On the way out of Cleveland (or, I should say, on the way out of the far western reaches of the suburbs of Cleveland) there were a couple of small moments like that. Minor coincidences, really. I’d noticed that Oberlin, Ohio, was more or less on our route. A coworker’s daughter had gone to school there and liked it, and she sounded, from her mother’s description, a lot like Natasha. In the interest of future considerations, I thought we should make the ten-mile detour.
So, with thunderclouds gathering in great purple knobs above and to the west of us, I took the Oberlin exit. Here’s the first half of the coincidence: I happened, on this short drive from the interstate to Oberlin, to look up and see a street called Russian Road, on our right. And then, when we pulled into town past the green lawns of the college, we happened to park in front of a coffee shop called the Java Zone, and we decided to go in—Rinpoche for green tea, yours truly for iced coffee. It was quiet at that time of year, but you could imagine how, in the other three seasons, the tables would be occupied by students with their laptops and professors with their reading glasses and stacks of essays to grade. From what little we’d seen, the town looked to be a quintessential college town: quadrangles, classroom buildings, and a couple of commercial streets lined with small shops. Natasha would love such a place, I thought.
The woman who served our drinks in Java Zone (Rinpoche was treating) had a thick accent, and soon Rinpoche was rattling on with her in a language I took to be Russian. I sorted out a “dah” and a “nyet,” remembered Russian Road. And then, as they went deeper into their conversation (the young woman seemed much taken with him), I wandered next door, where there was a combination department store and bookstore. In the spirituality section, on the middle shelf, just at eye-height, stood three thin volumes with the words VOLYA RINPOCHE on their spines. One was titled, The Greatest Pleasure, so I bought it, asked for a paper bag, and then, reason not clear to me, slipped it into the trunk of the car so the author would not see.
While I was waiting for Rinpoche to come back out of the Java Zone, I checked the map again and saw that Ohio Route 20 ran parallel to the interstate toward the Indiana border. There weren’t any large towns along it. We wouldn’t lose much time, taking that route, and I might be able to give Rinpoche a better sense of the American Midwest and give myself a respite from the highway madness.
He came out smiling, of course. When he was settling into the car he told me that the woman in the Java Zone had been from Irkutsk, which, in the scale of things, was not really all that far from Skovorodino—maybe two thousand miles—and she spoke what he called “clean Russian,” whereas Russian was actually his second language, as she could tell by his accent.
“What is your first language?”
“Ortyk.”
“Ortyk? Never heard of it.”
“The Ortyk people are my people. Descended from Mongolians, and before that, Tibetans.”
“Buddhists, then?”
“Not so much,” he said. “They were, what do you say? Close off? Close off from main lineage of Buddha’s teaching by big mountains there, and then by politics there, and they made their own lineage of teachers, and the teachers made their own way of thinking, their own practice, and so, now, to say Buddhists . . . not exactly right.”
“And you are part of this lineage?”
“Small part.”
“But you’re famous. You have books out.”
“I will give you one,” he said.
“No, I wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll buy one.”
“There is a bookstore right there,” he said, pointing.
“No. I’ll buy one in South Bend. I’m sure there will be stores there, too. Which one should I read first?”
“For an advanced soul like you,” he said, “I think the best would be the one called The Greatest Pleasure.”
TWENTY-ONE
Ohio 20 proved to be as flat as a Hungarian palascinta but interesting nonetheless. To the northwest, the clouds were angry and swirling, and we saw great spidery fingers of lightning flashing there. But the territory we traveled was untroubled. There were farms by the side of the road, uniform and flat and fertile, a sign at the edge of one field that read, GET U.S. OUT OF THE UNITED NATIONS. The John Birch Society. On the radio, the so-called Christians were going on in stentorian tones about the spiritual decay of America.
