FORTY-TWO
I had originally planned for us to spend our last night on the road in a place called Detroit Lakes in western Minnesota, about fifty miles from the North Dakota border. But, I don’t know, maybe it was hearing Jeannie’s voice on the phone, maybe it was the fact that the first two hotels I called in Detroit Lakes said they were booked—some kind of festival going on, Miniature Dollhouse Collectors of America or something—maybe I was just feeling the tug of the old homestead, the reality of my duties there, and didn’t want to delay things any longer. Whatever the reason, after I’d made the calls and put a few miles between us and the casino, I asked my companion if he minded stretching out the driving day. “We can probably get all the way to Bismarck,” I said. “Then tomorrow we’ll have only a short ride.”
Rinpoche let it be known that it didn’t matter to him in the slightest what our schedule was. He was in no rush, he was never in a rush. He could not remember the last time he’d had such an enjoyable day.
For dinner that night we decided to sample the local specialty and go German. I knew from experience that the phone books in that part of the world could almost have been taken from Berlin or Stuttgart. Five hundred Schmitts, a hundred and fifty Wanners. Many of the Germans had come by way of Russia and Catherine the Great’s broken promises. They settled the fertile plains of the upper Midwest, bringing along their farming methods, stern morals, and solid but unimaginative dietary preferences. I remembered that two of the shocks I’d experienced in coming to New York were discovering that Ringling was considered an unusual last name and that most people had never heard of knoephla soup.
We pulled off the highway in a little city called Park Rapids, which had the distinction of offering a two-car-wide parking lane right in the middle of its broad main street. I somehow knew there would be a German eatery there, and after walking less than a block we came upon it, the Schwarzwald Inn restaurant. Inside, it was as I expected, as I’d remembered: pale wood booths, decorative steins lined up by the cash register, wall hangings of Bavarian Fräuleins in lederhosen. And the wonderful smells of frying bratwurst and beer. It was a plain little place, but they had Spaten Premium in bottles (I convinced Rinpoche to take a sip, but did not tell him it had been the first alcohol to pass my lips, fourteen years old, behind the barn at Mickey Schlossen’s farm), a meaty menu, and old farm couples in overalls and cotton dresses—for me it was all a snapshot from a childhood album. Rinpoche contented himself with a dish of potato salad and a slice of the brown bread—it arrived already buttered, dense as it was delicious. Yours truly went the bratwurst and mashed route, in tribute to Mom and Pop. I had been thinking about them more and more as we got closer to North Dakota. They’d been a sweet pair, really—unadorned, unself-conscious, hardened by work and weather and girded about by the cool emotional climate into which they’d been born, but decent as the day was long.
I looked up at Rinpoche and told him, “Bratwurst, beer, and bread, my father used to say. No man needs more.”
He nodded, swallowed. “I remember also the things my father said to me. He was a kind man, very small for size, very famous where I was as a boy. There were not so many trees there as in America. Hills that went brown color in the summer. You hear the train go by from many miles, and you walk up the hill and see very far, and in the winter there was deep snow, and wind.”
“A Siberian North Dakota.”
“He used to say the land there made your mind big. Perfect land for meditation.”
“No bratwurst and beer though, I bet.”
He laughed. There was a spot of butter on his lower lip. “Sausage and beer, almost the same.” He paused and took another bite, swallowed, all very deliberate. And then, “He used to say—and sometimes my mother would say—that I, that my when I was born—”
“That my being born is how you’d say it in English.”
“Thank you, my friend. That my being born made them the happiest of anything.”
Here’s where our stories part company, I thought, because it was something my parents would never in a million years have told us, even though it might have been true. Kind, yes, but they’d been trained to terseness, and never questioned that. They did not spend a lot of time embracing us, kissing us, telling us what a blessing we were in their lives. Something happened to me then, in the midst of this memory, some small internal tremor. I could not, at first, find any reason for it. Looking at Rinpoche, I felt an unexplained nervousness rising up in me, that’s all. And I noticed that I had the urge to fall back on old habits and cover over the nervousness with a cute little remark. I resisted.
