Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When his sister tricks him into taking her guru on a trip to their childhood home, Otto Ringling, a confirmed skeptic, is not amused. Six days on the road with an enigmatic holy man who answers every question with a riddle is not what he'd planned. But in an effort to westernize his passenger-and amuse himself-he decides to show the monk some "American fun" along the way. From a chocolate factory in Hershey to a bowling alley in South Bend, from a Cubs game at Wrigley field to his family farm near Bismarck, Otto is given the remarkable opportunity to see his world-and more important, his life-through someone else's eyes. Gradually, skepticism yields to amazement as he realizes that his companion might just be the real thing.



In Roland Merullo's masterful hands, Otto tells his story with all the wonder, bemusement, and wry humor of a man who unwittingly finds what he's missing in the most unexpected place.

Release date: August 26, 2008

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, and all the characters are imaginary. But the story is based on an actual road trip I made from Bronxville, New York, to Dickinson, North Dakota, in the summer of 2006. With a few small exceptions (I don’t think there is an O’Malley Auditorium at Notre Dame, for example), the inns, hotels, restaurants, buildings, and roads are described with as much accuracy as my notes and memory have allowed, though, in many cases, through the very subjective lens of my own opinions and tastes. Although I did transplant one radio broadcast (about Biblical corporal punishment) in place and time, I made nothing up: the words of the radio programs described here are, again, as accurate as my memory and notes permit. The same is true for billboards, landscapes, locations of crosses by the side of the road, and messages posted in front of churches and homes and at the edges of Ohio fields.

Rinpoche’s ideas are drawn from thirty years of reading across the religious, philosophical, and psychological spectrum and meditation retreats at Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, and nondenominational retreat centers and monasteries. For those interested in these ideas, here, in no particular order, is a sampling of my readings over those three decades: the Bible; the writings of Thomas Merton, especially Zen and the Birds of Appetite, The Wisdom of the Desert, and Asian Journal; Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu; Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and Shambala by Chogyam Trungpa; Psychoanalysis and Religion, The Art of Loving, and The Sane Society by Erich Fromm; The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck; The Way of Perfection by Teresa of Avila; The Real Work by Gary Snyder; When Things Fall Apart and The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron; The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche (also his lectures and talks in person and on tape); the retreat talks of Seung Sahn; Fire Within by Thomas Dubay; I and Thou by Martin Buber; Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield; Freedom from the Known by Krishnamurti; What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula; Going to Pieces without Falling Apart and Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein; Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics by Marsha Sinetar; Light on Life by B. K. S. Iyengar; the talks of Father Thomas Keating and the retreat talks of Lama Surya Das; The Inner Life by Hazrat Inayat Khan; The Only Dance There Is, Be Here Now, and Grist for the Mill by Ram Dass; The Book of Job in Stephen Mitchell’s translation; The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi; The Art of Happiness and talks by the Dalai Lama; The Parables of the Kingdom by C. H. Dodd; The Essential Mystics, edited by Andrew Harvey; The Miracle of Mindfulness and talks by Thich Nhat Hanh; Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience by R. A. Durr; the personal example of my father’s mother; the novels of Dostoevsky, Hesse, and Maugham; the stories of Isaac Babel; the poetry of Walt Whitman and Anna Akhmatova; and the nonfiction of Carlo Levi and James Agee—among many other creative works. My gratitude to all these teachers and writers and to those not named here.





My name is Otto Ringling (no circus jokes, please) and I have a strange story to tell. At first look it may appear to be the story of a road trip I made, at the suggestion of my wonderful wife, from our home in the suburbs of New York City to the territory of my youth—Stark County, North Dakota. In fact, it is the account of an interior voyage, the kind of excursion that’s hard to talk about without sounding foolish or annoyingly serene, or like someone who thinks the Great Spirit has singled him out to be the mouthpiece of ultimate truth. If you knew me you’d know that I am none of the above. I think of myself as Mr. Ordinary—good husband, good father, average looking, average height, middle-of-the-road politics, upper part of the American middle class. Friends think I’m funny, sometimes a little on the wiseass side, a decent, thoughtful, forty-something man who has never been particularly religious in the usual sense of that word. My story here will strike them as out of character, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I promised myself I would just tell the truth about my road trip, and let those who hear the story embrace it or mock it according to their own convictions.