I have to admit that I often agree with them. I have moments—watching wife and babysitter punch each other on daytime TV, or reading about two-year-olds left alone by crack-addicted moms, or hearing radio loudmouths fomenting hatred, or seeing thirty thousand dollars spent on our neighbors’ daughters’ sweet-sixteen parties while my sister’s friends in Paterson work for five dollars an hour—when I wonder if we have, in fact, started in on a moral decline that will end with our extinction, the flag in tatters being run down the pole for the final time, the Great American Experiment lying in pieces like a beautiful broken vase, weakened from within and then smashed from without. But when I listen a bit longer to the so-called Christians, it sounds to me as if their cure for what ails us is more and stricter rules, more narrow-mindedness, more hatred, more sectioning off of the society, and it has always seemed to me that, if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.
Even so, as I mentioned, I have a sort of perverse fascination with the whole spectrum of talk-show nuts, and on the drive down Route 20 I made myself—and Rinpoche—listen to a long “Christian” call-in show. The host was ranting about the Sacred Sabbath and all the things you shouldn’t do on the Sacred Sabbath and all the people in this country who are “loathsome to the eye of God” because they don’t observe the Sacred Sabbath. Then the host started in on the righteousness of spanking, or “biblical corporal punishment,” as he called it. A caller wanted to know if it was appropriate to spank his fifteen-year-old daughter, who was straying from the Christian path, and put off by his “witnessing,” and did the host think it would be appropriate to render biblical corporal punishment to her?
The host thought that would be just fine. Spank on, my brother! So what if she’s fifteen? Toss her over your lap and spank on! In the name of Christ our Lord, amen.
Ordinarily, as we drove, especially when I had the radio on, Rinpoche would go into a kind of half-absent zone, studying the passing scenery, occasionally asking what a particular building might be used for, or how he should pronounce a name—Lido, Toledo. But on this drive he seemed to be paying close attention to the prattle about punishment and hell and God. When it ended—in a long flurry of commercials for tapes, CDs, donations to keep the word of God alive—he turned to me with a perplexed expression on his face and said, “Why so angry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anger, anger. Why so much in America, tell me.”
We were passing through Monroeville at that moment, a tiny little burb. In a parking lot to our left there was a police car with blue lights blinking and a policeman standing on the tar, and, opposite him, there was a large man with reddish hair and sideburns and a goofy, drunken smile on his face, as if what awaited him was not handcuffs, the local hoosegow, and a DUI conviction, but an invitation to the officer’s home for dinner with the wife and kids.
“They think the country’s gone to hell,” I said. “They think America isn’t living right. They think God is going to punish us if we don’t straighten out, and that, until God himself arrives on the scene, they are the ones who can do the straightening.”
“Ah.”
TWENTY-TWO
We pulled into South Bend, Indiana, in early evening and not far from the highway came upon our lodging for that night, a place called the Inn at Saint Mary’s. If nothing else, my chauffering of the Rinpoche was giving me a look at places I otherwise would have whizzed right past. Plus it was saving me a bit of cash here and there: the people who’d invited him to talk at Notre Dame had set us both up at the Inn at St. Mary’s with
very nice suites, all paid for, thank you. Accustomed as I had become to the high-finance accounting that goes with suburban life—the bills, the donations, the taxes, the cash outlays for ballet dresses, football cleats, and granite countertops—I found myself wondering how Rinpoche, as we say in the book business, worked his numbers. I knew from Cecelia’s letter that he had not been paid for the Youngstown talk, but would be paid handsomely for this one. Did he demand cold, hard cash for the dispensing of his wisdom? Or did he get paid by check and just walk into a bank and say, “Hi, I’m the famous Volya Rinpoche, would you mind cashing this for me even though I don’t have an account here?” and then fold the dinero into the sleeve of his robe and produce it whenever he wanted to chip in for gas (which he did, against my objections) or buy a postcard (over which he would lean, and with great concentration inscribe a message to my sister)? Did he have a nonprofit foundation? Patrons? An inheritance stashed away in a bank in Ulan Bator, from which he periodically ordered drafts? I wondered what percentage of my interior life was spent thinking about money and what Rinpoche would have to say on the subject, but I did not ask.
