Dinner with Buddha (7 page)

“I'm fine.”

“I could see the change in your face in the restaurant. I know what you must have been thinking about me.”

I shrugged.

“Don't you see that Shels isn't an ordinary girl?”

“Sure, I see it. She predicts the future, she stands outside in the snow and warms herself up by
thinking,
for God's sake. She talks like an adult half the time. But it's a bit of a stretch to go from that to being the next Dalai Lama, don't you think?”

She slanted her eyes away and back. “In every life, brother, there comes a point where you have to make a stand inside yourself, spiritually. You have to say, I believe this and I don't believe that. I'll commit to this, I'll abandon that. It's in the Bible, the Torah, the Sutras, the Vedas, the
Tao Te Ching.
Muhammad said surrender to God is the only way to salvation. So here's your moment. You can think I'm just a flake, a nutcase, a mother who wants her child to be special to compensate for her own failings. Or you can give me enough benefit of the doubt to travel with Rinpoche for a little while and see where it leads. If I turn out to be wrong, then you can tell me I was wrong and I'll apologize for wasting your time. But you're at a spiritual crossroads. I know you're discouraged and God knows you have reason to be. But now you have a choice. You can listen to the skeptical voice and go back to New York and the life you were leading there, or you can see all the awful things that have happened to you as a preparation, a turning over of the soil so it will be ready for a new crop to be planted.” She stood up, more agitated than I'd seen her in years. “I love you. I'll always love you, but I don't want to keep fighting with you. I
see
things. I
feel
things. I sense things before they happen—not always, and not perfectly. Sometimes the message gets mixed up. But this time . . . I think I have it right. I love you. Shelsa loves you. Rinpoche loves you. Good night!”

She went into the larger bedroom and closed the door behind her. I switched off the lamp and sat there in darkness. The shouts of drunken revelers reached the window from the street below and filtered through the glass. I tried to remember the last time Cecelia had spoken to me with that much intensity. For the most part, over the course of our adulthood she'd been background music. By her own design, I think. Always blending in, helping out, keeping the lowest of profiles, a beautiful bird in the foliage, singing quietly, urging me, cajoling me, sometimes, as in my first road trip with Rinpoche, tricking me. But on that night she'd turned into a lioness, a match for her remarkable husband.

I sat there for a long time, pondering. She was right about at least one thing: I was at a crossroads. Spiritual, psychological, emotional, midlife—whatever the term was didn't really matter. I faced a choice, I knew that, and the choice was more than whether to believe in her visions or not.

On my previous visit to the farm, in early April, Rinpoche had held up a metal spring for my inspection. We were taking a walk through the fallow fields—I remember that there were still traces of snow in the shady spots—and he must have found the spring in one of the outbuildings. He held it in such a way that the metal spiraled upward in ascending circles. “Spirchal life,” he said, touching it with a finger of his free hand. He started at the bottom coil and touched each one above it in the same place. “Feels like you go in circle, yes? Like you come again back on the same place, many times. Same trouble, same thinking. But it's not true, Otto. Meditation is like a wind here in the middle pushing you up, up. You want to go up in a straight like the rocket but you really go like this, this, how you say?”

“Spring.”

“Sprin'. Good. This is how you go.”

I remembered that mini-lesson then, on the couch in Jack Dempsey's room in the old Silverado-Franklin, remembered it and finally understood. Time and again I'd gotten to this place with my sister, wrestling with her flakiness, her eccentric worldview, her odd ideas, trying to love and respect her in spite of them. She read palms, she dated a monk, eventually married him, she gave birth to a spiritually gifted child, she'd helped influence my daughter to forgo her last years of college for the meditative life. With each return to that point on the circle I'd had to let go of old ways of seeing her world and allow some new idea, some scruffy, unwelcome visitor to apply for citizenship in my neat neighborhood. Clearly I was being asked to do that again, on another level, after a stretch of living that had knocked most of the confidence out of me. But this time I wasn't sure I could manage it. Having a monk in the family was one thing. Spending time in meditation was easily incorporated into what I thought of as an ordinary American life. Even acknowledging the fact that Shelsa had some special abilities—really not that difficult. But believing, or even pretending to believe, that she and some yet-to-be-discovered other special soul
might
have been chosen to play some great role in the world? There was a line there. Across that line lay one of two possibilities: My sister was a true flake; or she was right.

