Vitality

Jorge Ribeiro grew up in West Virginia in a small coal town where strangers already knew who he was. His father was the town surgeon but made a point of being home for dinner almost every night, even after a full day at the hospital. People expressed their gratitude towards him however they could—sometimes with a bag of tomatoes or a fresh-baked pie.

"If I'm walking down the street, people say, 'Oh, there's Dr. Ribeiro's son,'” Mr. Ribeiro tells me. "I'm like, who are you, right? But they knew me." His parents were both from Peru and the only Hispanic family in town. His name, Jorge, was flattened by West Virginia. "Everybody thought it's a cool way to spell George," he said. He got used to being called George and wouldn't hear his name said correctly on the regular until he moved to Los Angeles, decades later. “Everybody in Los Angeles knows some Spanish, but [Jorge] didn’t really feel like me,” he explains.

He was delivering newspapers on foot one morning before sunrise when a man pulled up in a convertible and offered him twenty dollars to get in the car. Mr. Ribeiro said no thanks and kept walking. The man followed him for a while, still offering, before he gave up. Mr. Ribeiro waited twenty years to tell his mother. By then it didn't matter how much time had passed—she was still upset about it.

His parents sent him and his younger brother to military school, a few hours from home. Mr. Ribeiro thinks it was partly because his mother worried about almost everything and wanted them somewhere structured. A lot of the other boys there were kids who were struggling and had been sent to get straightened out. Mr. Ribeiro and his brother did well and made honor roll, and they stayed close through it. When it looked like the school might close before his senior year, Mr. Ribeiro found a paragraph in a library catalog saying Vassar, freshly co-ed, would consider qualified juniors. He applied on a whim and got in before he'd even finished high school. The acceptance came on a small, high-quality card with pink ink on gray paper. He still remembers the feel of it. Today, he reflects, “I’ve felt, and I hope for most people this is the case, that the right college accepted.”

At Vassar, he played competitive chess. He once played fifteen people at once in an exhibition, and another time he came in second place at a college tournament and won fifty dollars. He then decided to quit, not because he lost interest in the game, but because he didn't like who he had become across the board. "I was thinking, I want to kill this guy," he said. "I want to squeeze him until he can't move anything. When I look back, I thought—I don't like that." He still plays with his brother now, but differently. If either of them makes a mistake, they take the move back and talk through why to figure out the best way to play.

He ended up in Japan almost by accident. He'd gone to Ohio State for graduate school hoping to study Buddhism and Hinduism. He panicked when he realized the program required three languages he didn't have and signed up for Chinese classes. When an ad for English teachers in Japan crossed his professor’s desk, she showed it to him and personally wrote him a letter of recommendation the same day she flew home for her own father's funeral. Mr. Ribeiro didn't find out until weeks later, when her husband delivered the message in the middle of a calligraphy class. "I was so moved," Mr. Ribeiro says, "that even though she's crying at her father's funeral, she wrote a letter of recommendation." He filled out the application that night.

He stayed in Japan for thirteen years, working in classrooms and later inside companies like Mitsubishi, Honda, Nissan, all while freelancing as a sportswriter on the side. He eventually covered the NBA Finals and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics for a small magazine that couldn't pay much but let him write as much as he wanted. In Kobe, all his students had been placed in what their own system labeled "failures"—kids who hadn't made it into a four-year university. Mr. Ribeiro found them sharper and more motivated than most of the American students he'd later teach at Cal State LA, where too many walked in expecting to be filled up like an empty cup instead of doing anything themselves.

When his father needed emergency surgery back home, Mr. Ribeiro had to leave Japan on almost no notice. Six students showed up at his apartment and helped him pack up his apartment. Fifty or sixty more met him at the airport. They formed a circle and went around one by one to say goodbye—some crying, Mr. Ribeiro crying too—before picking him up and throwing him into the air three times, right there at the gate. "It was a very moving, very moving thing," he said. "I'm still in touch with some of those students. They're married now, with kids who've already graduated."

His father died not long after. Mr. Ribeiro thinks he'd grown a little worn down by feeling unneeded. In West Virginia, patients without money had leaned on him and thanked him however they could. In the next town the family moved to, most people worked for a company with union health coverage and didn't think they owed the doctor anything at all. "They didn't really care about the doctor," Mr. Ribeiro said. "I think he felt people didn't appreciate him as a person anymore."

Mr. Ribeiro's first marriage also ended early. His wife was Chinese, had a daughter from a previous marriage, and was diagnosed with cancer not long after moving to the United States. Mr. Ribeiro was working toward a second master's degree at the time and never finished it. A professor offered to pass him through the class with any final paper,but Mr. Ribeiro couldn't even bring himself to turn one in. "I was so depressed," he said. "I never thought of that."

He met his second wife years later, in an ESL class at Pasadena City College—a class she initially couldn't get into. Mr. Ribeiro had settled an overcrowded waitlist with a lottery. She didn't win a seat, but she came anyway and sat on the side of the room in case one opened. "She did not like me," Mr. Ribeiro said. "Actually, she said she hated me." She got into a later section. One day, Mr. Ribeiro noticed her laughing with another student about a dance class they were both taking. He mentioned a Japanese movie he'd just seen about a man who takes up ballroom dancing, and she invited him to come try her class. He'd never danced before, but months later, at a Halloween dance at the local Elks Club, he reached over and held her hand. "That's when she knew," he said. They've now been together for ten years.

Mr. Rivero calls himself a "Buddhist Christian—"love God, love your neighbor—paired with a meditation practice he picked up in college. He still counts his breaths from one to ten, and when he loses count somewhere in the middle, he just starts over. "As successful for me, as successful meditation, is that I can go from one to ten numerous times without getting lost in other thoughts," he said, "but I always will have some other thoughts." He talks about energy the same way a physicist would. It never disappears, only changing form in the same way ice becomes water and water becomes steam. WIth whatever years he has left, he'd like to spend them as "a healer. Not a doctor. Using my energy and my thoughts."

He also talks about a woman he dated briefly after his first wife died who held openly racist views and still, somehow, treated the people directly in front of her with real kindness. He couldn't make sense of it. "How can you do that?" he asked, still turning it over. 

The line Mr. Ribeiro keeps coming back to, though, isn't about Japan or Vassar or any of the moves that reshaped his life from the outside. It is the one he'd hand his eighteen-year-old self if he could: "You're as young as your backbone is flexible." Literally, he means it about the body. He watched his mother stop moving in a chair near the end of her life and develop blood clots that eventually killed her. "You could say she died 'cause she stopped moving," he said plainly. Figuratively, he means the years he spent too certain of things, too slow to let go of a belief just because he'd always held it. "Sometimes I think I was too rigid," he told me. "I wish I'd been a little more open to some experience."

He's seventy-two now. He says the thing he notices in people his own age is the frown—years of small aches settling subconsciously into a face. He decided a while ago he didn't want to end up like that. Not because he found some trick to avoiding it, but because he's still doing, at seventy-two, what he did at nineteen the first time he learned yoga: staying loose on purpose, on the very days it would be easiest not to.