Instead of going on, Rinpoche just nodded in a satisfied way, as if cherishing a happy memory. He wiped his lip with one finger.
“You’re a reincarnation of some kind, aren’t you?” I heard myself say, from out of the center of the nervousness, but there was no mockery in the words. “Is that why it made them happy?”
“Yes. That is why. Also they loved me.”
“A reincarnation of who?”
“Just a teacher. In our lineage. No special man.”
“No?”
He shook his huge head. “You sure?”
“Yes, very sure,” he said, but for the first time on that trip he wasn’t making eye contact when he spoke.
“Are there female reincarnations, too?”
He laughed at this foolish question, seemed to regain his balance. “Of course, Otto. My mother was the incarnation of a great . . . you would call it, I think, a saint.”
I had a strong visual memory then, of Rinpoche in South Bend, prostrating himself before the statue of Mary as if he were as Catholic as any Father O’Malley or Sister McFinn. The feeling I had been trying to repress rose up further in me, up into the place between my lungs. I had a mouthful of bratwurst and found I was having difficulty swallowing. I felt as if I were fighting with myself inside myself. I’m tempted to use the expression “of two minds” except that I actually felt that: There were two distinct minds in me, old and new, and they were doing battle. I thought of Rinpoche’s recent description of the digital universe, of a continual decision-making that led the individual soul this way or that. A or B, A or B. I was remembering, again, what the massage therapist had said. I was replaying the things I’d seen and heard between Paterson and here.
“I’m curious about something,” I heard myself saying, when I’d gotten the mouthful of bratwurst down. To calm myself, I took a sip of the cool, tangy Spaten. “If there are saints, really, in this life . . . I mean, if they are actual people and not just a sort of myth we make up after they die, to give us hope or something . . . I mean . . . I’m not expressing myself very well here.” I took another sip of beer, the Rinpoche watching me now, calm, intent. “What I’m trying to ask is, if there are actual saints, and maybe even actual teachers or gods come to earth, I mean Jesus, Buddha, you know. How does it work? Who sends them? Why are they sent? What is the mechanism by which a being like that appears in a human womb? . . . I mean . . . does your lineage have anything to say on the subject?”
“Of course. Yes,” he said, smiling a small tight smile as if he saw right through me. He considered the question for a moment. “How to tell you?”
I tried to make a wise little remark—Oh, the usual way, I was going to say—but I simply could not get the words out.
“On this planet, this earth, there is the physical and the not-physical, yes?” He pronounced the word fuscal.
“I suppose.”
“You love your wife very much, yes?”
“Yes.”
“There is the physical wife that you love—that you can see and touch and listen and smell, yes? And then there is also the not-physical wife that you love that you can’t touch, can’t see, can’t smell. The physical body holds the not-physical, yes, but the not-physical makes go the physical body. Makes go the heart. Makes go the brain, you see?”
“All right.”
“On this planet, the physical wor
ld is mostly water and stone and air. A few other things but mostly water and stone and air. Those things you can touch, you can smell sometimes, you can see. But what makes go those things?”
“What makes them run, you mean. Makes them work. Or exist.”
He took a drink of water and nodded energetically, as I had seen him do during his talks, but there was something different in the way he was looking at me. His eyes were more intense, the gaze more intimate. He put just the last inch or so of the fingers of both hands on the table to either side of his plate and said, “Love makes them run. That is not my lineage, my idea. That is a fact just like when water gets cold it ices. Like that. Some people cannot see this is a fact, but this is. They are blind in different ways but this is a fact: Love makes the atoms go where they go and stick where they stick. Everybody when they see a baby, a small boy or girl, they smile? Why? Because inside themself they know this fact. They know love made this baby, this boy, this girl. They feel this natural rising up of love in themself. Okay, yes? Before, I said to you about God’s music that is playing all the time, for everyone. God’s music is this love. And this love that runs our world, sometimes it means that there is help coming from that love, from that . . . source you would say, yes? See in your life, in Otto’s life, how many times every day you help. Me, you help. Your wife, your children, people you don’t know that you see walking by, you help them. And every day maybe somebody helps you. What is this help? It is love. Okay?”
