ELEVEN
Breakfast at the General Sutter Inn is served in a street-side café that sits just off the main lobby. The morning meal is free for guests, if they choose from a limited menu; or they also have the option to order from the more extensive regular menu and take a five-dollar credit.
I sat at a table looking out on the street. Still partially full from the night before, I eschewed the cornmeal pancakes and crab and shrimp quiche and asked for something simple: coffee, apple juice, and oatmeal with honey. Rinpoche was nowhere to be seen and I realized we hadn’t set a time for breakfast. The food arrived quickly. I picked up my copy of USA Today and was reading about Israel’s bombing of Lebanon’s infrastructure and speculation about Cuba after Fidel and the big heat wave we were driving through. I looked up from this mix of news, glanced through the window, and caught sight of my traveling companion. He was out on the sidewalk, bending down, collecting something, putting stones or plants into a pocket buried in his robe.
After a few minutes of this, the good Rinpoche came in and sat down opposite me. A wide grin animated his rugged face, as if, given a chance to select from the entire population of North America, he would make me the breakfast companion first on his list. It was a nice feeling.
“How did you pass the night, sir?” I asked him.
He put his hands together at the side of his cheek and tilted his head onto them, eyes closed, tiny smile playing.
“That good, eh?”
The waitress swung by our table. Rinpoche ordered tea with one poached egg on wheat toast and she took his order while making a deliberate but only half-successful effort not to let her eyes wander across his outfit. It was not, apparently, the season for maroon in central Pennsylvania.
“Glad to see that you eat,” I said, when she’d left us.
“You,” he pointed to me, “you ate last night. Big!” He spread his hands out from his sides as if encompassing a three-foot-wide beach ball of a belly.
I was, in fact, suffering just a bit from a case of morning regret, and going very slow on the oatmeal. “How did you know that?”
He laughed as if I had made a joke. “Your face shows.”
“My aura?”
“Yes, yes. Anyone could see.” He pondered a moment, turned serious. “You can ask me now, any question. I will give you a wesson.”
Just as he was saying this, the waitress brought his tea, and now, on her second visit, she could not at all keep herself from giving him, and then me, the famous once-over. I imagined her providing a detailed report to the cook and busboy. Two true weirdoes out there this morning, Eddie. You have to take a look.
“A lesson?” I said, when we were alone.
Rinpoche nodded.
“What are you talking about?”
“Ask,” he said. “Anything. I teach you.”
“Teach me? A bit presumptuous of you, isn’t it?”
“What word?”
“Presumptuous. Uppity. You know, you’re the teacher, I’m the student?”
“Thank you for teaching me that word,” he said, smiling. “Say again please?”
“Pre-sump-tu-ous.”
He laughed his high, trilling laugh—the complement to his guttural chuckle—and now the two businessmen at the table on the other side of the room were looking us over.
“You are editor,” Rinpoche said. “You know books. You know language. Very good, thank you.” He nodded twice, then pointed to himself with one hand and attacked his egg with the other, happily, joyously, apparently unaware that I had taken offense. He sliced off a piece of the egg so that the yolk dripped onto his toast. He observed the little yellow flood. He sliced the toast with his knife and fork, put the piece into his mouth, and chewed happily, thoroughly, contentedly. A sip of tea, and then, “I am guru. I know other things than you. You should ask. Every morning at breakfast I let you ask one question.”
“Generous of you,” I said.
Another pair of nods from the good Rinpoche.
I ate a few spoonfuls of oatmeal, sipped my apple juice, tried to calm down. I could feel, again, in my depths, a particular species of hot, swirling anger, well out of proportion to the event. Twice now in two days I had surprised myself, and not in a way I liked. No tantrums this morning, I told myself. No nasty remarks. “Fine,” I said at last. “What is the meaning of life?”
He looked at his egg, chuckling happily, tilting his big head sideways so that the chin and nose were not in a vertical line. He nodded again that way, sideways, chuckling, looking at his egg.
