Breakfast With Buddha

Breakfast
with
Buddha

A NOVEL

by
Roland Merullo

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

For
Arlo Kahn
and
For
Michael Miller

Humor is a prelude to faith and

Laughter is the beginning of prayer.

—R
EINHOLD
N
IEBUHR

Like the lark that soars in the air, first singing, then

silent, content with the last sweetness that satiates it,

such seemed to me that image, the imprint of the

Eternal Pleasure.

—D
ANTE
, “Paradiso”

Genuine belief seems to have left us.

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
, “Democratic Vistas”

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
, “I Hear America Singing”

Contents

Acknowledgments

One
|
Two
|
Three
|
Four
|
Five
|
Six
|
Seven
|
Eight
|
Nine
|
Ten
|
Eleven
|
Twelve
|
Thirteen
|
Fourteen
|
Fifteen
|
Sixteen
|
Seventeen
|
Eighteen
|
Nineteen
|
Twenty
|
Twenty-one
|
Twenty-two
|
Twenty-three
|
Twenty-four
|
Twenty-five
|
Twenty-six
|
Twenty-seven
|
Twenty-eight
|
Twenty-nine
|
Thirty
|
Thirty-one
|
Thirty-two
|
Thirty-three
|
Thirty-four
|
Thirty-five
|
Thirty-six
|
Thirty-seven
|
Thirty-eight
|
Thirty-nine
|
Forty
|
Forty-one
|
Forty-two
|
Forty-three
|
Forty-four
|
Forty-five

Author’s Note

Reader’s Guide

About the Author

Also by Roland Merullo

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my excellent travel companions, Amanda, Alexandra, and Juliana; and everyone at Algonquin for their work on this book, especially Chuck Adams, Ina Stern, Courtney Denney, Brunson Hoole, Janet Patterson, Kelly Clark, Craig Popelars, Michael Taeckens, and Aimee Rodriguez, who all went the extra mile. I am also grateful to several North Dakotans, especially Kay Solberg Link for her hospitality and Gaylon Baker for his wide-ranging knowledge of the state.

ONE

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.

TWO

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.