Four floors below me banks of slot machines flashed, sang, and swallowed money. Beyond the window someone shouted in the street, five syllables of hilarity.

I sat there in the darkness for the better part of an hour, pinched, as I had been for years, between two very different sets of assumptions about what, exactly, we were supposed to be doing here.

Eight

In the morning I awoke to the fine light of a Dakota summer day . . . and to the sight of my niece's face. Shelsa was standing next to the bed, still as the trunk of a cottonwood tree, staring down at her uncle in a kind of loving trance. Her mother was a light-skinned Caucasian, of German-Scandinavian stock, and her father's people had settled in Skovorodino in southernmost Siberia, but they'd arrived there, ten or fifteen generations earlier, from the Tibetan plateau. Rinpoche had skin the color of a ripe acorn, his genes showed more strongly in Shelsa. She had raven-black hair and brown-black eyes and a small, straight nose that bent slightly upward at the tip. She had my sister's build—on the slender side but not skinny—and Seese's long, graceful hands.

But the expression on her face at that moment—tenderness touched with wash of compassion—belonged to her alone. Natasha had twice described these bedside gazes to me, saying she'd sometimes stir in the morning and find her seven-year-old cousin there, watching over her. “The first few times it made the hair on my arms stand up, Dad. It's like she spent the night in another world and is still partly there, like she's been in a warm place and you're cold and she's trying to heat you up by looking at you. I'm used to it now, but the first few times it truly freaked me out.”

“Good morning, my dear Shelsa,” I said.

“Uncle Ott, your feet were going. You were running in your sleep!”

“That's how I get my exercise,” I said, and she laughed so happily, so unself-consciously, that I felt a smile stretch the muscles of my neck. A smile that had not recently been seen. She hurried away to tell her mother my joke.

There was only one bathroom and her father was in the shower, so I had to wait a few minutes to use the toilet. Rinpoche was singing in a low baritone. It took me a moment to recognize the song: one verse of an Andrea Bocelli ballad that had been popular a decade before. Nice tune, but the words were lost on me.

A Russian-monk father who gambled, had ancestral roots in Tibet, and sang in Italian; a mother who had visions; a daughter with a beatific gaze: This was not an ordinary family.

After breakfast at the Howlin' Hawg Diner (committed now to a nonsugar diet, at least for a few days, I forced myself not to order a caramel roll, not to put jelly on my biscuit), Rinpoche and I accompanied Shelsa and Seese to the place where the bus to Rapid City stopped. “Why don't you travel another few days with us,” I said to Seese, by way of an apology.

She reached up and kissed me on the lips. “My brother,” she said, warmly.

“You could come with us, Shels.”

“I miss Tasha,” she said, in the grown-up voice. “And you and Papi have work you have to do. You have a job.”

“You could help us, couldn't you?”

A stern shake of the head. Topo clutched tight to her chest. “Everybody has their job, Uncle Ott. I have to help Mami and Tash at the Center. I have to show Warren what to do.”

I lifted her up, held her tight, then handed her across the air to her father for another bear hug. She wrapped her new rosary beads around the center of his cowboy hat and said, “So you don't forget me, Papi,” as if there were one chance in twenty billion that he could. I remembered, in a college philosophy class, being introduced to the idea that it was the pleasure of sex that ensured the survival of our species. God, Nature, the Random Whirl of Molecules—our professor left the source of the design up to our individual belief systems, but made the point that the ecstasy attached to the sex drive—“more powerful than any other impulse,” as she put it—was the force that kept the earth populated with human beings. Obvious enough, it seemed to me, though I have to say it wasn't something I'd thought about before I enrolled in Professor Spencer's Philosophy 102. I've pondered her words over the years and I'm sure she was right. It can't be an accident that there's so much pleasure in the act that preserves the species. Life wants to keep itself going, or the Grand Designer wants to keep it going. Either way, it works.

