Breakfast With Buddha

by Roland Merullo

  Fine, let them spend their time that way, it doesn’t matter to me except as a barometer of the country I love and worry over. Lying there, I remembered my father and mother taking us to a sun festival at one of the many Native American reservations in North Dakota—the Associated Tribes, I think it was, in New Town. After we’d watched the dancing and singing and were on the way home in our car, my dad remarked upon how far we’d advanced since the days when the land was ruled by Indian tribes. There were farms now, he said, where once there’d been only buffalo. Farms with telephones and TVs, tractors, airplanes, medicines . . . whereas in those old days there had been nothing. You worked from morning till night, you hunted and fished and sewed and cooked, sang and danced a few times a year, made war, made peace. “Look at us now,” he said, sweeping his hand out near the windshield at a stretch of heartland. “Look at all this.”

  “Look at us now,” I said to the TV. But I spent two hours of my life watching it.

  When two hours and five minutes had passed, Rinpoche knocked on the door. I had half a mind to ask him to watch the next show with me, but it was checkout time, and we had miles to cover that day. So I got up and turned off the set, feeling strangely depleted of energy, of urge, of hope. I looked around the room to make sure there was nothing I had left behind—T-shirt, pair of socks, reading glasses . . . desire to show Rinpoche as much as I could of my beloved America.

  NINETEEN

  I was, naturally enough, already thinking about lunch. As an antidote to the TV poison, I wanted an especially good meal. Something different. We were checking out of the Inn of Chagrin Falls, and the kind woman there was printing out our receipts and asking if we’d had a good night, and I had the foresight to ask her if I could see the Cleveland Yellow Pages. I knew we were only about an hour from that city, and I suspected the culinary options there would be richer than whatever awaited us on the flat roads to the west. I was rewarded for the trials of the morning by page after page of restaurant listings—Chinese, Italian, Greek, Japanese, seafood, meat-and-potato. Hungarian was the most exotic of the bunch, so I copied down the number of a Hungarian place called Little Budapest, thanked the hostess, then waited until we’d put our things in the car and had our seatbelts on before making the call.

  The phone was answered by a woman who spoke very softly and with a thick accent. I was sitting behind the inn, next to the air conditioner that had been bothering me the night before, with Rinpoche sitting calmly nearby, and a small device pressed up to my ear, and I was shouting into the device, trying to get directions to Little Budapest. The poor soul on the other end of the line must have thought I’d called purposely to torment her. “Four twenty-two, west,” she said, though it sounded more like “Firr-dvindy-do, yss.”

  “West?” I yelled.

  “Firr dvindy do, vss.”

  I should mention, at this point, that I am somewhat directionally challenged. Jeannie and the kids will attest to this with abundant examples of Dad walking into a building to use the men’s room and then not being able to find his way out again, of Dad returning to his B&B fairly late at night, alone, forgetting which of the second-floor doors leads to his room, and walking into the bedroom of the host family’s fifteen-year-old daughter (who is, to Dad’s enduring gratefulness, fully clothed).

  So, to be on the safe side, I took notes as I grilled the Hungarian woman. Rinpoche was sitting patiently beside me, his postmeditative calm acting as a reverse image of my posttelevision agitation. “College Road exit off 422,” I thought the woman said. I asked her to repeat it and she did, and I thought she said more or less the same thing. Then there was something about a road being closed, then another left, then something about what was possibly Columbia Road, a right there I was almost certain, and then Center Reach Road, though when I asked her to spell that, she said what sounded to me like “S-E-M,” and so on. I would see the restaurant up there a quarter mile on the right or the left. I waited for her to add the classic phrase, “You can’t miss it.” But she did not.

  So we started off. I made my way carefully through the center of Chagrin Falls, tracing carefully by memory streets that looked rather different during the day than they had at night. Somehow I made a small mistake and ended up in a neighborhood of neat modest homes, where a man was mowing his lawn when he should have been inside watching to see who had scored a knockout in the third round, wife or sitter. I thought of stopping to ask him for assistance, but I did not want to look inept in front of Rinpoche—who, after all, was entrusting me with the task of getting him safely to North Dakota. I was anxious to be on the highway in any case, and I confess to sharing, with a hundred million other red-blooded American men, an aversion to asking directions. I was hungry, too. So I stumbled on, soon found 480, or at least a recognizable road that led to 480, and we put Chagrin Falls behind us.

  There is little to recommend the route that leads from Chagrin Falls into Cleveland along 480 and 422. Trees, a smattering of warehouses and low-lying office buildings, a few patches of bog. But then, truth be told, 480 and 422 do not actually lead into Cleveland, at least not if you follow them as we followed them. I became aware of this fact when, as we were speeding along, I happened to look to the right, and there I saw the skyline of Cleveland shining in the sunlight, probably fifteen miles away. We were, unfortunately, not going in that direction. I began to suspect that there had been an important lapse in communication between me and the Hungarian woman. So I picked up the cell phone, dialed again, and this time a man answered. Gruff in the classic Eastern European fashion. No-nonsense. He sounded as if he had a complicated goulash to prepare, or hungry customers to seat, and should not be expected to waste time with people who couldn’t follow simple directions. His accent was slightly less difficult to parse.

