Breakfast With Buddha (10 page)

No teenagers in that house, I guessed.

And then, as we neared the town I had picked out for our day’s excursion, the landscape changed again, and in place of the farms there were clusters of what can only be called mansions, five- and six- and seven-thousand square foot homes with vinyl siding and partial fieldstone fronts, all of them nearly identical and squeezed close to each other on treeless lots.

Soon we began to see signs saying
HERSHEY ATTRACTIONS
, and I followed them. The road swept us around the center of the city and out to a dubious wonderland of parking lots, amusement rides, stadiums or concert halls of some sort, and hoards of sugar-loving, roller-coaster-riding tourists. At some point on the previous day, looking at my Rand McNally, I’d started to get a bit excited about showing my great country to the Rinpoche from Russia. It was what Cecelia had asked me to do. But even if she hadn’t asked, it was the kind of thing I would have wanted to do anyway, because I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other
nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid. I love my country. But I love it the way you love a wife of many years: not because you have some sentimental notion of her perfection, but because you know her thoroughly, from the courage of the maternity room bed to the pettiness of her morning moods; from seeing her sit for weeks by her dying mother’s bedside, to watching her worry about which shoes to wear to a cocktail party given by a person she does not like. You know she has the capacity to get up at five in the morning and make you pancakes before you set off on a particularly arduous business trip, and you know she also has the capacity to say things, in the heat of an argument, that she should not say, to sneak the last piece of chocolate cake, to lose track of time and keep the rest of the family waiting for an hour, at the beach, on a burning hot afternoon. You know everything from what flavor of lip gloss she likes to what books she would bring with her to the proverbial desert island and what she believes the meaning of life to be. And then, always, there is a part of her you do not know.

It was like that with America and me. Though I was not an eager student of her past, I was a thoroughly engaged and captivated student of her present. I liked to read about what was happening in Utah or Mississippi or along the coast of southern California. When driving, I liked to listen to talk shows all across the political and religious spectrum. Much as I hated being away from Jeannie and the kids, I derived a profound pleasure from going to a booksellers’ conference in some part of the country I had never seen, walking the streets of St. Louis or Seattle and just watching how people lived, seeing what they ate, hearing how the language of Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, and Woolf sounded
in their mouths. I wanted to show some of this to Rinpoche in the way that you want to show, to a first-time guest, the new addition you’ve built on your home, get his opinion on the woodwork, the layout of the rooms, the color and design of the bathroom tiles, even if you know that his opinion will be coated in a mandatory politeness.

With Rinpoche, however, I knew nothing of the kind. If anything, I suspected that, being the ascetic, spiritual type, he’d be put off by the Hershey Attractions of this world, the roller coasters, the exhausted masses driving thousands of miles to see something their friends had seen, and then coming away vaguely dissatisfied. I loved it all, the bowling alleys and grungy greasy spoons, the grit and fluff, the Disney. That, to me, was the stuff and fiber of American life. It was Our Reality, and I had a somewhat perverse urge to hold Rinpoche’s face to it and see if his high ideals could survive it. To prove myself right—or wrong—about something I could not even articulate.

We followed a long line of cars into the Attractions Zone, as it is called, and I looked for something that would give my passenger a taste of this particular American pie without absorbing half a day’s worth of driving time. I settled on a place called the Chocolate Factory. We drove down a long entranceway. We found a parking space. We walked across the burning tar and toward a glass entrance in a sea of curious humanity and then we were encapsulated in something so clean, orderly, and purely American—the uniformed security people, the information-desk woman with her nametag and Xeroxed maps, the sound of a recorded tour echoing off the ceiling—that every particle of it might have been painted in red, white, and blue. And, of course, right there in easy reach was the merchandise area.

We opted for the fifteen-minute tour and climbed a clogged, zigzagging, carpeted walkway with the story of Milton S. Hershey, in words and pictures, on the walls. I decided that, rather than play tour guide, I’d wait for Rinpoche to ask questions. He did not. Staying close beside me in the sweaty crowd, he studied the old photographs and the tablets on which Hershey’s story was sketched out. Milton was the son of Mennonite farmers, and after leaving that life he’d tried twice to start candy businesses, in Baltimore and New York, and twice failed. He’d returned home to Pennsylvania and tried again, and soon presided over an empire of sugar treats that stretched like ten million sticky fingers across the globe. Married but unable to have children, Hershey and his bride started a school for orphan boys, which eventually admitted girls, and which eventually became a school for the underprivileged, abused, and abandoned. At the time of the chocolatier’s death in 1945, the school was on the receiving end of his entire fortune.

