Breakfast With Buddha (6 page)

Nobody looks at it. The kids smirk. Jeannie washes a dish. If it happens at work, my assistant, Salahnda, takes a coffee break. Ten minutes and it’s over, and I’m left chastened and humbled. But for those ten minutes, I am as ugly as a parent yelling at his child in the park.

It’s interesting to me how these things get passed on,
how the sins of the father, or the mother, survive through the years and seep down into the lives of their children and grandchildren. I am occasionally haunted by this, in regards to my own children, haunted by a worry that I might, without knowing it, be passing something on to them, some unattractive tendency, quirk, or failing. Sometimes, after one of my small tantrums, I revive memories of my own dad, an otherwise steady Germanic soul, gone spitting and red-faced over a transmission on a tractor or some such thing. I’d get off the bus and walk up the long driveway, schoolbag banging shoulder blades, and there he’d be in the door of the bigger barn, wrench in his powerful hands, the belly of the tractor opened as if in an operating theater, the dark grease, the gears, the covering piece lying neatly on its back with the bolts held in it for safekeeping. Meticulous, he was. Exceptionally good with his hands, even by the standards of a Dakota farmer. Taciturn most of the time, but not unkind. And then there would be these little tantrums where he’d stomp and bellow and then mutter, again and again, the terribly sacrilegious phrase, “Jameson Crow! Jameson durn Crow!” and whack at the dirt with his wrench or his boot heel, his face the color of a McIntosh apple.

It wasn’t a question of fearing him, exactly. He never took out his frustrations on me or Cecelia or Mom. But it was as if you were accustomed to coming home to gently rolling prairie—which I was, in fact—and then on this day you came home and from beneath the prairie soil there came a spouting gusher of fury and frustration, a dark brew. Ten minutes the gusher would go, half an hour at most. My mother, who had a radar for these moods, would bring him out a cup of tea and a hard German biscuit and
at first he would ignore her, ignore the tray, and continue with his Jameson Crowing. Eventually he’d soften enough to go over and take a sip of the tea, a nibble from the biscuit, and that would signal the beginning of the end of it. He’d be on the road to recovery, the family would let out a collective held breath, and for a week or a few weeks or sometimes as long as a couple of months we would not see that side of him again.

So this trait had been passed down to me. That’s the way it works, isn’t it? Part of the ugliness in you is purely your own. But a portion of it is learned, or inherited. And, strangely enough, it seems immune to the scrutiny of your own conscience. Somehow, it’s all right—your tantrums or whatever else it might be: shortness with the children, meanness to a spouse, eating too much, cheating a little bit at work or on the tennis court, watching pornographic videos when the family is in bed or stealing away during every other lunch hour for a drink at GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! It’s all right. We find excuses for our small and not-so-small addictions and transgressions. We rationalize. They are part and parcel of the judging mind, and so the judging mind excuses them.

All you can do, I suppose, is decide which of your demons are harmless and which are really trouble, and then find the courage to wrestle with the latter group. If, over thirty or forty years, you can put up a dam in the DNA and block such things from being passed down, or even pass them down in diluted form, then, in my opinion at least, you can die in peace.

But I was not at peace there with Volvo Rinpoche on Christopher Columbus Highway in the world-class traffic tie-up. After a few minutes of steaming off and trying to
hold it in and realizing I couldn’t, I got out of the car and had one of my tantrums by the side of the road, a little drum-dance of what Anthony used to call “flustration.” I muttered and spun, kicking at tufts of grass on the median, looking up at the top of the hill and saying things like, “Great. Perfect. We go all of an hour and then we sit and sit. Perfect. Beautiful. Great way to start off the damned trip.”

Because my sister’s guru sat there as still as a fender and didn’t agree, challenge, commiserate, or even seem to mind, I carried on a few minutes longer than I otherwise would have. Even the shrieking ambulances did not humble me.