“I’m with you.”
“Good. And so, now, bigger idea . . .” He made a large circle with his hands. “Sometimes, many times, the strongness of love in this universe—”
“The strength of love.”
“Yes, the strength of love in this universe, it comes very much all at once into some bodies on this planet, the way air comes sometimes very much into a wind. And those bodies, they are a saint, a great teacher, what we call a god. Really it is a piece of God, the way you can have a big wind be a piece of the air on the earth but by itself it is not really separate.” He considered this a moment, then went on. “The way you can have light in a line coming through a window,” he pointed to his left where a ray of sunlight was angling in and splashing on the pale wood of a table. “Piece of the sun, yes, but not the sun really, you see?”
“Okay.”
“But what runs the world is that source. Sometimes when a country, when a place on the earth, needs help, or when the whole of the earth needs help, then this love becomes into a human body like a Buddha, a Krishna, a Muhammad, a Mary, a Jesus, a Moses, and so like that. Why at that time, why in that place, that culture, even my father says, ‘Don’t know.’ Why only some of the peoples there see that these saints are pieces of God and others do not see, don’t know. But if you look with a clear mind, you know that the world works like this. If you listen very careful to your heart going, if you meditate just on that, you can see that it runs because of this love.”
Rinpoche finished and sat back, watching me intently the whole time in much the same way a professor of physics might look at a favored student after chalking a theory onto the board in his office. Do you see? Is it clear? Has the light gone on in you the way it went on in me, years ago?
I must confess then that any urge I had to make a joke had been extinguished. I know I am not conveying this little bratwurst-and-beer encounter with anything like the power it actually had; I’m an editor, not a writer, after all. But at that moment, surrounded by a German-Americana of smells and sights that had been as familiar to me as the quilt on my childhood bed, I felt a physical sensation of another world having been opened up to me. A thick layer peeled away. An obvious truth revealed. Strangely enough, the feeling was vaguely familiar, and after a few seconds’ consideration I realized it was a cousin to the feeling I’d known when I had watched my children being born. There was the physical, of course, the blood and mucus, the tissue, the smells and sounds, the cries, the small body making its way out of the larger one. And then, behind or beyond or on top of all that, was something else, some brief glimpse into an enormous, almost an alien truth, momentarily irrefutable. Some essence of love or generosity was infusing the physical event, it was so obvious. And now here it was again, that same mysterious feeling.
I tried to let that truth sink in, tried to meditate on my heartbeat for a moment, on the heartbeats of the people I loved. I tried, with a bit of success, I must say, to contemplate the source behind the movements of the atoms in stone and air and water. It was strangely, eerily frightening. Rinpoche did not seem to feel the need to say anything more. I excused myself, got up and went to the bathroom, trying to give myself time to come back to my ordinary way of thinking about the world. But that way, safe and familiar and protected by a thick armor of intellectual acuity, seemed almost criminally superficial all of a sudden. There was the familiar DAMEN and HERREN on the bathroom doors, there was the water coming out of the faucet, and cells and atoms within that water, and ordinarily that was as far as I would have gone with it. As if those cells and atoms had simply materialized one fine day, out of nothing. As if my children had. As if a college chemistry text was all the explanation anyone needed for the fact of human awareness.
Back at the table, a young sister and brother combo—three and four years old, I guessed—had climbed up into the booth with Rinpoche. Blond, fine-featured, dressed in jeans and a NASCAR T-shirt, the boy was sitting on my friend’s knee, and the little girl was standing and leaning against his shoulder. Their mother looked on uneasily from the aisle, telling them it was time to leave, that they should give the man some peace, and so on. I stood a few feet away and watched. Rinpoche had a hand on the boy’s head and was looking at the girl and making faces, then put a hand on the girl’s head and made faces at the boy. They were squealing, hugging him, and their mother, all apologies, had to peel them away and shoo them out the door one by one.
