I hope this isn’t only another big imposition from your sister who loves you! His schedule is below. A big big kiss and a big hug from me to you, brother, and also to the great spirit in your car.
Love,
Seese
P.S. It was actually the Youngstown reading that gave me the idea to ask you to take Rinpoche. Otherwise, how could he have done it!
I read the letter four times. I read the schedule printed below it five times, and I checked the date and time of Rinpoche’s first talk against that day’s date on my watch and cell phone. Six times. And then looked up at my traveling pal, who was smiling at me and nodding his head in small beats.
“Rinpoche,” I said, and my voice was calm. Almost calm. “The first one of your talks is in Youngstown, Ohio. Tonight. Six o’clock tonight. Youngstown, Ohio, is a long way from here, and it’s after four. We’ll barely make it if we go nonstop.”
“Nonstop,” he said, smiling, nodding.
“You couldn’t have told me about this earlier?”
“Forgot,” he said, and for the first time I really thought he was lying. Not evading, not skirting, not giving a sketchy account, not engaging in some Zen trickery. Lying.
I had an image of the chocolate churners, big steel arms raking back and forth through a pool of cocoa soup, back and forth, churning, cooking, in my stomach, except that the hummus and the olive tapenade and the delicious iced coffee and the salad with ranch on the side were also in the mix.
“You have a ways to go to get the hang of American politeness,” I said, and I said it calmly. There was an edge, but it was a calm edge.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I mean, you could have at least let me know.”
“Thank you for helping me with American politeness. I appreciate. We should go now. We’re late.”
I just looked at him. The waitress whose first day it was came to the table and asked if everything was all right, and Rinpoche put his hand on her arm in a gesture of quintessential politeness and told her he had found the food to be better than a kiss. He had a nice one in his pocket, could he give it to her?
He meant a Hershey’s Kiss, of course, but the young woman had no way of knowing that. She could not keep herself from a slight recoil, a glance over her shoulder at the boss. Was this what she’d signed on for, part of the summer job? Old bald guys in red dresses coming on to her?
She disengaged herself with some graciousness. I made it up to her by leaving a 30-percent tip.
On the highway again I brought the car up to eighty and set the cruise control. Maybe the state police would stop us, and keep us there, stewing, by the side of the road for an hour, so we’d be late for the talk. Write out a ticket for two hundred dollars, which I would send to my sister with a polite note festooned with exclamation points.
Dear Seese,
My wonderful sister, I hope it isn’t any inconvenience for you to pay this ticket that we got speeding to Youngstown to make Rinpoche’s talk on time! It actually came to me to send it to you as we were sitting by the side of the interstate in the heat with the trooper leaning in the window! This should be the last ticket we get, but if there are others, I’ll send them, too. Hope you don’t mind!!!
Love,
your brother, Otto
FOURTEEN
By the time we had crossed into Ohio and were within twenty miles or so of Youngstown, it was clear that, even though we had been going well over the speed limit for ninety minutes, we were going to be more than acceptably late for Rinpoche’s speaking engagement. This bothered me about fifty times more than it apparently bothered him.
I am the kind of person who believes that punctuality is one of the columns on which a peaceful world is set. What happens to a person like me when he’s running late—or when someone else is running late—is that anxiety builds up like water in a clogged sink. Six inches from the lip of the sink. Four inches! An inch! By the time we turned off the interstate south of Youngstown and began making our way north on State Route 7, the water was overflowing. “It’s ten minutes past six,” I said, as we crawled along that cluttered road in a frustrating stop-and-go. And I could hear and feel that my words were being squeezed up through a tight stomach, through a tight mouth, through half a lifetime of being kept waiting by my beloved and not very punctual wife. “According to this map, we have something like eleven miles to go on this road, and it’s all traffic lights. No one is answering the phone at the place where you’re supposed to speak. We’ll never make it.”