So, in the spirit of full disclosure let me say this: Before the drive to North Dakota, like a lot of people I know, I suffered now and again from a nagging puzzlement about the deeper meaning of things. I functioned well, as the saying goes. My wife and children and I had a comfortable life, really a superbly satisfying life: nice house, two cars, restaurant meals, love, peace, mutual support. And yet, from time to time a gust of uneasiness would blow through the back rooms of my mind, as if a window had been left open there and a storm had come through and my neatly stacked pages of notes on being human had blown off the desk.

By the time I returned to New York, that wind had gone quiet. Outwardly, nothing had changed. I did not start practicing levitation. I did not shave my head and undertake radical dietary adventures. I did not quit my job and move the family to a restored monastery in the Sicilian countryside or leave Jeannie and the kids and shack up with a twenty-two-year-old editorial assistant from the office. Inwardly, however, in those back rooms, in the deeper recesses of thought and mood, something felt entirely different. And so, even though I am a private man, I made the decision—again, at Jeannie’s suggestion—to write down what had happened during my days on the American road. If nothing else, I thought, the story might drop a few laughs into someone’s life, which is not a bad thing these days.

So let me begin here: I am an ordinary, sane, American man. Forty-four years young. Senior editor at a respected Manhattan publishing house—Stanley and Byrnes—that specializes in books on food. I’ve been married to the same woman for almost half my life. We have two teenage children—Natasha is sixteen and a half, Anthony fourteen—an affectionate mixed-breed dog named Jasper, and a house in one of the pricier New York suburbs. Jeannie works, very part-time as a freelance museum photographer and very full-time as an attentive mother. It’s not a perfect life, needless to say. We’ve had our share of worry and disappointment, illness and hurt, and, with two teenagers in the house, we sometimes experience a degree of domestic turbulence that sounds, to my ear, like a boiling teakettle filled with hormones shrieking on a stove. But it is a life Jeannie and I made from scratch, without a lot of money at first, or a lot of help, and we are proud of it, and grateful.

Six months before my trip, a sour new ingredient was dropped into the stew of that good life, into the swirl of dinner parties, arguments over homework, and two-week rentals at the shore in August. My parents, Ronald and Matilda, seventy-two and seventy, were killed in a car crash on a two-lane North Dakota highway called State Route 22. In full possession of their mental faculties, in excellent health, they were familiar voices on the end of the phone line one day and unavailable the next. Gone. Silent. Untouchable. Hardy farm people with forceful and distinct personalities who were turned to ash and memories by a drunk just my age in a careening blue pickup.

We all went out to North Dakota for the memorial service. (My sister, Cecelia, who lives in New Jersey, took the train; she inherited my mother’s fear of air travel.) Tears were shed. There was talk of the old times, good and not so good. There was anger at the man—soon to be imprisoned—who had killed them. I expected all that. What I did not expect was the enormous feeling of emptiness that surrounded me in the weeks following my parents’ burial.



It was more than bereavement. It was a kind of sawing dissatisfaction that cut back and forth against the fibers of who I believed myself to be. Sometimes even in the sunniest moods I’d be aware of it. Turn your eyes away from the good life for just a second and there it was: not depression as much as an ugly little doubt about everything you had ever done; not confusion, exactly, but a kind of lingering question.

What’s the point of all this? would be putting the question too crudely, but it was something along those lines. All this striving and aggravation, all these joys and miseries, all this busyness, all this stuff—a thousand headlines, a hundred thousand conversations, e-mails, meetings, tax returns, warranties, bills, privacy notices, ads for Viagra, calls for donations, election cycles, war in the news every day, trips to the dump with empty wine bottles, fillings and physicals, braces and recitals, Jeannie’s moods, my moods, the kids’ moods, soccer tournaments, plumbers’ bills, sitcom characters, oil changes, wakes, weddings, watering the flowerbeds—all of this, I started to ask myself, leads exactly where? To a smashed-up Buick on a country highway? And then what? Paradise?