  “You are gong all right,” he said. “Jess keep gong.”

  “But I’m heading away from Cleveland, aren’t I?”

  “All right, all right, I said! Listen! Make sure you go leff after sementy-wan, that’s all. The highway goes two ways, you go leff. Then Clock Road. Then Columbia—no you can’t go that way, that road closed—then right, under-stan? Then leff and right on Center Reach and you’ll find us there. You’re gong fine.”

  And he abruptly hung up.

  We went bravely on, the top of Cleveland’s silvery skyline fading away beyond the curve of the earth. I began to entertain other options. There might be something decent off the interstate, or near the lake, some little gem of an All-American Ohio diner with fried chicken, baked beans, and coleslaw, a nice piece of homemade rhubarb pie for dessert, the best coffee within a hundred miles. Might be. No doubt there was, but the difficulty would lie in actually finding such a place. Friends at work had told me to take along a book we published, Unknown and Wonderful Eateries, which listed hundreds of roadside eateries from coast to coast, but I had declined. If they were in the book, they weren’t unknown, were they, I said. I wanted to make my own discoveries.

  I then saw a sign for Claque Road, next exit. And I decided that Claque was close enough to College and to Clock that it was worth taking one shot. Claque road led us—past a Road Closed detour—to Columbia Road. “We’re all right,” I said to Rinpoche, who was elsewhere. But no sooner were those words uttered than Columbia Road shrank to a winding two-lane street through a district that was painfully residential. Not a 7-Eleven, not a gas station in sight, not a Hungarian restaurant anywhere. House after house, yard after yard, lawns and garages and bicycles in the drive, and then, at last, like a mirage, an intersection with commercial buildings on all four corners. A large restaurant there, to the right. Hungarian-looking. But no, as we drew closer I could see a real estate sign in the window. Restaurant for sale, all equipment included. Instead of cooking, they had spent their time giving directions, and the enterprise had failed, and word had gotten around.

  How to navigate the intersection. Right? Leff? Straight? I pulled into a gas station across the way and went into the office. Mom was behind
the desk, Pop sitting in a chair reading the comic strip page of the Plain Dealer.

  Mom. Hungarian restaurant? In this neighborhood?

  Pop. (Shakes his head without looking up.)

  Visitor. Is there a Center Reach Road anywhere near here?

  Mom. Center Ridge Road, but that’s all residential down there. No restaurants there.

  Visitor. Okay, thanks. You’ve lived here all your life, right, and no Hungarian restaurants anywhere?

  Pop, looking up from the Plain Dealer. Try taking a right on Center Ridge and going down there a ways. There are a few restaurants there. Friendly’s and so on.

  Mom. (Gives Pop a squint. He has contradicted her in front of a perfect stranger. Soon they will be on the couch, the visitor between, cameras on, the audience screaming, and the host firing questions like poison darts. Everything was fine in our marriage until my husband heard from this man about some Hungarian restaurant and then he had to go and try it, and then the waitress there . . . and so on.)

  Without much confidence, I ferried Rinpoche down Columbia to Center Ridge, all hope evaporating as we passed block after block of suburban quietude. This is the middle of the middle of America, I wanted to say to him, but it did not seem like the right moment. In the middle of the middle of America stood two churches. In front of the first, a sign read, IF YOU ARE TOO BUSY TO PRAY YOU ARE TOO BUSY. And in front of the second, WHEN ANGER ENTERS, WISDOM DEPARTS.

  “How about when hunger enters?” I said aloud, and Rinpoche turned and gave me a quizzical look. We took a right on Center Ridge—there was, indeed, a Friendly’s there, to the leff. Unfortunately, I had my mind wrapped around goulash, not clam strips and fries (much as I like Friendly’s ice cream sodas). I pulled into the parking lot of an investment firm not far from Friendly’s and dialed the restaurant’s number one final time. Again the gruff chef. I told him where I was. He said, “Korter mile on leff. You can’t miss.”

  And I said, “Okay, I hope I don’t have to call you again,” and we both laughed.

  And there, tucked into a strip mall that bore the grand name of King James Plaza, was Little Budapest.

  Unpromising.

  Immediately inside the door we came upon a bulletin board, half a dozen pages posted there with snapshots and descriptions of houses for sale and some kind of a deal where you got two hundred dollars of food at Little Budapest if you helped in the selling of one of them. CNN giving the news of the day to an empty bar—soldiers crouching as they ran past the black skeletons of bombed cars. Relief maps of Hungary on the wall. The skin of a wild boar. And a dozen black plastic tables with windows looking out on Semter Reach Road.

  Not promising.

  Rinpoche and I took a window table and were handed menus by a blond waitress whose voice seemed familiar. We opened the menus to a great variety of offerings from the banks of the Danube, everything from Transylvanian Cabbage to Veal Paprikash to Breaded Goose Liver. This made me happy. Just seeing these things written on a page made me happy.