What better place for the money to end up, I thought. All the profits from all those Kisses and Almond Joy bars going to pay for kids whose parents had not been able, or willing, to bring them up.

I did not know how much Rinpoche understood. The tablets were small, a few pages of text at most, and with the crowds, we had ample time to read them. But he said nothing; his ordinarily expressive face betrayed no emotion.

The walkway swooped down toward two neatly coiffed college-age kids in uniform who guided us across a moving carpeted floor and into what might have passed for old-fashioned roller-coaster cars, clunky-looking wooden carriages with seats fore and aft. Rinpoche and I had a car to ourselves and sat side by side amid the cacophony of happy
voices and stentorian recordings. Now he had an enormous smile on his face. Let the show begin!

The car swiveled and slid along through a kind of fun-house of chocolate-making, replete with singing cloth cows, screens and voices providing facts about the cocoa plant, tanks of swirling chocolate soup, and conveyor belts on which thousands of naked chocolate kisses hurried past as if anxious to find their silver coats and their place on a shelf in Bangkok or Bangalore. It was a bit like a living Food Network segment, because as we glided along we were sprinkled with facts—250,000 gallons of milk a day, 60 million kisses a day, the butterfat removed at one point in the process and then put back into the mix at another—and carried along through the rich and wonderful aroma of cooking chocolate. At the end of the ride we passed a camera mounted on the wall and were instructed to smile. We did so. And then, after we’d climbed out of the contraption and negotiated the moving floor, we were offered the opportunity to purchase these glimpses of our happy selves. To this day in my workroom at home there is a photo on the wall that shows yours truly with a man in a maroon robe who looks as pleased and excited as any child in any candy store.

And, oh, the candy store! From the photo desk we marched downstairs into a sugar addict’s paradise, every imaginable chocolate confection from chocolate-chip cookies to dark chocolate, 150 different variations on the sugar vehicle dreamed up by Hershey engineers. The squeals of children spun in the air around us, the pressing of cash register buttons sang an anthem of profit. I did not hold back. A package of ROLO for Natasha, a bag of Mr. Goodbar for Jeannie, Almond Joy for Anthony, and a healthy supply of dark chocolate for myself. Rinpoche was admiring the
photograph of us and saying, “How fast! How could it happen so fast?” but seemed less than tempted by the shelves of delights.

Nevertheless, I bought a bag of Kisses and pressed them into his hands, telling him, or trying to tell him, that this, all this—the gold of the ROLO wrapper, the blue and crinkled white of Almond Joy, the little twirl of tissue erupting from the Kiss’s peak—was like the snap of firecrackers on Fourth of July, or football games on Thanksgiving—an essential Americana, a kind of national flag of my childhood. I wanted to ask him if he carried in his mind similar images from the early years in Skovorodino. Yak butter biscuits, maybe. Or cheap framed portraits of Lenin on the schoolroom wall. Or those fun days of setting kopecks on the rails and waiting for the Trans-Siberian Express to come along at dawn and mash them thin.

But I didn’t.

After leaving the shop, we joined a river of humanity making its way at tidal speed toward a sea of windshields and SUV bumpers glinting in the hot day. A parade of fossil-fuel burners crept toward the exit. Eventually we were on the road again, at last free of the mob. After passing one farmer’s field with a sign that said
EVERYONE SHALL GIVE ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF TO GOD
(
How do you know?
I wanted to shout out the window as we passed.
How is it that you claim to know?
), we saw the entrance for Interstate 76 West, curled down the ramp, and pointed the nose of the car toward the startling abundance of the American heartland.

It had been an odd morning—the dirt in my glass at breakfast, the immaculate shelves of sweets—and though I tried once or twice to start a conversation, I soon learned
that Rinpoche was not in a talkative mood. To fill the empty air I turned on the radio and found a talk show where the host was waxing eloquent about the need for torturing people. I looked across at Rinpoche to gauge his response, but, though his eyes were open, he did not seem to be listening.