At last, there was a small stirring ahead of us, drivers tossing their cigarettes down and climbing in behind their wheels. I muttered and cursed my lousy luck for another few seconds and then got back in the seat and did not look at Rinpoche at all. We moved forward slowly, single file, merging, inching, until we passed the cause of the delay—a car with its front third mashed in, glass sprinkled on the pavement, the driver’s door ajar as if it had been ripped open, a star of broken windshield over the steering wheel. A medium-sized truck was also smashed up, facing the wrong way. And a third vehicle was lying on its side in a ditch off the right-hand shoulder. I felt then, besides the foolishness and shame, a whisper of that haunting emptiness I had been feeling of late. Just a whisper.

Rinpoche was fingering a loop of wooden beads at his belt. He said, “You don’t need to go away from the fast road now, anymore.”

But I did.

NINE

Having shown one
of the uglier sides of myself to a perfect stranger, and to this particular perfect stranger, I felt embarrassed, of course, but also a sense of relief. I no longer had to pretend to be better than I was. At the next opportunity I left the interstate and wound down the exit ramp onto Pennsylvania 611. While I was doing this, I was pondering Rinpoche’s comment about getting off the fast road, wondering if he’d had a premonition. It was the kind of thing Cecelia would have pounced upon as evidence that the future is known to us, that crystals heal and high-tension wires sicken, that when we suffer it must be in payment for the sins of previous lives. My wondering caused me to take 611 South, when I should have taken 611 North.

Not a big problem, I thought, when, two miles down the road I realized my mistake: 611 South would no doubt lead us to an east-west highway soon enough. And it was a pretty road, gliding near the upper reaches of the Delaware River, then down through small villages of hundred-year-old,
peeling-paint homes with columned front porches. I could have turned around, but 611 South was narrow, a lumber truck was riding my bumper, and, frankly, I did not want to admit my mistake in front of my companion.

The landscape on this side road was gentler, and, gradually, it worked a soothing effect on my mood. Instead of the high, jagged, stony hills that marked the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border, we were now cruising through sloping farmland planted in corn and presided over by neat white barns. The “Slatebelt” it seemed this stretch of terrain was called, judging at least by signs we passed. Slatebelt Auto Repair. Slatebelt Sewing. I found myself thinking of my parents again, my father’s fits of temper, his work ethic, my mother’s understanding and stoicism, the way, as a pair, they had roughed up and smoothed over the edges of each other’s personalities. Was it mere chance that had brought those two personalities together for fifty years, blended their genes to make my sister and me, then sent the blue pickup crashing into them on that cold February morning? Was everything just a random coagulation of cells, of lives? What about Anthony and Natasha, then: Could those souls just as easily have been born in the Slatebelt? On the banks of the Nile? In an Argentine village? Or had they somehow been destined for a life with Jeannie and me, as part of a greater plan?

At some point, mind still spinning with such things, I stopped in at a roadside store called Ahearn’s Country Café, where I bought a bottle of green tea—in memory of my dad, perhaps, though he’d never drunk green tea in his life—and checked the glass cases in vain for German biscuits. Rinpoche seemed to require nothing in the way of nourishment. I asked him, twice, if I might treat him to a
cup of coffee or a pastry, but he only shook his head and wandered contemplatively around the store, casting his calm eye upon a predictable Americana of slushies, an out-of-order ATM machine, and the refrigerated glass cases that held plastic bottles of juice and chocolate milk.

Not long after leaving Ahearn’s, as I’d hoped we would, we came upon a major highway heading west. Route 22. Same number as the route on which my parents had been killed. Rinpoche’s premonition—if that’s what it was—about leaving the interstate, now this odd coincidence. It seemed to me for a few seconds that there might, after all, be some hidden design to the world’s complex workings, some merit to the types of things my sister was always talking about: synchronicity, psychic wavelengths, auras, healing energies, all the frizz-frazz of people who couldn’t deal with solid reality. A few seconds, however, and the notion passed. I took Route 22, which soon led us into I-78, which was choked with construction sites and one-lane work zones and spotted with billboards advertising homemade Dutch food at the upcoming exit. In my experience, this tasty cuisine consisted of meat with a side order of meat—pork, smoked beef sausage, scrapple—all the delicious fat left in, everything smothered in gravy. The billboards should have come with a Surgeon General’s warning, or announced the availability of angioplasty at the next exit.