  When the waitress returned, Rinpoche asked for some noodles and a salad. I had already eaten the free appetizer of sliced cucumbers in vinegar with a garnish of sour cream and paprika and it had not made a dent in my hunger. So I ordered and ate chicken crepes in a cream and chicken broth sauce, with diced chicken and diced red and green peppers in the filling, the crepe itself light and perfectly made. Delicious Hungarian coffee with chocolate in it and whipped cream on top. Then a huge portion of lamb stew and mashed potatoes. And then, to finish, an apricot- and walnut-stuffed palascinta, which turned out to be a thin pancake stuffed with apricot-walnut cream.

  I was at peace, the sour film of daytime TV washed from the lenses of my inner eye, the belly full, the road ahead promising only good things.

  Rinpoche was smiling at me and patting his midsection in a way that seemed gently sarcastic.

  “I know, I know. But the breakfast at the inn just wasn’t enough for me, or not interesting enough. And it’s almost one o’clock.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “The judgmental ah.”

  He laughed.

  “You have your meditation pleasure. I have my food pleasure.”

  He laughed again.

  “Your meditation pleasure lasted two hours. My food pleasure was what, twenty minutes? See how much more ascetic I am?”

  “Ascetic?”

  “Giving things up. Living the lean life.”

  “Rinpoche could never give up his meditation.”

  “Ah,” I said, and he laughed again.

  “Rinpoche went three years without speaking. Two times.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his big head and reached across with a finger to scoop up the last dollop of the apricot cream. “Retreat.”

  “Is that a tradition?”

  He nodded. “Two years in prison eating kasha and bad bread and tea.”

  “What did they arrest you for?”

  “For being the son of my father. My father was a great, great Rinpoche, famous everywhere for as far as you could travel on a horse. A great teacher, and so . . . to jail.”

  “Threatening to the powers that be,” I said.

  “But why?” He seemed sorrowful.

  “Do you miss your dad?”

  “Father, mother. Very sad. My mother died when I was in the prison.”

  “It’s hard when you don’t have a chance to say goodbye,” I said. “My parents died in a car crash. In February. No good-byes there either.”

  “Yes, very hard,” he said. “When we go outside I show you something.”

  I paid and thanked the waitress, stepped into the kitchen to get directions back to the highway from a heavy, happy man, and then found Rinpoche waiting on the sidewalk. He had been gardening again and held in one hand the kind of wide-bladed, lime-green grass that grows at the untended edges of sidewalks and lawns. He shook the dirt free, pulled out a half dozen of the longer strands, smoothed them, then twisted them into a flimsy green braid.

  “Time,” he said, holding up the braid to me. He indicated one end, then the other, “Maybe one thousand year.” He touched the individual stalks of grass tenderly. “Souls. Spirits. You see? You, your father, your mother, sister, wife, children, you see? Your spirit is together with their spirits like this, tight against each other. That is why you were born into this wife together.” He pulled one strand out and tossed it up into the sunlight. “Maybe one of these people, or two, not so close after this wife. But people you really love, spirits that are close to your spirit, you see? They tie around tight to you, wife after wife.”

  “Life,” I corrected him. “L.”

  He paid no attention. “You see them, you live with them, you meet them now as son or daughter, next as mother or father, next as friend, maybe sometime as enemy, you see? You go through time with them.”

  “A nice idea,” I said. “Comforting.”

  And in response I received a hard look and felt the power in his eyes, in his being. It made me think of the power in the hands of a gentle-seeming karate master, and in fact, at that moment, Rinpoche did poke me fairly roughly in the center of the chest with one finger. He glared at me fiercely for a three-count, then smiled. But this time the smile was only a thin coating of velvet over stone. “You have the good life,” he said harshly, emphasizing the l. “Easy life this time, Otto. Do not waste, okay?”

  TWENTY

  Well, I may not be open-minded about the illogical and inexplicable, as my sister claims, but I have long had a great curiosity about what we call “coincidence.” You are thinking about a person you have not seen in years, and then, on that very day, the person calls; you dream of something, and that something happens the next afternoon. You are sitting in a bar in Manhattan with your young live-in girlfriend, broke and pretending not to be, without prospects, without patrons, your dream of life in the big city you love starting to fade, and just at that moment a man twice your age sits down nearby and orders a vodka martini, and
you start talking to the man, and it turns out that he works as an editor for a well-respected publishing house in Manhattan, and they specialize in books about food, and you start to talk about how, in the city, even on a tight budget, you can eat pretty well, and you tell him you come from North Dakota, and the dining options in even four square blocks of Manhattan make you feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven, and the conversation goes on for an hour and at the end of it the man takes a business card out of his wallet, says he happens to have an editorial assistant job just coming open, and it doesn’t pay much but the work isn’t that rough, and there are some good books coming in, and interesting authors, and if a person is really sincerely enthusiastic about food, it can help, and there might be a future in the publishing business. And so on.

  Mere chance? Or the hand of fate, or karma, sketching dormers and trellises into the architecture of some grand plan? I have always wondered.