All right, I’m a fan of the old idea that if you live a decent life you rise up to heaven afterward. I’m not opposed. But sometimes, riding the commuter train home past the tenements of Harlem, or calling Natasha and Anthony away from their IMing long enough for the frenzied modern ritual of a family meal, or just standing around at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party with a glass of Pinot Noir in one hand, I’d feel this sudden ache cutting along my skin, as if I were suffering from a kind of existential flu. Just a moment, just a flash, but it would pierce the shiny shell of my life like a sword through a seam of armor.

I’d had similar moments even before my parents’ deaths. But after that day—February 7, a frigid North Dakota Tuesday—it was as if a curtain had been lifted and the ordinary chores and pleasures of life were now set against a backdrop of wondering. The purpose, the plan, the deeper meaning—who could I trust to tell me? A therapist? The local minister? A tennis partner who’d lived ten years longer and seen more of the world? I found myself thinking about it at night before I went to sleep, and while standing on the train platform on my way to work, or watching TV, or talking with my kids, and even, sometimes, just after Jeannie and I had finished making love.

And so, I suppose, such a state of mind left me perfectly primed for my extraordinary adventure. If I can risk a sweeping observation, it seems to me that life often works that way: You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears. But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to its own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you’re not prepared for, or don’t want, or can’t, at first, accept.



When they retired from farming, my parents remained in the house where my sister and I had been raised, and they leased the two thousand fertile acres surrounding it, land that was planted in sunflowers, soybeans, and durum wheat. After their deaths, the duty of selling off the old farmstead fell upon my shoulders, as I am the older and—I have to say this—only responsible child. It was not a job I wanted, God knows. There was more than enough on my plate without that helping of high-plains beef. But there are duties you don’t turn your back on: your child is hungry, you make dinner; your spouse is ill, you take care of her; your parents die, you settle the estate.

Two things made this duty more complicated than it might otherwise have been. The first was my younger sister, Cecelia, a nice enough woman who is as flaky as a good spanakopita crust, and who, as I mentioned, does not tolerate air travel well. And the second was the fact that, though I had zero interest in keeping the house and land, I did, for sentimental reasons, want to salvage a few pieces of my parents’ sturdy antique furniture. So, how best to sell the house and move the furniture—given my sister’s unpredictability and the long distances involved—became, in my mind, the North Dakota Question.

Over the course of our marriage, Jeannie and I have developed a nice ritual. On Thursday evenings, no matter what else is going on, we sit together for an hour over a glass of wine and we talk. These conversations range from Natasha’s taste in boyfriends (outrageous hairstyles, enormous vocabularies) to the excesses of the president of Belarus. We laugh, we tease, we debate, and we sip good wine—out on our fieldstone patio in warm weather, and at the kitchen table in cold.

One of these conversations—it was April, the maple trees were in bud, we sat indoors—was devoted to the North Dakota Question.

“You’re procrastinating on this,” Jeannie said, in her typically straightforward fashion.

“Thanks.”

“You’ve always had North Dakota issues. You’ve always avoided them.”

“It’s not issues. It’s a house. Land. It’s five or six old oak tables and chairs and so on. . . . Issues. You sound like my sister.”

“Which is another issue.”

“Your siblings are more or less normal—you can’t relate. You grew up in central Connecticut. No one has issues about central Connecticut.”

Jeannie laughed. She has beautiful chestnut hair, just touched with a streak of gray now, and she has so far resisted the temptation to cut it short. We were in the kitchen and were drinking, I remember, a cold, fruity Vernaccia; I reached across and refilled her glass. Above our heads, something that might have been called music thumped in Anthony’s room. I glanced at my wife and saw that, around the edges of the North Dakota Question, a familiar kind of empathy and understanding floated. Aged love, time-tested, what could beat that?

Jeannie twirled her glass. My parents’ marriage had been solid but tumultuous, their relationship composed of weeks of tender mercies and a stoic, high-plains peace, interrupted by volcanic arguments over something as simple as the way my father put his toothbrush in the holder, or how Mom cooked the oatmeal. I wondered if they’d been having one of these famous fights when the front bumper of the pickup smashed through Pop’s door at seventy miles an hour.

“You’re going to have to drive out, you know that,” Jeannie said at last. “Cecelia has to be there and she’ll never fly. And you’ll need to rent a trailer to cart the stuff back.”

“Movers could do it.”

“Movers can’t sell the house.”