By this time he and I had developed a traveling regimen. When we stopped for the day, if we were both having dinner, we’d first go to our separate rooms and give each other an hour of alone time, one of us meditating, the other flipping through TV channels, taking a shower, or lying on the bed and going through a long-ago-memorized routine of stretches designed to ease an aching back. My suite in South Bend was on the first floor, two large rooms, two televisions, a couch, desk, and king-sized bed, very clean, fairly quiet, with a strong shower and tan striped wallpaper marred only by not very original drawings of Notre Dame dormitories and classroom buildings. Probably they got a lot of ND alums at the inn, down from Michigan or over from North Carolina for the big football weekend, and the drawings of Father Mahoney hall, or whatever, summoned memories of the good old years. It occurred to me in one of my many fruitless musings that if the term religion were defined more broadly—and I believed it should be—then the real religion of Notre Dame would be not Catholicism but football. After all, did they get a hundred thousand screaming fans for Mass on a Sacred Sabbath morn? Did the parishioners come early for the service and set up barbecues in the rectory parking lot? Return year after year to relive memories of a favorite sermon? Buy pennants, sweatshirts, and bumper stickers with the name of their church emblazoned on them?
And then, in the midst of this somewhat irreverent reverie, I wondered what my own religion might be. If I defined it that way, that broadly, as the primary focus of my thoughts and passions, what would it be? Family life, perhaps. Our sacred rituals would include eating meals together, going to Anthony’s piano recitals and Natasha’s soccer games, walking Jasper by Sprain Brook, the annual trips to the Green Mountains in winter and Cape Cod in summer; like the so-called Christians on the radio shows, we were engaged in a continual debate about rules and transgression.
Or maybe I belonged to the First Church of Good Eating. Or work. Or sex. Or money. What occupied the very center of the stream of thoughts that ran through my gray matter night and day? What was the deepest pool in which the largest fish cruised and fed? Or should I use the Hindu model, with dozens of gods and goddesses—Jeannie, Natasha, Anthony, my parents, my boss, my tennis partners and friends, my sister, sex, food, swimming, work, bank balance, reading—each presiding over their precinct in the Greater Realm?
Joke about it, fine, a little voice in me chirped. But try answering the question, Otto. What is the main current in the river? If you had your own talk show—God save America from that—what would you rant about? What do you care about most?
Lying on the bed in the nice suite, with the hot Indiana day easing into evening beyond the curtained windows, I gave the matter some serious thought. And what I came up with, to my own surprise, was love. It was the only answer that held up. Love—of Jeannie and the kids, of Jasper, our wonderful mutt, of work, of eating. There was my next career. I would be the national radio voice of the Love Party, somewhere left of the Democrats and right of the Republicans, far out in space.
I’d be the Rush Limbaugh of Love, the Jesse Jackson of Love, the Michael Savage, the Jerry Brown. Callers would dial the 800 number and tell me how much they appreciated the show, how I was the only voice in the country talking any sense, how those awful, no-love types had ruined the America we adored, and how it was our duty to take it back from them. Twenty minutes out of every hour there would be commercials for medications, for investments, for enlistment in the Peace Corps. We are the few, the proud, the volunteers in Zimbabwe.
But can’t you, the voice chirped, answer the question in a serious way? Isn’t mockery the province of the insecure? Isn’t that what you do with Rinpoche and Cecelia, in your heart of hearts, make fun of them because something in their way of thinking threatens you, or at least challenges your assumptions?
Instead of dealing with that question, I started thinking about food. I took a shower, wondering the whole time what we might find for dinner there in the flat cornfields north of Indianapolis.
Rinpoche’s talk wasn’t scheduled until nine p.m., which I thought was an odd hour. The other strange thing was that he’d agreed to go out to dinner with me. I’d expected him to skip dinner entirely and leave me to venture out into the culinary wilderness on my own. But on the drive in from Ohio he’d said he wanted to find a restaurant and have the evening meal with me before his talk. It was the latest in a series of curveballs.
“Do you really eat meat?” I had asked him.
“A little meat, not too much.”
“Do you mind spices?”
“Spices very good. In Skovorodino we never had spices. When I went to India I discover my tongue.”