There were, on occasion, dead deer or possums by the side of the road. Rinpoche nodded his head once, solemnly, at each carcass. By then I’d almost forgotten my sorry outburst and my own questioning, and I’d fallen back into a place where I studied and then dismissed him within the whirl and tilt of my own thoughts. He was easy to be with,
I could tell that already, a nice relaxed presence. And yet, it felt to me, surrounded as I was by the roar of American commerce, that his world must be a world of artificial calm, a world of nodding at roadkill and fingering beads. He didn’t know the strains of a regular life, of children’s demands, their tantrums, their occasional whining and perpetual neediness. He didn’t know the stress caused by irritating coworkers, or stupid bosses, or just ordinary chores and pressures—bills, home repairs, family emergencies. He wore his robe. He “sat.” He had his centers, whatever they were—ashrams of some kind, I supposed. With a life like that, why wouldn’t he be calm and pleasant?

“You know,” I said to him, after we’d passed through yet another work zone and a long stretch of silence and were making good time again on the open highway, “all this Zen stuff, the sound of one hand clapping and so forth, it’s fine, but I’d like to have an actual conversation with you. We’re going to be in this car together for, I don’t know, thirty hours or so, and if all your answers are going to be cryptic . . . well, that’s not much fun.”

He had turned his face to me and was smiling without showing his teeth. His skin was the color of the fine filament you find between the peanut and its shell, that silvery red-brown. His forehead and chin were strong, the latter cut by a shallow cleft. His eyes—I glanced back and forth between them and the road—were a sandy brown and speckled with flecks of gold. It was a wide face, open as a child’s, and yet hardened as if he’d worked outdoors for many years.

“What is
cliptic
?” he asked.

“Cryptic. It means secret. Or not secret, exactly, but a kind of shorthand, a code. You know—cryptography is the
study of codes. I ask you what you do, what Rinpoches do, and you say, ‘I sit.’ That’s cryptic. That’s not what we call in this country an open conversational style.”

“Ah.” He turned his face forward and made several small nods, as if digesting this lesson in American social behavior. “What do you work?”

“I’m an editor. I help publish books, on food. Big coffee-table books with pictures of beautifully prepared meals in them, or books with recipes . . . or, sometimes, smaller books about a particular kind of food, or a particular way of preparing food, or the history of food, or a biography of a famous chef. For example, one of our recent projects was a book about the history of the preparation and consumption of game meat. Elk, buffalo, venison, and so on. But that wouldn’t interest you. You’re a vegetarian, no doubt.”

He shook his head.

“Not a vegetarian?”

“Not any -
arian.
”

“But you’re some kind of Zen master, a Buddhist at least.”

“Not any -
ist.
”

“Not Buddhist? Not a follower of his teachings?”

“He doesn’t want the followers for his teaching.”

“All right. But surely you’re not a Christian.”

“Of course. Christian.”

“What kind of Christian then? Protestant? You’re not Catholic, are you?”

“Protestant,” he said, with his small smile. And then, a second later, “Catholic. All the -
ists
. All the -
arians.
Hindu, too. All the Hindus. Muslim. Sufi. I’m Sufi.”

“You’re playing again. Look at the straight answer I gave you, and you give me riddles. Nonsense.”

“Cliptic,” he said with a big smile.

“Worse than cliptic.”

The gas gauge had fallen close to the red zone. In place of billboards offering Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine there was now a spate of advertisements for fast food restaurants in a place called, oddly enough, Hamburg. If the ads offered health warnings I couldn’t see them as we sped past. At the next exit I pulled off and headed for the nearest gas station. “Where do you originally come from, at least?”

“Siberia,” he said, though he pronounced it
Sigh-berry-ya
.

“You’re Russian?”

“South Sigh-berry-ya. Skovorodino.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Very far,” he said. “Near to China. Near to Mongolia. Near to Tuva.”

“And you started a center there?”

“I run away from there.”

“When?”

“Twenty years. I was born there, taught there. My father was a great master there. I went to prison there. Run away.”

“You escaped from the Gulag?”

“No,” he said, in an unengaged tone that implied we were speaking of someone else, an uncle or neighbor, long-ago deceased. “Russia.”