It was like that with America and me. Though I was not an eager student of her past, I was a thoroughly engaged and captivated student of her present. I liked to read about what was happening in Utah or Mississippi or along the coast of southern California. When driving, I liked to listen to talk shows all across the political and religious spectrum. Much as I hated being away from Jeannie and the kids, I derived a profound pleasure from going to a booksellers’ conference in some part of the country I had never seen, walking the streets of St. Louis or Seattle and just watching how people lived, seeing what they ate, hearing how the language of Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, and Woolf sounded in their mouths. I wanted to show some of this to Rinpoche in the way that you want to show, to a first-time guest, the new addition you’ve built on your home, get his opinion on the woodwork, the layout of the rooms, the color and design of the bathroom tiles, even if you know that his opinion will be coated in a mandatory politeness.
With Rinpoche, however, I knew nothing of the kind. If anything, I suspected that, being the ascetic, spiritual type, he’d be put off by the Hershey Attractions of this world, the roller coasters, the exhausted masses driving thousands of miles to see something their friends had seen, and then coming away vaguely dissatisfied. I loved it all, the bowling alleys and grungy greasy spoons, the grit and fluff, the Disney. That, to me, was the stuff and fiber of American life. It was Our Reality, and I had a somewhat perverse urge to hold Rinpoche’s face to it and see if his high ideals could survive it. To prove myself right—or wrong—about something I could not even articulate.
We followed a long line of cars into the Attractions Zone, as it is called, and I looked for something that would give my passenger a taste of this particular American pie without absorbing half a day’s worth of driving time. I settled on a place called the Chocolate Factory. We drove down a long entranceway. We found a parking space. We walked across the burning tar and toward a glass entrance in a sea of curious humanity and then we were encapsulated in something so clean, orderly, and purely American—the uniformed security people, the information-desk woman with her nametag and Xeroxed maps, the sound of a recorded tour echoing off the ceiling—that every particle of it might have been painted in red, white, and blue. And, of course, right there in easy reach was the merchandise area.
We opted for the fifteen-minute tour and climbed a clogged, zigzagging, carpeted walkway with the story of Milton S. Hershey, in words and pictures, on the walls. I decided that, rather than play tour guide, I’d wait for Rinpoche to ask questions. He did not. Staying close beside me in the sweaty crowd, he studied the old photographs and the tablets on which Hershey’s story was sketched out. Milton was the son of Mennonite farmers, and after leaving that life he’d tried twice to start candy businesses, in Baltimore and New York, and twice failed. He’d returned home to Pennsylvania and tried again, and soon presided over an empire of sugar treats that stretched like ten million sticky fingers across the globe. Married but unable to have children, Hershey and his bride started a school for orphan boys, which eventually admitted girls, and which eventually became a school for the underprivileged, abused, and abandoned. At the time of the chocolatier’s death in 1945, the school was on the receiving end of his entire fortune.
What better place for the money to end up, I thought. All the profits from all those Kisses and Almond Joy bars going to pay for kids whose parents had not been able, or willing, to bring them up.
I did not know how much Rinpoche understood. The tablets were small, a few pages of text at most, and with the crowds, we had ample time to read them. But he said nothing; his ordinarily expressive face betrayed no emotion.
The walkway swooped down toward two neatly coiffed college-age kids in uniform who guided us across a moving carpeted floor and into what might have passed for old-fashioned roller-coaster cars, clunky-looking wooden carriages with seats fore and aft. Rinpoche and I had a car to ourselves and sat side by side amid the cacophony of happy voices and stentorian recordings. Now he had an enormous smile on his face. Let the show begin!
The car swiveled and slid along through a kind of fun-house of chocolate-making, replete with singing cloth cows, screens and voices providing facts about the cocoa plant, tanks of swirling chocolate soup, and conveyor belts on which thousands of naked chocolate kisses hurried past as if anxious to find their silver coats and their place on a shelf in Bangkok or Bangalore. It was a bit like a living Food Network segment, because as we glided along we were sprinkled with facts—250,000 gallons of milk a day, 60 million kisses a day, the butterfat removed at one point in the process and then put back into the mix at another—and carried along through the rich and wonderful aroma of cooking chocolate. At the end of the ride we passed a camera mounted on the wall and were instructed to smile. We did so. And then, after we’d climbed out of the contraption and negotiated the moving floor, we were offered the opportunity to purchase these glimpses of our happy selves. To this day in my workroom at home there is a photo on the wall that shows yours truly with a man in a maroon robe who looks as pleased and excited as any child in any candy store.
And, oh, the candy store! From the photo desk we marched downstairs into a sugar addict’s paradise, every imaginable chocolate confection from chocolate-chip cookies to dark chocolate, 150 different variations on the sugar vehicle dreamed up by Hershey engineers. The squeals of children spun in the air around us, the pressing of cash register buttons sang an anthem of profit. I did not hold back. A package of ROLO for Natasha, a bag of Mr. Goodbar for Jeannie, Almond Joy for Anthony, and a healthy supply of dark chocolate for myself. Rinpoche was admiring the photograph of us and saying, “How fast! How could it happen so fast?” but seemed less than tempted by the shelves of delights.
