Breakfast With Buddha Read Free Page A

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, huh?”
    “Not so bad. They’re good kids. Just drifting out into their own orbits already. It’s natural, it’s right. Though I guess I have this image . . . I don’t know. . . .”
    “Of some perfect, endless family life?” she said. “All happiness and McDonald’s commercials?”
    “No McDonald’s, but, yeah, I guess so. Something that doesn’t just dissolve in a burst of cell phones and grumpiness, then whoosh away into biannual visits.”
    “You’re an idealist by nature, my love. I just go along, taking what comes.”
    “What comes is pretty good.”
    “More than pretty good,” she said, and then, “I’ve always thought work solved the idealist part for you. I mean, a beautiful photograph of a glistening lamb chop with purple new potatoes and asparagus. There’s some imagined eternal perfection represented there, something lasting. Your books are . . . unmottled. Is that a word?”
    “It’s the eternal part I’m thinking about, I guess.”
    “Nothing we can do about that, honey.”
    “I know, sure. But does that mean we have to just go along with everything, live like everybody else lives, by the same assumptions? Is that the best we can do?”
    “It’s your parents’ dying. You lost them, and now you’re worried about losing the children, which won’t happen.”

    “I just don’t want to look back with regret, that’s all. If there’s any chance to look back.”
    “What do you have in mind? Go and live on a Greek isle?”
    “I don’t know. At least the family would stay together longer if we lived on a Greek isle. Do things as a unit instead of flying off into iPods and e-mails and jobs on the other edge of the continent.”
    “You took a job 1,800 miles away from your parents.”
    “I know it. And I love our life, I do. I just . . . question it sometimes lately, on some level. I can’t describe it. I’ve been feeling this way for a while now, even before my parents died. Midlife, maybe. I don’t know.”
    For a few minutes we were quiet. Jasper trotted away on the scent of a porcupine or squirrel, or because he didn’t like the conversation, didn’t like hearing about death and abandonment, couldn’t imagine a life without