But on the sidewalk there in Deadwood I had the strange urge to locate Dr. Spencer, write her a postcard, and say, “The affection of small children doesn't hurt the cause, either.” It's a different kind of pleasure, of course, but something turns over in the heart of an adult in the presence of a young child. No doubt it's part of the reason why, all over the world, we celebrate birth the way we do. There's magic in the child spirit. It's more than just the cute remarks and mispronunciations, more even than the completely unself-conscious embraces and abundance of innocent physical contact, the smiles, the laughs, the kisses. There is an energy there, a
pureness,
I want to say, an absolute essence that hasn't yet been messed with by the pains of grown-up life. In troubled families, in kids who've been abused, that essence is trampled on very early, but even in the healthiest families it soon fades. Doubt intervenes. Comparison rears its ugly head. We enter a period of biological competition for a mate, a drive set so deeply in us that nothing can stop or alter it. I remembered a scrap from my Bible classes: “Unless ye become like little children. . . .” Some people I'd met—Rinpoche was at the top of this list—managed to preserve that childishness, that untrammeled self-expression, into adulthood. But most of my fellow Americans were half-crushed by the passage of time. Our spirits were dampened, twisted, mottled, trimmed. I don't mean we all turned into semi-humans, but, well, speaking for myself at least, there was some leaching out of the vibrancy, the joy, the faith in my absolute uniqueness, in my claim to part ownership of this earth.

Shelsa was such a pleasure to be around. Even forgetting the odd and special aspects—the strange morning gazes, the seeming ability to know things she had no real way of knowing, to warm or cool herself by will, the hours sitting so still in the yard that birds landed on her shoulders and joined in the contemplative fun—even forgetting all that (and it wasn't easy to forget)—she was like sunlight in every room she entered. Once or twice in any given day you'd see a spark of “normalcy” in her: She'd whine or fidget, make demands, complain. But these moments were like highlights of spice in a glass of good wine. Complexities that added to the richness. The rest of the time she was upbeat, curious, smart, warm as the summer fields. And this was especially true, for some reason, with her only uncle. She touched me whenever she could—hugs, kisses, quick back massages if my shoulders and neck were within reach. When we walked from car to restaurant or hotel, she almost always reached up and took hold of my hand, looked at me as if I were a better man than I knew myself to be, as if I actually deserved to be an uncle to such a creature, as if I carried around the reputation of a Hall of Fame father. There were times when I felt, with an eerie certainty, that I wasn't in the presence of a child at all. “Uncle Ott,” she'd asked me at one of these moments, “do you think Aunt Jeannie was reincarnated yet?”

“I don't know. What do you think?”

“I think she probably was.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because Tash came out of her body. Her wound. And if a girl like Tash was borned into a wound like Aunt Jeannie's then Aunt Jeannie must be very, very special. And if Aunt Jeannie is that special then God won't let her just rest and sleep and take naps. She would come back to some other wound and pretty soon help people.”

“I miss her. How could I know which wound she was born into?”

“You can't always know but maybe you'll feel it when you meet her and then you'll know. Like I knowed when I met Tash that we were friends a long time.”

“When did you feel that?”

“I feeled it all the times with her. Like with you. Like with Mami and Papi. Maybe one day Aunt Jeannie will be born into Tash's wound.”

“Do you feel it with Warren, too?”

“Yes.”

“With the people who come to the Center to meditate?”

“No.”

“With anyone else? In town?”

“Sia at the coffee shop. The woman, Marta, who is the wife with the farmer next to us.”

“Special woman?”

“Yes.”

These were the kinds of conversations we had. You could look at them two ways. You could suppose she was merely mimicking what she heard her mother and father say, reflecting their rather unusual (by American standards at least) worldview, repeating what she'd heard. Or, as my sister put it, you could “knock down the walls of the little room in which we've been taught to think” and imagine the world the way she and Rinpoche described it, a place of continual rebirth, of eternal connections, of spiritual evolution fueled by certain souls who kept returning and returning to aid the rest of us in our movement toward celestial ecstasy.

I was, in this one regard, bipolar. The steadiest of men in every other way, in the realm of having faith in the spiritual legitimacy of my three companions I was, in those days, a waffler, a doubter, a fair-weather fan. I confess this with no small degree of shame.

Waving good-bye to my niece through the bus window caused me an actual, physical pain. Shelsa was pressing Topo Gigio against the glass and moving him right and left, pretending to make him speak. Seese lifted a hand, blew her husband a kiss, sent me a smile and a good-luck nod. And then, in a burst of engine noise and a puff of diesel smoke, they were gone.

When they were out of sight I sent a text to my daughter, telling her what time the bus would arrive in Dickinson and asking if all was okay. She responded immediately with this message:
FINE, DAD. IN LOVE.
To which I responded:
GLAD ON BOTH COUNTS. MISS YOU.

I found myself remembering Jeannie's mother, and thinking:
If you marry him, your children will be giants.