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A few years after arriving in California - after I moved to San Francisco - my physical activities included being a PADI Divemaster (the safety officer for scuba excursions) in Monterey and Hawai'i, wilderness search and rescue with the Bay Area Mountain Rescue Unit, and rollerblading with the Golden Gate Skate Patrol (when in-line skates were still a novelty).

I wanted more.

I was practicing Zen Buddhism at the Zen Center when I heard about an unusual martial art, Aikido. Oriented to defense, aikido was seemingly more subtle and sophisticated than other martial arts; brutality in Aikido is considered an embarassing faux pas, an act of an immature practitioner. (I had some months experience with taekwondo while in New Hampshire and was turned off by the macho posturing I saw in that dojo, not unlike what was portrayed in "The Karate Kid". The status-oriented assembly line of testing geared to give each student worthless encouragement to ensure attendence, providing students with worthless talismans of confidence in the form of a bewildering array of colored belts, was off-putting.) In contrast, here was a martial art that required physical presence, mindfulness, compassion, and had a nickname of "Moving Zen". Wow.

I visited several Aikido dojos in San Francisco and settled on City Aikido, primarily because I'd be able to experience several different teachers: Robert Nadeau, Richard Moon, Nick Scoggin, and Frank Doran. For six years, on and off, I attended evening classes, often rushing north from a consulting gig in Silicon Valley. When travel was required, I left the practice, only to return, again and again.

From time to time I attended weekend-long practice sessions at George Leonard's Aikido of Tamalpais, where I saw Richard Strozzi Heckler and Satome Sensei. In the waning days of his life Terry Dobson visited the Skidrow Dojo; I was lucky enough to be in attendence. I didn't know it at the time, but so was James Lincoln Friedman.

Jimmy Friedman is the dojo-cho of Suginami Aikikai, the current encarnation of the Skidrow Dojo. The founder of the rock band "El Destroyo", Jimmy was asked in 1988 to teach Aikido to ten friends in the aftermath of the violent murder of a friend of theirs. Those compassionate roots are still evident in the way Jimmy teaches us.

Classes with Jimmy are a never-ending stream of jokes, social commentary, and practice. Jimmy and several students have been throughout the Far East, and their stories alone are worth the price of admission.

(Lately, though, I've been doing Hapkido with the kids.)