Dinner with Buddha Read Free

had worked and sweated, no sound of the meditation bell or Rinpoche’s basso chants echoing across the wheat fields. A beautiful silence had settled over our land, a curtain of quiet broken only by the crunch of our footsteps on the gravel road and the occasional happy burst of song from a meadowlark. For a little while then it was the North Dakota of my imagination.
    â€œThings good, Dad?” my daughter asked, in her cheerful, hopeful way. She had my mother’s northern European aspect—the wide-set pale eyes, the pale freckled skin—and her own mother’s mouth, a heartbreaking mouth that stretched effortlessly into the saddest of all smiles and flexed into frown when she was troubled. She was tall, slim, athletic, beautiful to my eye, capable of great things, and I worried almost constantly that she’d wither away here in this dusty outback, remain single and unhappy, sprinting down a dead-end road into middle age.
    â€œGood,” I fibbed. “Fine. And with you?”
    â€œNice. I have what you’d probably call ‘a love interest.’ ”
    â€œWonderful! Good guy?”
    â€œOlder,” she said. “Kind. Really into meditation.”
    What leapt to my lips was:
How much older?
But I’d learned long ago to tread lightly when it came to Natasha’s love interests. I was happy she’d found someone, but she had, in this arena, a genetic similarity to her Aunt Cecelia: Both of them had loved their way through a string of unusual boyfriends—the wild, the nerdy, the addicted and arrested, handsome and not so handsome, tall, thin, stocky, short, brilliant and rather slow; men, young and not so young, who inhabited the fringes of the masculine netherworld. I’d learned to accept it and hoped now only for one outcome: that my daughter’s romantic explorations would end up where my sister’s had, with a good man who treated her well.
    So instead of probing I said, “And how’s that going? The meditation, I mean.”
    â€œRinpoche’s guiding me. He says I’m making progress but it doesn’t feel like progress. It just feels like a gradual, I don’t know, a gradual becoming more myself. I’m not afraid of the things I used to be afraid of.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    â€œSuch as Bakken creeps coming on to me in the market. Such as going out for long walks on the farm roads at night. Such as being out on my bike in a thunderstorm.”
    Keep going, I thought. Soon it will be not afraid of getting into cars with strangers, not afraid of jumping out of airplanes, not afraid of working as a guard in the state prison, not afraid of. . . . I said, “As a fearful man, I have to say I’m jealous.”
    â€œLittle things, Dad, but it’s nice. And it’s because of the meditation. Are you keeping up with your practice?”
    â€œSure,” I said. “It’s the last bastion of discipline for me. I sometimes think that, without it, I’d drown in a sea of wine and television.”
    â€œYou’ve gotten fat.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œAre you still working out?”
    â€œNot as much.”
    â€œAre you depressed, Dad?”
    â€œNot so much.”
    â€œWhat do you do all day?”
    â€œOh, you know. I meditate for twenty minutes or half an hour, morning and night. In the middle of the day I keep busy. A little tennis. Reading. TV. Seeing friends.”
    â€œYou’re depressed.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œYou should come out here and live with us. Rinpoche’s an expert on depression.”
    â€œAnd never experienced it a day in his life, I bet.”
    â€œNo, but still.”
    â€œIt’s good to be here, hon. Nice to see you in the flesh, to see Rinpoche and Aunt Seese and Shelsa. But after all these years of city life, being here is like downshifting from fourth to second. It’s very pleasant, refreshing. But it’s not the life for me, Tash. I