Nevertheless, I bought a bag of Kisses and pressed them into his hands, telling him, or trying to tell him, that this, all this—the gold of the ROLO wrapper, the blue and crinkled white of Almond Joy, the little twirl of tissue erupting from the Kiss’s peak—was like the snap of firecrackers on Fourth of July, or football games on Thanksgiving—an essential Americana, a kind of national flag of my childhood. I wanted to ask him if he carried in his mind similar images from the early years in Skovorodino. Yak butter biscuits, maybe. Or cheap framed portraits of Lenin on the schoolroom wall. Or those fun days of setting kopecks on the rails and waiting for the Trans-Siberian Express to come along at dawn and mash them thin.
But I didn’t.
After leaving the shop, we joined a river of humanity making its way at tidal speed toward a sea of windshields and SUV bumpers glinting in the hot day. A parade of fossil-fuel burners crept toward the exit. Eventually we were on the road again, at last free of the mob. After passing one farmer’s field with a sign that said EVERYONE SHALL GIVE ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF TO GOD (How do you know? I wanted to shout out the window as we passed. How is it that you claim to know?), we saw the entrance for Interstate 76 West, curled down the ramp, and pointed the nose of the car toward the startling abundance of the American heartland.
It had been an odd morning—the dirt in my glass at breakfast, the immaculate shelves of sweets—and though I tried once or twice to start a conversation, I soon learned that Rinpoche was not in a talkative mood. To fill the empty air I turned on the radio and found a talk show where the host was waxing eloquent about the need for torturing people. I looked across at Rinpoche to gauge his response, but, though his eyes were open, he did not seem to be listening.
West of Hershey, the state of Pennsylvania turned more severe: rough rock faces, a slag pile, steep hillsides, deep valleys, unpeopled it seemed, and not as pretty as what we had passed through earlier in the day. At one point, having returned from his daydreaming, Rinpoche wrestled with the plastic Kisses bag, and when he finally managed to tear it open, the candies sprayed out onto his lap and the floor. He laughed with his face turned up, then tidied up the silvery mess. He saved one kiss and contemplated it for quite a good while, turning it this way and that, tapping the
ribbon of tissue from side to side, finally tugging on it, peeling away the foil, and then spending another good while tracing a fingertip along the smooth sides of the hard little brown dollop. At last, as if he’d prayed sufficiently over this miniature feast, he popped it into his mouth. I could see him rolling it comically from one side to the other, the eyebrows up, eyes wide, lips and cheeks working. Another minute or so of rolling and sucking and making humming noises, and he swallowed it with a loud gulp, choked and coughed for a moment, laughed at himself, and then reached across and slapped me so hard on the top of my right thigh that the car sped up.
“Kees! Kees!” he sang, and when I glanced over at him, my sister’s holy man was giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
THIRTEEN
Our driving schedule was dictated, in large measure, by our need for food. Or my need for food, I should say, since Rinpoche ate very little. He even managed the impressive feat of keeping the bag of Kisses open on his lap for more than an hour without ever reaching in for a second helping. It was now midafternoon and, despite three big chunks of dark chocolate, I was in need of that international tradition known as lunch. The prospect both excited and worried me. According to the map, the closest city of any size was Altoona, not exactly famous as a culinary capital, but even that was too far off the interstate to warrant a side trip. We wouldn’t starve, I knew that. Every so often we saw billboards advertising food options at the upcoming exit, but these options were a murderous fare of salt, fat, sugar, and chemicals. It is true that I am particular about food. It is my profession, after all, and in my years at Stanley and Byrnes I’ve been lucky enough to have been exposed to some of the world’s greatest chefs and a small library of fascinating books on growing, preparing, and consuming food. I guess it’s as natural for me to be particular about what I eat as it is for a clothing store salesperson to be picky about neckties or dresses, or a mechanic to be fussy about the make of car he drives. Another part of my pickiness comes from the fact that I grew up on boiled potatoes and beef, sauerkraut and overcooked pork, in an environment where, if your mom put an ounce of lemon rind into the apple pie, she risked being shunned for the next decade of Volunteer Fire Department Auxiliary lunches. On our one visit to a Chinese restaurant in Bismarck, my parents ordered . . . hamburgers. And so, leaving North Dakota meant, for me, opening a door onto a seemingly limitless world of culinary experience.
To balance my love of eating, I exercise a few times a week, walking a three-mile loop with Jeannie on Sunday mornings, killing half hours on the elliptical trainer at the health club a few blocks from where I work. On the road, though, there wasn’t much opportunity for exercise. Nor was there the distraction of professional and domestic chores to keep the mind away from the table. You opened the car window for a second and hunger poured in, or, if not hunger, then at least the notion of eating.
But I worried about the options there, south of Altoona and north of nowhere. Cheap, fried-to-death burgers and carbonated sugar water, a slice of wilted lettuce in the name of fiber. No, no. Not for me. And not the American cuisine I wanted for the Rinpoche, either.