Rinpoche shrugged. By that point I was building up a small dossier of evidence to support my theory that, Rinpoche or not, spiritual master or not, foreigner or not, he was quite an inconsiderate man. I was even beginning to wonder, again, if he was using Cecelia simply to get the land and the house from her, if he was more clever than he seemed, sly, duplicitous, one of these guys who came to America, surveyed the scene, grasped instinctively the depth of our spiritual desperation and naïveté, shaved his head and bought a couple of robes, and started calling himself a guru. I had a whole string of such thoughts going.
“It doesn’t bother you to keep your fans waiting?”
He didn’t answer, engaged, apparently, in studying the urban landscape of Youngstown, Ohio.
And what a landscape! I’ve seen a good piece of America, and traveled, at various points in my life, to Europe, Asia, and Brazil. Twice a month during the school year I volunteer at a literacy center in a very poor part of the Bronx. So it’s not like I’m a stranger to urban decay, or urban blight, or the slums, or whatever other word we like to paste over the raw wound of poverty. But even given all that, the part of Youngstown we saw surprised me. Once we crossed the city line we drove through block after block of boarded-up houses and businesses. Rusted signs, iron grates over the doors of dead nightclubs and bombed-out bars; side streets where it seemed that all the homes on a block—and fairly nice-looking homes they had been at one time—showed hollowed-out upstairs windows. Bottles and litter strewn about, abandoned bicycle frames, old wet shoes, a knapsack in the gutter. Rinpoche could not stop looking at it, and neither could I.
According to our directions, his talk was to be in a downtown building, right on the main drag. We found it without trouble, but things were hardly better there. You could see that it had been a healthy downtown at one time, with elegant stone buildings and a strip of greenery, mid-street. But now there were clusters of dead and boarded-up businesses, as if some kind of awful epidemic had raced through this part of Ohio—the symptoms being charred siding, torn roofs, gaping windows, sagging and untended porches—and it had reached even the brick and stone downtown and taken a toll there as well.
When, after passing through all this sorrow, we arrived at the address on Cecelia’s letter, there was a beautiful woman about my age standing at the curb in front of an empty parking space, in a posture of apprehensiveness. She was tall and thin, with large, perfectly wonderful eyes, an ankle-length dress, and brown braids that reached almost to her waist. We stepped out of the car and she immediately went up to Rinpoche and bowed, so that the two braids, color of nutmeg and shining as if they’d been polished, fell down on either side of her ears. She straightened up and smiled a smile that reminded me of my sister, and then she took Rinpoche’s hand in both of hers and said how worried she’d been that something terrible had happened. Saying this, she looked at me and tried to hold the smile in place, but I could see that she blamed me for the fact that her teacher was twenty-one minutes late. I said nothing.
She ushered us inside—not an auditorium as I’d expected but a space that must have been, at one time, in a finer day, a hardware or small grocery store, or a place that sold undergarments to the wives of the iron factory executives before everything went, well, to China. It was empty now, this space, except for eight or ten rows of gray folding chairs set up on a cracked linoleum floor. It was not an overflow crowd: about half the chairs stood empty. There was a somewhat grander-looking chair up f
ront, raised slightly above the floor on a two-foot-high homemade stage—someone had put a fair amount of work into this production. Next to the chair stood a table, and on the table stood a mug and a small teapot. The assembled audience, eighteen or twenty in all, was an all-American mix of white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. Two elderly couples sat in the front row. Behind them, a smattering of what might have been college students, or recent graduates. Then a pair of Yuppies, to use a word I dislike. And then, strangely, two rows of people with the unmistakable mark of poverty on them—cheap clothing, no smiles, an aspect to their posture and expressions that spoke of a hardness, a kind of pain, a weight they lugged through the days. Everyone knows this mark. We can pretend not to for the sake of some false politeness, but everyone knows what it looks like to be poor. And anyone with half a brain can tell the truly poor from the faux poor, the artists in their torn jeans, the college kids in dirty T-shirts. These were the actual poor.
