Dinner with Buddha (19 page)

“Care to provide any specifics?”

Another laugh. “Well, you know when you have a déjà vu? Well, I've been having those all the time the last week or so. And I've been thinking of Mom a lot. . . . All the time, a lot more even than I usually do. And Shelsa's been going into these, I guess you could call them ‘trances' or ‘spells.' She came into my room the other day and bowed down to the picture of you and Mom I keep on the night table. I thought it was a joke at first but it wasn't.”

“Is Seese worried?”

“She was a little at first. She called Rinpoche and he explained what they are.”

“Which is?”

“He called them ‘rest periods.' Before she's going to do something. Do you remember you and Mom used to talk about how much I ate when I was twelve and about to sprout?”

“You ate like the front line of the New York Giants. Night after night. And then, boom, in about a month you were four inches taller.”

“Like that, I guess, though she's too young to start sprouting. . . . You have a birthday coming up, Dad.”

“I do.”

“I always hate to be away from you on your birthday.”

“I don't know where we'll be at that point. I'll call, though.”

“We have an idea for a surprise gift.”

“When I re-enter the Dakota territories, okay?”

“Sure, fine. Anyway, I was just checking in. Aunt Seese and Shels and Warren send their love. Anthony called and we talked for a while. He misses you but he's not much of a phone guy. He says the workouts are going okay. Take care. Love you.”

“And you take care. Love to all of you. Bye.”

I put the phone in my pocket and looked up at the stars blinking above the mountains. The thought that came to me, not without a trace of bitterness I must say, was this:
My daughter is not a metaphor!
I knew Rinpoche would agree. “No, no, Otto, wery real!” he'd say, or something to that effect, but I'd wonder if he truly meant it, wonder if the belief that this life was metaphorical, symbolic, illusory, if that belief sucked away some of the intensity we feel for a loved one. In his case, it didn't seem to. With Seese, with Natasha, especially with Shelsa, even with me, it wasn't hard to feel the force of his love. And yet, somehow, that love was missing the element of worry, of fear for our safety. There was no angst in it. Which made it, I supposed, purer. And yet, I knew that, in the old days whenever I set off on a business trip, part of what made the good-bye between Jeannie and me touch me so deeply was her “Be safe, sweet one.” There was a concern in it, a caring, perhaps a measure of worry. Without that, wouldn't I have felt less important to her, less beloved?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, my thoughts could populate an empire. By then I could hear a gentle commotion at the door of the Engineers' Club, people stepping out onto the sidewalk, alone, in pairs, in small groups, and I could feel the weight of a few curious glances. I did what I could to make myself invisible.
So he gets to travel with the Rinpoche,
I imagined them thinking.
So he knows he's going to be enlightened soon. So he's going to help with some grand project.

If you only knew,
I wanted to signal back, in some kind of mental Morse code.
If only you were inside my mind and saw what goes on there!

I waited, peered in through the door, waited a while longer, listening to scraps of conversation that ranged from “should sign up for one of his retreats” to “not crazy about this metaphor bullshit.”

When Rinpoche had signed his last book, bestowed his final blessing, hugged and been hugged twenty-five times, when he'd thanked the introducer and the organizers and the people putting away the chairs, he popped out into the cool mountain night and joined me and we started back toward the hotel. Rinpoche never asked me, afterward, what I thought of his talks. He never seemed to wonder if the audience had received his wisdom wholly, partially, or not at all. Unlike the authors I'd dealt with in my editorial days, he wasn't cranked up on an egotistical high or exhausted by the need to appear kind to so many strangers. We might have just been shooting a game of pool for all the difference I noted in him.

“Tomorrow,” I told him, “we're heading south. I've been doing some research. I have a treat in store for you, some real Americana.”

“Good, good,” he said, but he spoke in a way that seemed uncharacteristically distracted.

As we turned the corner toward the Delaware, yours truly still dragging his body along as if it were afflicted with three different strains of flu at the same time, I asked him if anything was wrong, if something at the speaking had upset him.

“One question,” he said.

“Anything. Spiritual advice. Translation services. Your nearly enlightened brother-in-law stands ready to help with all kinds of answers.”

Just before we crossed the threshold into the hotel lobby he stopped and faced me, put a hand on my right shoulder. Touched by the light from inside the building, the expression on his face was all puzzlement, the purest confusion. I thought he was going to break with tradition and ask me why there hadn't been more questions, or if the metaphor metaphors had made sense, but then I detected the spark of amusement there. “What,” he said, “means this thing,
ocus-pocus
? I like this word wery much. What means?”

“Magic,” I said. “Fakery. Trickery. And it's hocus, not ocus. Hocus-pocus.”

“Ah,” he said, satisfied, at peace with himself, with others' opinions of him, at peace with this illusory, magical world. We went up to our third-floor room, the room where a notorious Wild West gunslinger had once slept. We said good-night and took turns washing in the cramped bathroom, and I lay down in the huge bed and listened to the old boards creak, Rinpoche murmuring prayers in the other room, trucks passing on the street below. I felt the texture of the sheets against my skin, the weight of the blanket, and it did all seem a kind of code, a
madaphor,
small signals standing in for something larger and more mysterious. Even in the midst of my physical malaise, I felt, as Tasha said she did, a small amount of surprise simply at the fact that I was there, alive, embodied in this world
.

