A Thousand Ways to Pass a Moment in Time

Time’s a tricky customer. It comes, it goes. It flies, heals and slips away. We stop time, commemorate and mourn it. We wish it would hurry, then beg it to stop. Whatever its nature, the urge to celebrate time’s passage is as old as time itself and was in full evidence Friday night.

To some, the millennium was the coming of a new world. To others, another night on the late shift fry line.

Here are some glimpses of how people passed the end of the 20th century, the century of progress, and the beginning of the 21st, as yet unnamed and unknown.

At Tofukuji Temple in Nakano

The bells began their centuries-old toll. Celebrants lined up to pound the giant bronze bell at Tofukuji Temple and sipped hot, sweet sake around a bonfire as priests chanted the sutra blessings to herald the Buddhist Year.

As midnight came and went, a faint murmur could be heard from the waiting crowd.

“Hey, none of the lights went out!” said one woman.

The streets of Tokyo’s often raucous Roppongi district were quiet; traffic on major arteries was light; most Japanese spent the holiday visiting shrines or temples or stayed home to eat the traditional bowl of noodles, a symbol of long life.

Temples rang their bells 108 times, a number that represents all the varied worries and anxieties of the old year. But at Tofukuji, anyone who showed up was welcome to ring the bell. Parents woke their children and toted them to the temple to pound it.

Although the temple’s priest, Fumitaka Ando, thinks entirely too much is being made of the new millennium--after all, he says, 2000 is a Christian year--some markers in the adjacent, ancient graveyard have Western dates instead of those of the Buddhist or imperial calendars (year 2543 or Heisei 12, the 12th year of the reign of Emperor Akihito).

The minutes after midnight were serene. Heavy phone traffic temporarily disrupted most mobile calls. Instead of a chorus of bleats, beeps and chirps, phones flashed the silent message, “Please Wait,” and the temple bells rang throughout the city.

In Nakano, the tolls echoed in the neighborhood for hours. For a moment, at least, the new was forced to wait for the old.

On the Beach at Copacabana

Worshipers began gathering on Copacabana beach six hours before midnight. Some arranged tables and chairs on the sidewalk. They dressed from head to foot in purifying white. At dusk they lit blue, green, pink and white candles. The flames flickered; drums pounded; the worshipers sang and danced circles around altars covered with flowers and images of Iemanja, Afro-Brazilian goddess of the sea.

At the stroke of midnight, fireworks exploding above them, they waded into the surf to launch their offerings: small floating altars of candles, lipstick, mirrors and other gifts for the notoriously vain goddess. Other worshipers tossed white flowers onto the waves.

There was fire in the sky and fire in the water.

Families held hands so as not to lose each other. Children covered their ears in the din. Crowds of people peered from windowsills of oceanfront apartments.

Thousands of bobbing flames floated out into the Atlantic in the giant amphitheater of hills and high-rises that is Copacabana beach.

To the people here, the goddess Iemanja represents generosity, life and renewal in the Candomble and Umbanda religions, which were repressed for decades, but retained the allegiance of millions of Brazilians who joined the gods of the African pantheon with Catholic saints.

On the beach, Adinei Santos clutched her red-yellow and white roses and counted seven waves after midnight, then threw the flowers into the sea.

“It’s a tradition. It brings good luck. The economic situation in Brazil has gotten more difficult. We need the help of Iemanja,” she said.

Lilian Ciurariu, a writer, called it “an event for one-on-one with God.”

With Mandela on Robben Island

For 27 of his 81 years, Nelson Mandela had no choice about how or where he spent New Year’s Eve. For most of those years, he did not even have a watch. The only indication of a new year’s arrival was the midnight blast from the Robben Island foghorn.

“Eventually they let us stay up till midnight on New Year’s Eve and sing and play bridge in the passageway,” said Ahmed Kathrada, who was convicted of treason with Mandela in 1963.

This year the former South African president returned to the tiny prison cell on Robben Island where he spent 18 years in prison.