The braided woman who had met us at the curb stood at the front and made sure Rinpoche was comfortably seated in his chair, and then she gave a brief introduction that she’d obviously memorized. “We’re honored tonight to have with us the great spiritual master of our time.” Standing just inside the door, I found that I was surprised. The woman’s speech sounded like hyperbole to me—though, of course, hyperbole was part and parcel of the introductions of dozens of authors I’d edited. I knew the Rinpoche better than she did, after all, and while he was growing on me a bit, and while he was a perfectly nice fellow if you overlooked his impoliteness as a symptom of cultural misunderstanding, I thought that “the great spiritual master of our time” somehow didn’t quite fit with a guy who, not so long ago, had nearly choked to death in ecstasy over a Hershey’s Kiss; who didn’t get to his appointments on time and didn’t seem to care; who lied to a stranger while he was being given a ride halfway across the country; and who, perhaps, was conning a naive and good-hearted woman, herself one of the actual poor, out of her rightful inheritance.
When the braided beauty finished, there was polite applause and some fidgeting in the rows furthest from the impromptu stage. I had not sat down, was not intending to stay for the talk. Even when I saw how unenticing the options were for an hour of strolling in downtown Youngstown near dusk, I didn’t feel like staying. I don’t know why. When Rinpoche bowed and said he would begin with a ten-minute meditation session, I slipped out the door as unobtrusively as I could manage, went and sat in the car, and studied the map for the best route west. For all I knew they would be holding hands and chanting in there, or sitting cross-legged on the cracked linoleum and envisioning beams of energy winding up around their spinal columns like glorious serpents. Not my style.
There in the car, with the doors locked, I passed an odd hour and a half. Once I finished looking at the map—which took all of about four minutes—there was not much besides the radio to occupy my thoughts, and I’d had enough radio listening for that day. I did not have a book or newspaper to read and was, I admit, afraid of taking a walk. It was a fear I encountered every week on my trip to the Bronx, even though the tutoring sessions were early on Saturday morning and even though, in the course of six years, nothing untoward, nothing of any significance, at least, had ever happened to me there. Still, I was a well-off white man in a poor black neighborhood, my social standing stamped on my car, clothes, face, and posture as clearly as any mark of poverty, and I felt disliked, guilty, and vulnerable. Something like that feeling had attached itself to me almost as soon as we crossed the Youngstown line on Route 7. I don’t know if anyone else has ever felt this; I assume so. It is not something we talk about at work, where, for the most part, the editors and marketing executives—black, white, Asian, Hispanic, and otherwise—live in Manhattan, or in the commuter-train suburbs to the north, and the shipping and receiving people, the cleaning people, the assistants, and security staff, for the most part, live in certain parts of Queens, or the Bronx, or Harlem, where the life of the street is a very different life. I realize I am on treacherous ground here. I realize I am generalizing and tiptoeing along the edge of the territory into which we never venture very far in the American national conversation: The fact that there are whole neighborhoods into which cabdrivers refuse to take a fare; that there are people among us who live in circumstances we are ashamed to talk about, children who live that way; the fact that there are huge quadrants of our cities where people like me—and not just white people like me—simply do not go, places we do not see, do not want to think about as we are sipping our designer martinis in swanky downtown bistros where dinner for two costs what these other Americans earn in a week. We excuse it by citing the laws of capital, or by telling ourselves we work harder, or that it is social inequality that serves as the motivation for our national wealth. All good logic, maybe. Still, I’ve always been ill at ease with the vast distance between my life and the lives of other Americans.
I sat there in the car and felt as though I were coated in a kind of thin layer of slime I couldn’t name. How hard would it have been to stand quietly in the back of the room and daydream, I asked myself. How awful would it have been to hold some stranger’s hand for a few minutes and chant? What, exactly, is it that you do not want to hear? And this after giving Rinpoche lectures on American politeness.