“Real estate agents can.”

“You should go and make your peace with the place. You know you should, Otto. And you need some time away from us and away from work. It’s been years since you’ve had a real break.”

“I could fly and meet her there.”

A frown. Then a shriek and door-slamming somewhere above us. We waited a few beats to see if it was anything serious. No.

“And leave Cecelia to drive there and back?” Jeannie said. “Alone? In her fourteen-year-old Chevrolet, with her twenty-year-old maps? She’d end up in Honduras.”

“She could intuit her way. Consult the spirit guides.”



The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.

“She made it out for the service okay,” I said.

“Okay? Getting off the train in Fargo instead of Minot and having to hire a car and driver with her last hundred dollars? You and I at the Amtrak station watching passengers get off, the train pull away, no Aunt Seese? That’s your idea of okay?”

“Reasonably okay,” I said. And then, “What about this? What about we make a family trip out of it? Two weeks in August. Just the four of us in the minivan. Aunt Seese takes the train.”

It was one of those offerings you know are dust before the last syllables are out. At work, on a fairly regular basis, I was on the receiving end of similarly frail proposals. The author of a book that sold three hundred copies saying she had an idea for a new project, an exhaustive treatment of the Bulgarian sour pickle. She could make it work, she knew she could.

Jeannie set down her glass and began to count on her fingers: “One, we trade Cape Cod for greater Bismarck, which means sea breezes and seventies for tornado warnings and ninety-six in the shade. Two, our dog and our two beautiful offspring sit in the back of the same car for three thousand miles, round-trip. Three—”

I held up my hand. “You had me at two. Look, let me at least run it by the kids. I have the vacation time. I could take three weeks instead of two, one on the Cape, the rest for the Ringlings on the Road. We could visit some chefs I know, historical sites, have some first-class meals, make an adventure out of it.”



Jeannie looked at me for a three-count, a touch of amusement at the corners of her mouth. She said, “I have two words for you, my love.”

“And which two might they be?”

“Not . . . likely.”

And on that note our sixty minutes of alone time ended.



During dinner I decided not to go anywhere near the North Dakota Question. Jeannie cooks, the kids set and clear the table and sweep the floor, I like to wash the dishes. Though we are fairly relaxed in our parenting style, we have two rules: show basic respect for the others at the table; and no books, magazines, schoolwork, or electronic devices while food is being consumed. Natasha and Anthony had apparently been arguing about something upstairs, and they passed the meal buried in slightly different versions of adolescent sulking, Natasha picking at her food, Anthony wolfing it. During cleanup they muttered and snarled, then pounded off to their separate door-slammings and various algebras.

When the sink was clean, dishes stacked, I made my way up the stairs carrying my hopelessly optimistic family vacation plan in both hands like a pot of dying geraniums to a sick aunt.

I knocked on Natasha’s door and found our scholarly daughter at her computer, headphones on, the walls around her papered with soccer players from the U.S. women’s team and posters of teen boy rock stars with flat stomachs and pouty lips. Still sour-faced from the argument with her brother, she took off the headphones and, somewhat reluctantly, turned to me. I pulled up a chair. I noticed for the thousandth time how much she resembles my mother through the eyes. A high-plains, gray-green, pioneer directness, as if, beneath the freckles and long lashes, lay windswept stone. At moments, I worried that, like my mother, she would make a steady, dependable, but not particularly warm wife. Then again, I’d come home two hours early one afternoon that winter and discovered her and her genius boyfriend, Jared, making out on the living room couch, and there had been plenty of warmth there. An abundance of warmth.

I said, “Tasha, you know I have to go to North Dakota to settle Gram and Gramps’s property.”

“I know, Dad.” A glance at the computer screen. Maybe Stacey was writing to say that Neal’s new hairstyle wasn’t as cute as his old one, or that Ilene’s choice in skirts that day had been off the wall. It was important to answer such things without delay.

“Well, I thought it might be fun if we made a road trip out of it. The four of us. Jasper, too. We could try camping, or stay in nice hotels, or a combination. Swim, eat, see the big sights. A family adventure. What do you think?”

She looked at me for what seemed the span of her childhood, then said: “Camping, Dad? With, like, my brother the disgusting beast?”

“Okay, so minus the camping out of the equation. What do you think of the idea?”