Mandela entered his cramped cell, the fourth door from the end in section B, with the single purpose of lighting a candle and passing it to his successor, South African President Thabo Mbeki. The flame was then extended to several dozen schoolchildren waiting in a courtyard where Mandela once toiled. Mandela and Mbeki rejoined 500 guests for champagne and watched a midnight fireworks display from Cape Town across the bay.

Mandela has been to Robben Island many times since he left in 1982 to serve the final years of incarceration on the mainland. For the man who dedicated his life to uplifting Africa’s black people, the candle-lighting signified hope for a better future for a continent freed of white domination during the 20th century but left shackled by war, disease and poverty.

Robben Island is one of South Africa’s hottest tourist attractions. Guests arrived for the evening’s celebration on ferries operated by former inmates and piloted by former prison guards.

Prisoners-turned-politicians exchanged stories, joked with visitors and tried to explain why the island holds such promise.

“Through all the years, the freedom fighters who lived here shared hope, shared the passion and continued the fight for freedom,” said Jeff Radebe, a former inmate who is now minister of public enterprises. “That we are here tonight on the eve of a new millennium is itself a resounding triumph for the forces of justice, freedom and peace.”

Aboard American Airlines Flight 1099

Janet S. Rhodes, a 63-year-old Long Beach grandmother, sat in seat 20-F, ate chicken Caesar salad, sipped complimentary chardonnay and worried not a lick as Flight 1099 slipped across midnight Greenwich Mean Time, tugging the U.S. air traffic control system--one of the most computer dependent organizations on Earth--into the year 2000.

“I wanted to be able to tell my grandchildren that I flew into the millennium,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes paid $437 for the privilege of flying at a time most people wanted desperately to avoid airplanes.

The flight took off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern time and landed in Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport about 8 p.m. It would to continue to San Francisco, arriving just past midnight.

A computer analyst for Lockheed Martin, she was not worried about Y2K problems. “If there had been any glitches, they would have shown up in other parts of the world,” said Rhodes, who donned a black top hat. Two passengers wore tuxedos.

Rhodes flew in the company of Federal Aviation Administrator Jane Garvey, who took the flight to demonstrate the safety of the commercial system. From a coach seat 31,000 feet over Tennessee, she announced that the plane had entered the new millennium without a hitch.

“There are a lot of happy faces here,” Garvey said by phone to the FAA control center in Virginia as the aircraft cruised through the 2000 rollover time.

Garvey read a letter she had faxed to President Clinton. It read: “ . . . the nation’s airspace is up and running safely and efficiently. So, using the words Orville and Wilbur Wright wrote in a telegram they sent nearly a century ago: ‘Success. Stop. Inform press. Stop.’ ”

Garvey didn’t need to summon the press. Except for Rhodes and a handful of others, reporters and TV camera crews were the only people on the plane with her.

With a Poet in South Beach

In dresses, tuxedos and tank tops, 10,000 men and women gathered in the Miami Beach Convention Center to celebrate. More than 400,000 tourists and mainlanders crossed Biscayne Bay to party on the slender barrier island of Miami Beach.

On Royal Palm Avenue, a few blocks from the party’s South Beach epicenter, just beyond earshot of the rock rhythms of Blondie, the descarga of the Gypsy Kings and the madhouse fusion of a hundred bar bands, poet Campbell McGrath hunkered down at home with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two young sons.

Even before he was anointed this year with a $280,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” McGrath was smart enough to know that the best perspective on worldwide commotion would be from a tranquil perch before his own hearth. So he and and the family planned takeout from Joe’s Stone Crab. Then McGrath would go back to work on what he calls “The Florida Poem,” in which he is trying to make sense of the looming future, in a state “symbolically/impoverished, bereft of mythic infrastructure/Its hallowed grounds are golf courses/its great cathedrals theme parks. . . .”

As time shed its old skin, McGrath said he was struck both by the artificiality of the calendar-driven hoopla raging around the globe, and the opportunity it presents for new beginnings. In a land of exiles, retirees, Old South and New Wave, “We have license to reinvent ourselves, to define what we want to be,” he said.

“In Florida we are tabula rasa, brand new, but I sense that our cultural diversity is taking root. In my students at Florida International University I see a vitality, a tolerance and a longing for identity that is heartening. One symbol we do have here is the Fountain of Youth and maybe that is our unifying metaphor. It is not about a search to stay forever young, but about reinvigoration. We are different, vital, ever-changing. Maybe that is our identity.”