I sat and took refuge in the last of my Spaten, in the familiar motions of taking out the wallet, pinching the credit card, handing it over. But something was turning upside down inside me; something in the conversation, in the spin of the past few hours, something was making me breathe differently, think differently. I paid for our dinner, but Rinpoche, who was getting the hang of the American way of eating, insisted on adding the tip. He reached into the folds of his robe, brought out half a dozen dollar tokens from the casino up the road, and, with a wonderfully impish expression on his workingman’s face, set them in a neat stack on the paper place mat.
FORTY-THREE
It is about 300 miles from Park Rapids to Bismarck. I guessed the trip would take us five hours or so and called the Bismarck Radisson to hold two rooms for late arrival.
By the time we got back to the car and rejoined Route 200, we had, by my calculations, an hour and a half of daylight left. I was glad of that. From other trips, I knew the landscape would change dramatically when we reached the westernmost part of Minnesota and then crossed the border to my home state, and I wanted to point that out to Rinpoche and say, Look at how flat it gets here. This was all a glacial lake a million years ago. If we turn south we could drive probably five hundred miles—through South Dakota, and then all the way across Nebraska and Kansas and most of Oklahoma—and you’d barely see a hill. It’s where most of the wheat is grown in America now, and a lot of the corn, and where most of our beef cattle come from. But 150 years ago these plains were black with buffalo for as far as the eye could see, millions of them grazing together in huge herds. The native people here depended on the buffalo for everything from food to clothing to skins for their tepees. They used to kill them with bows and arrows, if you can imagine that—they’d ride up beside a two-thousand-pound galloping beast and kill it with an arrow. But the U.S. government wanted to settle this land with white people, so they paid men to come out here and slaughter the buffalo because they knew that would make the Indians move away. Sometimes one man would kill as many as 150 in a day, and by about 1900 the buffalo were close to
extinction, and the Indians had mostly been chased away, and people like my great-grandparents had been given huge tracts of land—a thousand, two thousand, three thousand acres—on which to build houses and grow crops.
I’d prepared a whole lecture for him on the history of the Great Plains, the blood and slaughter and hardship and sacrifice lying beneath the placid landscape like karma in a soul—unseen, nearly forgotten, but echoing quietly in every modern minute. It had been a holocaust, some people said. Others claimed it was just the juggernaut of history, the price of progress, the same old story that had been played out all over the globe: the more advanced technology—rifles, ironclad ships, fighter jets, nuclear weapons—always winning out over the tools and rituals of the past.
But shortly after we left Park Rapids, Rinpoche leaned the seat back a few inches and closed his eyes. I was alone with my thoughts and the gradual approach of darkness across flat fields of corn, sunflowers, and soybeans. For a little while I tried to listen to the talk shows. One of the hosts was saying that the solution to the terrorist problem was to drop a nuclear bomb on Mecca. Someone on another station claimed that Christ the Lord was coming soon to cast sinners into eternal fire. Someone else said that all our troubles could be traced to immorality—drugs and drink, abortion, homosexuality (how they loved to talk about homosexuality, these people), high school students coupling without benefit of the blessing of the church or their elders. It was all the fault of the liberals. It was all the fault of the people who insisted on owning guns. It was all a righteous punishment for the bad things someone else had done. Always someone else.
We crossed the North Dakota line just as the very last light of the day disappeared. Tired by then from the long hours of driving, I merged onto Interstate 94, a fast, mostly empty road that slices the state neatly in two: a larger northern piece and a smaller southern piece. Thirty or forty miles west of Fargo I pulled off into a rest area. Rinpoche had not moved. I got out and stretched, still feeling the harsh reminders of my yoga adventure. The moon had not yet risen and the sky was as I remembered it, black, immense, and pocked with points of light, the air sweetened with the fragrance of just-harvested hayfields.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 24