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.”
On that note I got out and filled the tank. Gas prices were breaking records that summer; filling the tank cost me forty-seven dollars. I wiped the windshield clean with the rubber-edged tool, trimming the water off in neat rows as the Rinpoche watched, intrigued. He seemed to be studying everything—the landscape, the design of the gas station’s logo, the displays in the front window and the numbers on the pumps. Forty-seven dollars! If you made six dollars an hour, it took a day’s work to fill the tank.
I went in to use the facilities, and on the way out I noticed an old man in overalls sitting on a folding chair just outside the front door. Rotund in cheeks and belly, balding, past seventy, he seemed to be one of these local people the chains sometimes hire for minimum wage, a fossil-fuel Buddha doing odd jobs. He sent a shining smile up at me. I stopped and asked him where we might find a place to spend the night. “Not a chain motel,” I added. “Someplace real. I have a friend along, visiting from another country, and I want to show him the real America. An old inn. A B&B, something like that. Would you know of anyplace like that in these parts?”
“Lititz,” he said.
I thought for a moment that he was being vulgar. Uncle of the owner, down on his brain cells, he was offering commentary on the body parts of female customers.
“Say again?”
“Lititz,” he repeated, and waved his cane to the south, past the east-west highway we had just been on. “Little old town. Nice inn there. Feed you good, too, if you can afford it, and from the looks of things, you can. Go to 501, head south, and keep going. You’ll feel like you missed it. Go on and on, an hour from this spot right here. Inn is right on the road. Feed you real good.”
“But we’re heading northwest,” I said.
“Nothing that way. Go to Lititz, I’m telling you.”
I thanked him and had turned and started to walk away when he rapped me on the calf with his cane. I turned back.
“Listen to me,” he said, rather fiercely. “Go south. Lititz. And don’t eat too much there. Cut your life short. Chops the sex urge in half, too, you know.”
“We wouldn’t want that.”
“No, we wouldn’t.”
I smiled politely, patted my belly, and hurried away, erasing his advice from my mind almost immediately. I got back in the car and was clicking my seatbelt on and there he was again, hobbling toward us, then pushing his face practically through the window. He gave Rinpoche a big smile and a wink and said to me, “You don’t take advice good, do you, son?”
Rinpoche laughed. I mumbled something about being as open to advice as the next person, but that we had a schedule to keep.
The old man pushed two fingers into my left shoulder. “I’m telling you, Lititz is special, a special place for you. Look at my eyes.”
I looked. Cloudy, silvery, intense. I felt the stubbornness rising up in me. Back off, I was tempted to say. Go harass somebody else. But then his face softened, his fingers tapped my shoulder lightly, and his voice turned into a kindly grandfather’s voice. “Listen,” he said, “I wouldn’t send you down there for nothin’. You like your food, am I right?”
“Absolutely.”
“This place has the best food within fifty miles of here. You’re talking just a little ways off your route. Here.” He reached into his overalls and produced a folded up scrap of glossy paper. “Coupon. Ten percent off. You trust me now, okay. Show your friend here the very best of Pennsylvania.” He looked across at Rinpoche and winked again.
“Yes, I want to see this place,” Rinpoche said, and that sealed the matter.
I FOUND ROUTE 501 without any trouble, and headed south along it, relieved to be away from the interstate noise, the hurtling semis, and the insistent advice of old men in gas stations. This was an even prettier road, lined with sedate, perfectly manicured farms and neat white barns, some of them made with a pale stone or surrounded by walls of that stone. There were small ponds in these yards, straight rows of corn, smooth carpets of alfalfa and beans in the fields, and I supposed that the old guy had been right: It was worth it, after all, to lose a bit of time going south if the territory was prettier and the food better. I could always make up ground the next day. Along the side of the pavement an Amish family clop-clopped in their black buggy. Another calm, artificial life, I thought, another little world within a world, separate from reality. But then it occurred to me to wonder if these lives were in many ways harder than my own, not less but more real. Rinpoche had been in prison, after all, if he was telling the truth. There was nothing artificially nice about that.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand,” I said. “But, at some point, I’d like to know what that was like, the prison. I’d like to hear the story of your escape.”
He nodded. Nodded, then uttered this memorable line, as if he’d been pondering it while I navigated Pennsylvania’s country highways and took advice from its old men: “You are a good person, good soul.”
“What? For asking to hear about your escape from a Soviet prison?”
He reached across and patted me on the forearm, two firm slaps. There were two or three syllables of the famous chuckle, and then: “You are a clean soul.”
“I try to—”
“You are close to a major st
ep.”
And you haven’t even looked at my palm, I thought.
“You don’t see,” he went on, “but you are now very close to a major step. You have the dreams about escaping, yes?”
Here it came then, the dreaded spiritual nonsense. “Listen,” I answered, as kindly as I could manage. “I’m not such a clean soul, as you put it. I try. I’m a good dad, good husband. I try to treat people decently. But I have to tell you that I am a Christian—not in the judgmental, hateful sense in which that word is lately thrown about, but an old-fashioned Christian. A Protestant, in fact. That’s my faith. That’s what I live by. I don’t go to church often, it’s true. Those rituals don’t do much for me anymore. But the basic principles—”
“You don’t see,” he said.
“No, I don’t.” And then, in another small fit of anger, I pulled the car over into a gravel driveway that led to some kind of metal storage building. I killed the engine, turned and gave the Rinpoche all my attention, then took a breath to calm down. “Look, I’m not fond of proselytizers.”
He raised his eyebrows and kept them raised, then dropped them.
“I’m not a big fan of the touchy-feely, the past lives, the chakras, the important steps someone who doesn’t know me tells me I am about to make. I’m an ordinary American man, with a wonderful wife and family, nice job. I try to be good. You’ll excuse me for being blunt, but, really, I don’t need anything—any words of encouragement from you or from any other spiritual teacher.”
Breakfast With Buddha Page 5