At Lakeside Lanes in St. Louis

Elsewhere, fireworks fizzed, music boomed, crowds roared--and here was David Easter, handing out maroon-and-taupe two-tone shoes, directing a colleague to scrape some gum off the rug, fielding complaints about a sticky spot on Lane 12 and stamping hands for the all-you-can-eat taco bar.

It was business as usual at the Brunswick Lakeside Lanes Bowling Alley. On millennium night in Valley Park, a quiet, middle-class suburb of St. Louis, Easter volunteered for duty; didn’t even request--or get--overtime pay.

“I’m not much of a partyer,” the 36-year-old father of two said with a shy smile. “It doesn’t really matter to me.” Easter and the other Lakeside Lanes employees whooped it up with the 100-plus bowlers when midnight tolled and the century officially turned.

The celebration capped an hour of “cosmic bowling”--glow-in-the-dark pins, laser lights, rock music competing with the thud-crash of green and pink bowling balls bumping down well-polished lanes.

Lanes were crowded with kids as young as 5, some red-eyed and yawning even as their parents lined up to pay the $39.95-per-person cover fee.

The bowling bash was not always voluntary, either.

“This was NOT my idea,” groaned 16-year-old Alison Knox as she slid into an orange plastic booth.

“We’re here because our parents decided to be mean to us,” moaned her sister Shannon, 15. Though she had curled her blond hair, slathered on sparkly pale blue eye shadow and donned a filmy zebra-print shirt just in case her dream man might wander by, Shannon figured this millennium would be a bust. “I’d rather go to a party or a concert,” she complained.

Her parents had vetoed all independent celebrating. “We wanted to be together on New Year’s Eve,” Joyce Knox said.

To Alison and Shannon’s disappointment, the bowling alley’s celebration--billed as a “once-in-a-lifetime” party--was decidedly low-key. Just a few balloons bobbed above the lanes, and the pins were set and swept away with businesslike regularity--no funky Y2K quirks to add spice to another night at the lanes.

A few bowlers dressed up in sequin-studded blouses or glittery vests. But mostly, they wore jeans and T-shirts. With families dominating the crowd, dream men for Shannon were in short supply.

Among Onions in Los Angeles

The road to 2000 has deflated many a fantastic forecast of decades past--1984 didn’t look much like the book, 2001 won’t be much like the movie. Maybe the most persistent prediction of what we can now call the last century was that machines would make manual labor obsolete.

Tell that to Moises Placencia, 31, who welcomed the new century slathering chili on hundreds of sandwiches with a 15-man crew at Tommy’s Original World Famous Hamburgers, a ramshackle stand at Beverly and Rampart in the heart of Los Angeles.

Placencia spent New Year’s Eve much as he has every Friday night for 14 years; peeling white onions and mixing mounds of ground beef and spices into 90-gallon stainless steel vats of Tommy’s chili.

Tommy’s workers do their regular shifts, whether or not they fall on holidays. ‘Nobody complains,’ said Placencia, noting the double-time pay. Then he pauses and adds: ‘Well, sometimes they complain a little.’

Angel Marin, 54, has worked as a cook and counterman at Tommy’s since he came to Los Angeles from Jalisco in 1975. The high-flying California economy is distant. There are no options packages or hopes of quick millions. Satisfaction comes from knowing the job will still be there next week.

Marin, however, works with his own version of a Non-Disclosure Agreement. He is one of the handful at each store who knows the recipe to Tommy’s chili, which he became privy to after 10 years of service.

As surely as Internet millionaires and Y2K hoopla will become topics of history classes, students will continue to scarf down hamburgers at places like Tommy’s. And workers like Placencia will still be turning them out, sweating away in the smoke and heat of a kitchen, counting the hours to the end of the shift, and the days to the next paycheck.

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Times staff writers Sonni Efron, Peter Hong, Dean Murphy, Sebastian Rotella, Mike Clary, Stephanie Simon and Rich Simon contributed to this story.