Twenty-one

Something—voices in the hallway, perhaps—awakened me very early the next morning. The altitude sickness was gone. I felt 51 again, not 108. I washed and dressed quietly and went down the creaking stairs and out into the mountain air. It was cool at that hour. Even in August, you could imagine the winters, with their thirty-below-zero mornings and fifty-mile-an-hour winds. You could guess what it must have been like to come to Leadville a century and a half earlier in search of a quick fortune and find yourself living in a wooden shack in January, surrounded by other fortune seekers, coffee and beans on the cookstove, a wife and kids looking at you and wondering what they were going to eat for the day's other meals and how they were going to spend the hours and why you'd dragged them to this godforsaken place. Walking an oblong route through the city's back streets, shirt buttoned on top and hands in pockets, I wondered if it was true that we were led through life by our desires. Those desires sprouted into dreams in our mind's eye—whom to marry, where to live, what to do for money—and we followed those dreams as best we could, through a kind of maze of years. Along the way we had stretches of pleasure, and hours, weeks, or years of pain; we knew the exhilaration of first love and the torment of losing friends. We went on through the maze, following some mysterious scent, and we discovered, somewhere in the middle of life, that we were in a place we never expected to be. The edges of the old dreams had gone blurry. New, smaller ones had sprouted, like branches off the main trunk. Or maybe we'd abandoned our dreams altogether and simply put one foot in front of the next, showed up for work in the morning, washed the dishes, fed the dog, settled down in front of the TV to gaze at the lives of others, imaginary and real, as we plodded along toward old age.

On one of the side streets that sloped gently down into the valley, musing, musing, glad to be alive, I passed a series of houses built so close together that, until you were straight in front of them, they seemed attached. Their sharing of the warmth and protecting each other from the wind looked to me the perfect metaphor for marriage, for family. Human life, that decades-long trip through the maze, was a difficult enterprise. Difficult, trying, sometimes terrifying. By some embedded instinct we understood that a close companion softened the terror, lightened the load, took the bite out of the coldest winds. I remembered Rinpoche telling me that he'd made two three-year retreats, mostly silent, mostly solitary, eating only enough to stay alive and spending the days in prayer, meditation, some physical work, occasionally having a bit of instruction from an older master. What interior force that must have required! What courage, to face that emptiness alone, without the ordinary sense comforts for armor, without a partner.

I missed my wife. I missed my children. I missed my old dog.

Back up on the main drag I found a coffee shop called City on a Hill—sunlit, filled with early risers, smelling of the magnificent bean—and I sat on a stool facing out the front window and indulged. A large latte, two superb buttermilk biscuits, a cup of ice water. Again, I tried to eat as Rinpoche had instructed me, without checking my phone or reading a newspaper, really tasting the coffee and biscuit on my tongue, and for a while I managed it. Pickup trucks and bicyclists passed in the street; a line formed at the ordering counter—fit, young, lively mountain types, happy in their bodies. After a time, a fellow in a gold-trimmed maroon robe walked up to the window, beamed his thousand-watt smile at me, and came inside.

“You found me,” I said.

“Last night,” he said, taking the stool beside me, “I see this place and I think: This is the place for Otto in the morning.”

“Outstanding coffee. Breathtaking biscuits. Here, have this one.”

He broke off a corner of the biscuit with thumb and forefinger and chewed thoughtfully.

“I'll get you some tea and another biscuit to share.”

The young man at the cash register—another specimen who looked like he could ride his bike to Vail and run up the ski slopes then jump into a hang glider's harness and float back across the valley to his job—said, “You're with Rinpoche, aren't you?”

“Yes. This is breakfast for him. Green tea and a biscuit. Your coffee's great, by the way, nice and rich.”

“No charge for this, man. It's an honor to have him in our shop.”

“You sure?”

“Sure, man. I was at the talk last night. Must be nice to know where you're headed.”

“We're headed south today,” I said, “to a place my sister found, kind of a—” I stopped at that point, belatedly realizing that he was remarking not on the direction of our travels but on my upcoming enlightenment. How, I wondered, was a soon-to-be-enlightened, middle-aged human being supposed to act? The young man was watching me, for clues, it seemed. I was glad I hadn't ordered one of the sticky buns, or come in carrying my copy of the
Wall Street Journal.
I felt disinclined to tell him that the Rinpoche was wrong, or joking, trying to flatter or encourage me. I formed my features into an expression that suited a spiritual man.

“Cool to travel with him, I bet.”

“Unimaginably cool,” I said. “But, at moments, challenging.”

“What good would it be if it wasn't?” he asked, and I mumbled something vaguely agreeable, upbeat, wise, slipped two dollars into the tip jar, and carried the food and drink back to my companion. A young mother with her little son in tow was just leaving his side. She appeared to have gotten an autograph.

Rinpoche accepted the tea with both hands and took a sip. Grateful. Appreciative. Taking nothing for granted. “You meditate this morning?” he asked me.

“I mused. I went for a walk and thought about family life, loneliness, the point of things.”

“A kind of meditation,” he said. “Later we do the other kind, you and me.”

“Three hours?”

He laughed, broke the biscuit in half, raised his eyes to mine. “You life changes now, my friend. Big.”

My instinct was to make a joke, to ask him if I was going to hit the lottery, or buy a new car, if Angelina was going to leave Brad and beg me to move in with her . . . something like that. But the expression on his face stopped me. His eyes were steady, pinning me in place. Ringing in my inner ear was the remark of the man at the register, “What good would it be if it wasn't?”

“Any hints?” I managed.

“You have the birthday soon, yes?”

“Tomorrow.”

“In Skovorodino we think that day wery special. The day you decided to come into this life, wery special, man! We always go to swim in the river.”

“What if you were born in January?”

“Then through the ice,” he said, wrapping his arms across his chest like a freezing man. “So cold! Then we do a special meditation. Then we wait for some news to come to us on that day. Special news. A dream, maybe. A wisit from somebody. The surprise.”

“In America we eat cake.”

“You can have cake, too. No problem, man! Cake, candy, the swim, the big surprise!”

“I'll use today to prepare myself,” I said, somewhat carelessly.

Rinpoche answered in a serious tone that absolutely unnerved me, “I help you.”