He then reached into his robe, flipped the folds a couple of times, came out with his fingers clutched, leaned across the table, and dropped a handful of dirt into my water glass. At that moment the waitress was circling back toward us with a pot of coffee, and the odd little drama at our table stopped her dead in her tracks. She hesitated there for a two-count, then spun on her heel and made for the kitchen with an update for the cook. My glass was now cloudy, filthy, a few crumbs of brown dirt on the table beside it. Perhaps even a grain or two of sidewalk dust had fallen into the oatmeal. Rinpoche took his spoon, reached over, and vigorously stirred the mixture he had made, then sat back and looked at me with his beaming kid’s smile. After a moment he pointed to the glass and said, “Meaning of wife.”
“What is? Rudeness? Oddness?”
“Why so angry?”
“Not angry,” I lied. “Amused. Thank you for the lesson.”
“You’re welcome.”
The dirt was beginning to settle so he took up his spoon a second time, reached across, and stirred it.
“What is this, some kind of Zen trick?”
He laughed, of course. He ate a bit more of his soupy egg, sipped his tea, smacked his lips loudly. “Meaning of life,” he repeated, now pronouncing the l perfectly. “Protestant trick.” A huge smile now. “Catholic. A Hindu trick.”
“Dirt in a glass?”
He held up his own water glass, dirt-free, and peered at me through it, then set it down. “The mind,” he said, pointing at the clear glass. I was glad, at least, that he hadn’t pointed at the glass of what was now becoming mud and said “your mind.” By then the dirt was settling, the top part of the glass was somewhat clear again. “Watch,” he instructed. And as we watched, the dirt in my glass settled slowly to the bottom so that the top two-thirds of the water grew translucent, then transparent. “Your mind,” he said, pointing at the glass in front of me. He picked up his spoon. “When you—when some person—does things he shouldn’t do. Watch.” He put the spoon in the glass and stirred energetically again, took the spoon out, sat back with a look of complete satisfaction on his face. “Then you can’t see.”
“When someone does what bad things?”
“Kill person. Kill animal for no reason. Drugs. Anger. Eat too much . . . like that.”
“Kill someone and eat too much in the same category?”
He laughed as if at himself and pointed at me. “Smart.” Everything I said on that morning seemed to greatly amuse him. “Killing someone means more dirt. Glass filled with dirt for killing someone. Little bit of dirt for eating too much.”
“I see. That’s today’s lesson.”
“Yes. It is good lesson. If you want to see the life as it is in a true way, then you have to make the water very pure, very clean. This is not easy in this world but it is what you have to. You cannot upset the mind.”
“Very good. Thank you for the lesson.”
“You’re welcome.”
The waitress found the courage to make her approach at last. Pouring the coffee, she could not keep her eyes from the muddy glass. “Scientific experiment,” I told her. “My friend here is an expert in Burmese herbal medicine.”
She smirked and left us.
Rinpoche was finishing his egg, lovingly mopping up the last of the yolk with an entire slice of toast. I took another bite of oatmeal, cool by now, gritty.
“Now you get to ask me one question,” I said.
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nbsp; He laughed. “Very good, very good. Thank you.” He ate the piece of toast in four big chomps, took another sip of tea to wash it all down, looked at the back of his strong hands as if pondering their design, then said, “My question is this: What did you do last night in the room?”
“Talked to my wife. Wrote a letter to my daughter.”
“Your daughter is very nice. I saw her picture in your sister’s house.”
“Wonderful. Smart. And we have a wonderful son, too.”
“Very good,” he said. “Very good practice. The best practice.”
“Practice? Practice for what?”
“Dying,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Family love is the best practice for dying. For understanding that you are part of something big, not just your one separate body. This is why you are such a good man.”
“My children are something more than mere practice for my own dying,” I said, just as the waitress made another pass.
“Yes, yes,” Rinpoche said. “You love them very much. That is why you are ready now, because of that and other things.”
I nodded, curtly, and looked away.
“Love makes the water in the glass clean,” he went on.
“I suppose it does.”
“Jesus said so.”
“Did he? Interesting.”