The look in her eyes was suddenly the look of a thirty-year-old. It is a law of the universe that your words come back to you—and in exactly the same tone of voice. “Dad,” she said, “be sensible.”

I AM AN UPBEAT sort of person, in general. It’s a valuable temperament in the book publishing world, where there are eighteen failures for every success and where the tidal sweeps of fashion knock even the most sure-footed soul into the hard surf at least once or twice a year. It’s a valuable temperament in the rough waters of raising teenagers, too. And so, though I’d gotten exactly nowhere with Natasha, I stepped down the hall and knocked on Anthony’s door, thinking that, if I could convince him to come out in favor of the family road trip, then he and Jeannie and I could gradually work Tasha free of her resistance.

That spring, Anthony was going through the ordeal known as puberty. His nose and ears were growing too fast for the rest of his face. His skin was breaking out. Dark hairs were showing themselves above his top lip. His sister, of course, never tired of reminding him of these troubles, and Jeannie and I were often having to act as referee. When I went into his room, I found him lying on his bed tossing a baseball into the air and catching it, over and over again, in a sullen hypnosis.

“I remember doing that,” I said, sitting sideways on the bed and squeezing his lower leg once. Anthony was at the age where he did not particularly like to be touched. “Some nights I’d try to get to a thousand catches.”

“On those boring North Dakota nights, huh, Dad?” He stopped tossing the ball and looked at me.



“They could be pretty bad. But it’s a cool place in other ways. You’ve never seen the real countryside there. Wild buffalo. The Badlands. Native American stuff.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s like a different world,” I went on, encouraged. “Gram and Gramps liked it there.” I saw a familiar shadow come over his pimpled face; he and my father had been close. “Still sad about them, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I have to go out there, you know, to settle the estate, sell the house.”

“When?”

“August. I should drive, and August is the only time I can get away from work for that long. Want to go?”

“Where?”

“North Dakota?”

“Driving?”

“Sure. I thought we’d make a family adventure out of it. All of us.”

“Nah.”

“What about just me and you, then?”

“Nah. I was thinking of going out for football. I was gonna ask if I could stay at Jonah’s house when you guys go to the Cape.”

You’re 135 pounds, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I had been a 135-pound football player myself, seen a total of about fourteen minutes playing time, and had a lot of good memories from those days, and one shaky knee.

“What if we made the trip before football?”

“It starts August 3, Dad.”

“All right. But in principle you’d like to go, right?”

“Not that much, to tell you the truth. I’m into, like, my own private space these days. You know, all that time in the car together, motel rooms. Not my thing.”

THERE IS A PATIO at the back of our house. It’s the usual setup—outdoor furniture, potted plants. Standing or sitting there you can look down toward a stream that cuts its weak flow into a brush-filled ravine. It’s all we have in the way of wildness, and some evenings, sitting in a patio chair facing those trees as darkness fell, I’d feel a fleeting sense of some other way of life, less domesticated, less safe. Not free of family obligations, exactly—I loved being part of a family—but with fewer of the responsibilities of modern American middle-class suburban life. Fewer of the particular concerns and duties that are payment for the safest, richest, easiest lifestyle in human history.

That night, after the visits with Natasha and Anthony, I went out and stood on the patio and stared off into the trees. Our faithful dog, Jasper, came and leaned against my leg, a silent pal. Though Jasper was more affectionate these days than either of our two kids, I knew they loved me. I knew they’d swing out away from Jeannie and me over the next years, then come circling back. When they were in their twenties and thirties, we’d all be close. . . . But by then they’d have their own lists of concerns and duties, their own oil changes, doctors’ appointments, and business meetings, maybe their own kids. Very possibly their careers would pull them a thousand or two thousand miles away, leaving Jeannie and me to grow old the way my parents had, buoyed by a phone call once or twice a week, flowers on Mother’s Day, hectic visits. Why were we all so proud of a style of living that splintered the family like so much dried-out firewood?



I heard the screen door close and recognized the scrape and tap of Jeannie’s shoes on stone. She came up beside me in the dark. Jasper moved over and leaned against her knee.

“No go on Dakota?” she said.

“No go. I’ve been out here pondering the meaning of life.”

“That bad, h. . .