’s faces. He felt some shame that day. It was all so obvious, so tangible. If only he could wrap up the lessons of thirty years and hand them to his little girl. Is it possible to tell her the truth and have her recognize it without the doubts, testing, failures and guilt that youth insists upon? Will a child believe one who tells her that all she needs to know in life is held in her heart right now?

All this, and more, came back to me as I fingered my worn book. I called my daughter, and she came running from her rummaging in the basement.

“How about we share this book?” I said. “It can belong to both of us. I’ll tell you about what it teaches and the old man who gave it to me.”

“Yes! I’ll tell Mom,” she replied. I held her shoulders, looked into her eyes and conspired with my new shareholder of treasures. “Tell Mom, too, that Daddy looks like he’s crying over his old book and that he’d like to tell you both a story tonight. O.K.?”

“O.K.!” and off she ran.

Two can play that game.

Richard E. is retired and living in the Green Mountains of Vermont. His daughter teaches autistic children and is studying for her Ph.D. degree.