West of Hershey, the state of Pennsylvania turned more severe: rough rock faces, a slag pile, steep hillsides, deep valleys, unpeopled it seemed, and not as pretty as what we had passed through earlier in the day. At one point, having returned from his daydreaming, Rinpoche wrestled with the plastic Kisses bag, and when he finally managed to tear it open, the candies sprayed out onto his lap and the floor. He laughed with his face turned up, then tidied up the silvery mess. He saved one kiss and contemplated it for quite a good while, turning it this way and that, tapping the ribbon of tissue from side to side, finally tugging on it, peeling away the foil, and then spending another good while tracing a fingertip along the smooth sides of the hard little brown dollop. At last, as if he’d prayed sufficiently over this miniature feast, he popped it into his mouth. I could see him rolling it comically from one side to the other, the eyebrows up, eyes wide, lips and cheeks working. Another minute or so of rolling and sucking and making humming noises, and he swallowed it with a loud gulp, choked and coughed for a moment, laughed at himself, and then reached across and slapped me so hard on the top of my right thigh that the car sped up.

“Kees! Kees!” he sang, and when I glanced over at him, my sister’s holy man was giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

THIRTEEN

Our driving schedule
was dictated, in large measure, by our need for food. Or
my
need for food, I should say, since Rinpoche ate very little. He even managed the impressive feat of keeping the bag of Kisses open on his lap for more than an hour without ever reaching in for a second helping. It was now midafternoon and, despite three big chunks of dark chocolate, I was in need of that international tradition known as lunch. The prospect both excited and worried me. According to the map, the closest city of any size was Altoona, not exactly famous as a culinary capital, but even that was too far off the interstate to warrant a side trip. We wouldn’t starve, I knew that. Every so often we saw billboards advertising food options at the upcoming exit, but these options were a murderous fare of salt, fat, sugar, and chemicals. It is true that I am particular about food. It is my profession, after all, and in my years at Stanley and Byrnes I’ve been lucky enough to have been exposed to some of the world’s greatest chefs and a small library of fascinating
books on growing, preparing, and consuming food. I guess it’s as natural for me to be particular about what I eat as it is for a clothing store salesperson to be picky about neckties or dresses, or a mechanic to be fussy about the make of car he drives. Another part of my pickiness comes from the fact that I grew up on boiled potatoes and beef, sauerkraut and overcooked pork, in an environment where, if your mom put an ounce of lemon rind into the apple pie, she risked being shunned for the next decade of Volunteer Fire Department Auxiliary lunches. On our one visit to a Chinese restaurant in Bismarck, my parents ordered . . . hamburgers. And so, leaving North Dakota meant, for me, opening a door onto a seemingly limitless world of culinary experience.

To balance my love of eating, I exercise a few times a week, walking a three-mile loop with Jeannie on Sunday mornings, killing half hours on the elliptical trainer at the health club a few blocks from where I work. On the road, though, there wasn’t much opportunity for exercise. Nor was there the distraction of professional and domestic chores to keep the mind away from the table. You opened the car window for a second and hunger poured in, or, if not hunger, then at least the notion of eating.

But I worried about the options there, south of Altoona and north of nowhere. Cheap, fried-to-death burgers and carbonated sugar water, a slice of wilted lettuce in the name of fiber. No, no. Not for me. And not the American cuisine I wanted for the Rinpoche, either.

At the toll booth I asked about good restaurant options thereabouts—no chains or fast food, please. The woman squinted at me as if I were a communist, then, with some reluctance, directed us to a nearby steakhouse. But I was
suspicious from the first. I sensed that the place belonged to a friend of hers, or her husband’s cousin, that there might be kickbacks involved. We found the steakhouse without trouble and went in. The menu posted on the bulletin board in the foyer was as unimaginative as a bad watercolor in a dentist’s waiting room. I ushered Rinpoche out before the hostess made her approach. He was, understandably enough, perplexed. “Can’t do it,” I said to him in the parking lot. “I’ll explain later. We’ll just shoot down into the nearest town and see if we can’t scare up something a little more interesting.”