I laughed and thought: What is called for here is Thai. Not too much meat, spicy as you want it. Probably some more-or-less Buddhist statuettes on the walls. So, at check-in, I’d inquired about the possibility of finding a Thai restaurant in the vicinity, and the young fellow at the desk (who looked as though he appreciated a good feed as much as I did) told us, with a big, proud smile, that there was a place called Siam, right here in downtown South Bend.
“You can’t miss it, really,” he said.
“No, trust me. I can.”
He laughed, and for the first time I really digested the fact that I was back in the Midwest. Not so many good eating choices, maybe (I hoped that had changed), but there was a kind of ease and unself-consciousness between people that seemed to grow like corn in this soil. “Take a right out of the driveway. Follow that road. No turns. You’ll come into downtown and it will be there on your right.”
When I thanked him, he said, “You bet.”
So I was thinking about that as I showered and dressed and ran from the questions of the chirping internal voice. And then I went to knock on Rinpoche’s door. Green curry, I was thinking. Thai iced coffee. Basil fried rice. Pad Thai. Tom yum soup.
Running. Running.
Rinpoche and I went down the first-floor corridor side by side, and through the large, sunlit, sofa-and-chair-filled lobby, where we attracted some not entirely friendly gazes from the dads of freshmen football recruits, in town to watch the August double-sessions.
When we were settled again in the car, stopped at a light on the way to Siam, I said, without planning to: “I bought one of your books in Oberlin when you were talking with the woman in the coffee shop. I didn’t want to tell you. I hid it in the trunk so I could read it when you weren’t watching. I’m a bit ashamed of that.”
Rinpoche liked to ride with his oversized cloth purse between his ankles (I sometimes wondered if it was filled with cash), even though I’d suggested several times that he keep it in the trunk or back seat. It was resting there now. He reached down and unclasped it, fished one hand in, and brought out a paperback copy of Mending Your Life with Food, by Jersey L. Rickard Jr., a book I’d edited. It had been released two summers earlier, sold 88,000 copi
es in hardcover, and earned the author close to a quarter of a million dollars in foreign rights sales alone. I looked over and saw him holding up the book—one of my biggest successes—so I could see it. There was an enormous sly smile on his face. My astonishment must have shown because, when the light turned green and we started forward, Rinpoche began to laugh and did not stop laughing until we found a parking space on Jefferson Street, two blocks from Siam.
TWENTY-THREE
My experience of Thai restaurants, from Miami Beach to Massachusetts, is that the food served in them is of a universally high quality and that the interiors tend toward the Nouveau Plastique. There are exceptions, of course. But Siam was not one of them. A storefront on a crowded stretch of business block, in the flat, staid, if—in a midwestern way—somewhat alluring downtown South Bend, Siam was filled with evening light from tall sidewalk windows and presided over by a crew of waiters and waitresses who seemed to believe that if the water in a customer’s drinking glass fell below the three-quarters-full mark then King Padinpathanrananan himself would appear magically in the doorway and give them a bad time.
They were a friendly, gentle sort, the women black-haired, slim as saplings, and beautiful, and the food they served Rinpoche and me had a healthfulness and tang to it that made me realize I had a tongue. What a wonderful cuisine it is! Rinpoche was partial to white rice and ordered a half-portion of vegetarian Pad Thai to accompany it. After the spring rolls and a full portion of chicken satay, and after flirting for a few minutes with the idea of a green curry, I at last settled on a main dish that included tender pieces of chicken, carrots, cabbage, green peppers, and onions in a gingery sauce.
At the table closest to ours sat a man with one of those ear buds, and he was talking, apparently, to his young daughter, going on and on with her, obviously very much smitten with fatherhood. “Sure, sweetheart. And I’ll be home day after tomorrow. I miss you more than anything. Here’s a kiss for my little pumpkin.” And so on. It reminded me exactly of my younger self, precell days, standing at a payphone outside a conference in Dallas, with booksellers from all over the Southwest waiting their turn, and Natasha on the other end of the line, asking how many days till I came home, how many hours, how many minutes was that, Daddy? And me thinking nothing else mattered, not sales, not marketing, not publicity, not anything at all but keeping this innocent happiness in her voice for as long as we possibly could.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 13