Still, I sat there. A ragged and intermittent parade of people went past, all of them men, most of them walking slowly, shuffling almost, almost prowling, looking around as if expecting some opportunity to present itself. Daylight slipped away, and then these solitary specters passed from the darkness of the abandoned part of the block, through the light pouring out of the storefront, and back into darkness again. A few of them peered into the storefront. One even stood there for a while and watched, his face close to the glass. No one went in.
When I thought most of the talk must be over, and when the voice haranguing me for my lack of courage and decency grew persistent, I unlocked the door of the car and quietly made my way back into the lecture hall. Rinpoche had finished the formal part of his presentation and was answering questions.
An elderly black man in the first row raised his hand and said, “A little earlier on you said something I never read in any of your books. You said, if I heard right, that you can only change about half what happens to you anyway. Or something like that. Could you expand on that for a minute, Rinpoche?”
Rinpoche took a sip of his tea and nodded half a dozen times, but all the while he was looking directly at the man with a sort of intimacy—if that is the correct word—that startled me. I had not seen that kind of a look from him in our time together. And when he started to speak I realized it was in a voice I had not heard from him either. His command of the language was stronger, but it was something more than that, a certain force, a charisma I had missed. To the questioner he said, “Yes, yes. It is this way: I say half but I don’t mean half, exactly. But some, let us say some, okay, yes? Some of what you learn in this life you will learn anyway, if you do nothing, if you are not ‘spiritual’, if you don’t meditate, if you don’t care about these things. Even if you murder a person you will learn some of what you have to learn. You will suffer from the guilt of doing that, even if you pretend to yourself that you are not guilty. In the deep of you, you will suffer. If you eat too much you will suffer, and you will learn. If you put into your body drugs, you will suffer and you will learn. If you use your sex in a way that harms someone, you will suffer and you will learn.
“But also the good, you see, also the pleasant. You will love the person you are married to, or your lover, and you will learn. You will love your children, your work, your pleasures in this life, your friends, your hobbies, your sports, your sewing, or your gardening. Each of these things acts as teacher for you. You see this? Each of these things is kind of guru, too, you see? Illness, failure, sorrow, success. Yes. It is not necessary to have any particular spiritual path in this life in order to learn from these things. It is not essential to have guru, to eat this wa
y or not eat this way, to talk this way or any way. Some part of this education of the spirit in you will happen to you in this life. That is so for every soul.”
Rinpoche paused for a breath, then went on, “But if you care about your mind, you see, if you don’t stir up the energies of your mind by hurting some person or some animal, by using your body in a way that is not healthy way, if you meditate, or say prayers, if you have some quiet in your life instead of keeping all the time busy with noise and errands, if you cultivate good thoughts and feelings where you can instead of bad thoughts and feelings, if you do this then you will . . . what is the word?” Rinpoche glanced back at me as if I might offer it. “Compound. Is that right? Yes? You will compound your learning. Or increase, maybe increase is the word in your language. Do you see? It does not mean you are better person than the one who does not do these things. Do not think that. Thinking that will not help you. It means you will squeeze all the juice from this life that there is to squeeze. You will not waste your time here, that you have been given, that is so precious we do not realize until the moment we die. You will not waste this precious time, do you see? This is the best kind of being an environmentalist person. This is not misusing the gifts of this world. Do you see?”
There was reverential nodding all around the small plain room. Everyone saw, apparently. I felt a twist in my intestines that reminded me of the terrible and mysterious stomachaches I’d suffered from as a boy, squirming on the couch in the old farmhouse while my mother heated dishtowels and placed them on my belly. Rinpoche sat back after his long, impassioned answer and calmly sipped his tea. From the assembled worshippers there was a kind of glow emanating out toward him. And from the back of the room, utterly without knowing I would do so, I said, rather more loudly than I intended, and perhaps less kindly: “And what purpose does all the learning serve?”
Breakfast With Buddha Page 9