“I am finding, in this life, the places where all the religions are the same. What Jesus said. What Buddha said. The way the Jewish people live and the way Hindu people believe. Maybe now I will make a new religion that holds all of them and people will not kill each other so much because of what they believe God is.”
“Excellent,” I said, but it was just too much for me on that morning, I’m sorry to say. I felt that we’d made a scene, and was embarrassed by that, and I was not at peace with Rinpoche’s lesson, his interest in my sister and our land, his theories about my kids, his plans for world peace. Most of the warm feeling I’d started the meal with had drained away. I could not meet Rinpoche’s eyes. He fell silent, watching me, and for a time we sat there like that, as if we spoke utterly different languages and there was no longer any hope of translation. I put some bills on the table, stood up, and led my companion, the religion-maker, outside into the heat.
TWELVE
I drove away from the General Sutter Inn enveloped in a mood that might be compared to that of a teenager who is being forced, by her well-meaning parents, to clean her room, or to study, or to tutor her brother with his Spanish, when all she wants is to be driven to the mall and to walk the gleaming corridors with her coterie of friends, staring through windows at the latest style of jeans and talking about boys. A righteous frustration, it might be called. A bit of anger sprinkled on top. And yet, inside the frustration and anger lies the reluctant sense that there might be something healthy involved in the parental militancy, something unfair about her pouting.
But, of course, it was not quite like that. I am an adult, and so, in my case, it was simply that I have a particular dislike of arrogance in all its forms, and Rinpoche’s presumed superiority nagged at me like the e-mail of an obnoxious author, presuming the world would always sit in waiting at his door because he’d published one good book. At the same time, I have to say that there was some quality to Rinpoche that made him almost impossible to dislike. Just at the point where you thought he was locked up in his own little world of “wife wessons” (his mispronunciations followed no regular pattern), he’d talk about your children as if they were his nieces and nephews. Just at the point where you thought he was challenging your way of living, he’d call you a good man. Just at the point where you knew he was taking himself too seriously, he’d break out in joyous laughter at something he had said or done.
Still, as we put my bag in the trunk of the car, and his at his feet (an old prison reflex, I thought, because he never let the bag out of his sight), I felt knocked slightly off my ordinary balance. It did not help matters that a yellow ticket had been slipped beneath the wiper, and that Rinpoche wanted a detailed explanation of what it signified and why I was upset. Ten dollars to the town of Lititz. Cecelia would have called it a bad omen.
Following directions we’d gotten from the kind clerk at the General Sutter, we headed north for a few miles on 501 then turned off onto State 322. More farms here. A small orchard stretched out in front of one of them, maybe thirty trees in all, and I saw what I assumed to be a husband and wife there, picking fruit on ladders in the sun. They were working on the same tree, and the woman was wearing, on that hot August morning, a long plain dress and a plain light blue bonnet to match, and it spawned in me a whole line of thought about the Amish and the Mennonites. The line of thought was affected, in part, by the fact that the farms we passed were exceptionally picturesque and seemed exceptionally well kept. Son, grandson, and great-grandson of farmers, I knew how much work was involved in keeping a farm, even keeping it poorly. But to have land that looked like this—manicured and fertile at once—and to have whitewashed barns with straight walls, and stone and clapboard houses with neat roofs, and graded driveways, and gleaming windows—it meant laboring from morning till night, fifty-two weeks a year.