At the toll booth I asked about good restaurant options thereabouts—no chains or fast food, please. The woman squinted at me as if I were a communist, then, with some reluctance, directed us to a nearby steakhouse. But I was suspicious from the first. I sensed that the place belonged to a friend of hers, or her husband’s cousin, that there might be kickbacks involved. We found the steakhouse without trouble and went in. The menu posted on the bulletin board in the foyer was as unimaginative as a bad watercolor in a dentist’s waiting room. I ushered Rinpoche out before the hostess made her approach. He was, understandably enough, perplexed. “Can’t do it,” I said to him in the parking lot. “I’ll explain later. We’ll just shoot down into the nearest town and see if we can’t scare up something a little more interesting.”
According to my map, the nearest town was Bedford, Pennsylvania. We followed a two-lane highway south and soon found it. On the left as we entered the town there stood a large Armed Forces Recruiting Center. On the right, in the windows of what looked to be a turn-of-the-century office building, JESUS IS LORD was spelled out in large capital letters, with a five-foot-tall poster of a bearded white man from a place where, to the best of my understanding, the men had been, in his day, bearded and brown. Now, I saw these things—the recruiting center and the window-sized letters—almost at the same time, but I do not mean to imply that anyone in Bedford had wanted me to do so, had tried to link Jesus and the military. But there was a linkage all the same, in the America through which I was driving my new friend. It made me uneasy. As I said, I consider myself a Christian, which means I hold Jesus up as a sort of model for how to behave in the world. My father and two uncles were decorated Korean War veterans, and a cousin lost a leg in Vietnam—so I have a pretty good appreciation of and respect for military people and their families. But something was going on in my America in those years, some wave of bad thinking that even a middle-of-the-road type like me could not be at peace with. My colleagues at Stanley and Byrnes were guilty of ignoring religion, maybe, or dismissing it. But there was another segment of Americans that used it—via a process I did not fully understand—as a springboard to a kind of aggressive ethnocentrism, as if there was obviously a God, and the God was obviously Jesus and only Jesus, and he obviously loved the United States of America more than any other nation in his millions of universes, and therefore any military action we took must have Jesus’ blessing. I could not swallow this, and had become sensitized to it, and so, driving into Bedford, it was on my mind.
We pulled to the curb in front of a tourist information office. Inside, there was a poster advertising a talk by a man whose life had been altered forever when he discovered levitation, so obviously Bedford had more levels to it than I’d at first supposed. My hopes for a decent meal lifted. The couple who presided over the tourist office were as friendly as could be. The woman came out from behind the counter and listened to my short rant about chains and healthy food, smiled at Rinpoche, who was standing peacefully off to one side like an embarrassed spouse, and directed us to a place called the Green Harvest, only a couple of blocks away.
It was hot. I was ravenous by that late hour, tired from the road, big questions about war and love spinning through my thoughts.
The Green Harvest was a find. Wonderfully original oil paintings on the walls, an airy, sunny atmosphere, a screen curtain keeping out the bugs and letting in whatever cool air was to be found in that part of Pennsylvania on that afternoon. Behind the counter, a young woman presided, and it turned out that this was her first day on the job; she was backed up by a slightly older woman who seemed to own the place. Iced coffee? Yes! Hummus plate? Yes again! Hummus plate with olive tapenade, some kind of cream-cheesy pineapple spread, an excellent fresh salad, even whole wheat pita bread! A magnificent surprise! A find! Rinpoche and I sat at a thickly shellacked table, the young woman served us identical meals, and all was well.
All was well, that is, until, from beneath the mysterious folds of his garment (he had two maroon robes, I later learned; he’d wash one in the sink or tub every other day and hang it up in his room to dry) Rinpoche drew a piece of white paper. We were finished with the hummus by this point, and savoring the last sips of the excellent strong coffee, and he pulled out the sheet of typing paper, folded to one-fourth its size, and handed it across to me without comment.
“What’s this?”
He shrugged, smiled shyly. I thought it might be a poem he’d scratched out the night before, thanking me for my generosity in agreeing to take him west, or for helping him in his struggles to master English. Or perhaps it was some calligraphy for me to frame and put up on my wall when I got home. As I unfolded it, another possibility came to mind: it might be some Vedantic or Kabbalistic prayer he’d ask me to memorize. Let the proselytizing begin.
But no, worse than that, it was a letter from my sister, Cecelia, typed carefully
on her old electric Olivetti. I have saved it and shall quote it here in full:
Dear Beloved Brother,
You are the kindest soul to do what you are doing, and to put up with a sister like me. I hope the trip isn’t going too bad, and that you haven’t been cursing me. (Remember, I’m a psychic, I’ll know!)
I don’t know if Rinpoche has mentioned this to you yet or not, gosh I hope so, but he has several speaking engagements that we’ve set up on the route of your trip. He gets hundreds of requests for these things. He gets paid for some of them. Alot!!! [sic] And others he does for free.
Well, the first one is in Youngstown, Ohio, a free one set up by some nice people who are trying to change the atmosphere of that town. And then the second is at Notre Dame University, set up by a Catholic priest who is running a conference on crossing religious borders or something like that. Then there is one event in Madison, and that’s it—unless I get some other offers while you are on the road.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 8