A surprising thought came to me: These people know how to live. Not They know how to farm, but They know how to live. I imagined a life for the man on the ladder and the woman with the bonnet—who I assumed were Mennonites. I imagined a life for the Amish folk passing in the night in their horse-drawn carriage, their children staring out the carriage’s small back window at a world they would never have access to. My kids grew up with vacation trips to France, California, Cape Cod, afternoons at a friend’s back-yard pool, laptops, cell phones, nice-looking clothes, the luxury of a movie now and again, a night at the mall, football and soccer seasons, an enormous variety of foods—a kind of freedom to go places and do and have things that the children of this bonneted woman and her husband would never know. If the couple was Amish, not Mennonite, then the difference would be even more extreme: Their kids would live in a house without electricity, on a piece of land tilled without machinery. They would marry in their teens and adhere to a social code that made the Pilgrims seem like punk rockers. It was one thing to live that way in Switzerland three hundred years ago—where the idea had started—but in America in the twenty-first century? Here, now, the list of things they sacrificed would be as long as Route 501. And what kind of return would there be on that? What could possibly be worth such a monumental sacrifice? Would it earn them minds as clear as drinking water completely free of sidewalk grit? After they died, would there be a special place reserved for them above the clouds, God smiling on them with a special affection, all the things they’d given up presented to them tenfold? Was that the way it worked? And, if so, what would be reserved for ordinary good folks like Jeannie and me and Natasha and Anthony, people who’d given up nothing, but who’d done little harm and a fair amount of good in our years on earth? Was it all just a game, the winners being those who could give up the most? Or were the people who gave up things only well-intended fools and nothing more? And why was it that, among my circle of coworkers and friends, arguably some of the most sophisticated and intelligent people on the planet, these questions were never even approached in casual conversation? Not once, in twenty years! Because it was simply assumed that the idea of a life governed by religion was for the unsophisticated and unintelligent? An opiate? Because they thought God was just a comforting lie? Because such questions were simply too personal?
I looked across at Rinpoche and thought about asking him his opinion on the subject, or at least starting up a conversation about it. But something blocked me. I could feel this something as if it were a thin wall between my lungs and mouth, the bricks narrow but sturdy and neatly set, the mortar hardened by years of the same pattern of thinking and living. It was just pride, perhaps. But I have never been good at finding the line where pride ends and dignity begins, and so I held to my silence.
After a couple more miles of those exquisite farmhouses and
fields—and a fairly uncomfortable silence in the front seat—the landscape changed. Now there were only woods on either side of the road, steep wooded hills and narrow valleys. Along the highway we saw a dead fox, a dead possum, a dead raccoon, and Rinpoche muttered prayers over their rotting carcasses as if they were the bodies of lost sons. And then we descended and the land opened wide to right and left and the farms seemed to my eye to have a slightly different character, not quite as rich, this soil, not quite so sturdily built or well maintained, these barns and houses. There were electric wires and cars and personal billboards in front yards. WALK HONESTLY, one of them advised. And on a silo, FOR HERE WE HAVE NO CONFLICT / BUT WAIT FOR THE ONE TO COME.
No teenagers in that house, I guessed.
And then, as we neared the town I had picked out for our day’s excursion, the landscape changed again, and in place of the farms there were clusters of what can only be called mansions, five- and six- and seven-thousand square foot homes with vinyl siding and partial fieldstone fronts, all of them nearly identical and squeezed close to each other on treeless lots.
Soon we began to see signs saying HERSHEY ATTRACTIONS, and I followed them. The road swept us around the center of the city and out to a dubious wonderland of parking lots, amusement rides, stadiums or concert halls of some sort, and hoards of sugar-loving, roller-coaster-riding tourists. At some point on the previous day, looking at my Rand McNally, I’d started to get a bit excited about showing my great country to the Rinpoche from Russia. It was what Cecelia had asked me to do. But even if she hadn’t asked, it was the kind of thing I would have wanted to do anyway, because I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid. I love my country. But I love it the way you love a wife of many years: not because you have some sentimental notion of her perfection, but because you know her thoroughly, from the courage of the maternity room bed to the pettiness of her morning moods; from seeing her sit for weeks by her dying mother’s bedside, to watching her worry about which shoes to wear to a cocktail party given by a person she does not like. You know she has the capacity to get up at five in the morning and make you pancakes before you set off on a particularly arduous business trip, and you know she also has the capacity to say things, in the heat of an argument, that she should not say, to sneak the last piece of chocolate cake, to lose track of time and keep the rest of the family waiting for an hour, at the beach, on a burning hot afternoon. You know everything from what flavor of lip gloss she likes to what books she would bring with her to the proverbial desert island and what she believes the meaning of life to be. And then, always, there is a part of her you do not know.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 7
