Lunch with Buddha Read online

  Praise for Roland Merullo’s Breakfast with Buddha

  “Merullo is a pleasing writer, as affable as the Rinpoche [character] he creates. His gift is slipping gentle spiritual lessons into easy-reading narratives. . . . In the case of Breakfast with Buddha, you can relax and enjoy a road trip—Hershey, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and Duluth, Minnesota are all surprisingly endearing—even as you painlessly absorb the notion that life is really about spiritual growth.”

  — Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor

  “Merullo’s skill with the pen enchants the reader with a fresh awareness of how man confronts his spiritual side in a chaotic world.”

  — Judy Gigstad, Bookreporter

  “There are two journeys here, and the significant journey is not measured in miles, but in awareness; we know that it is not only the passing scenery out the window we should attend to, but to Otto's inner landscape as well . . .”

  — John Dufresne, The Boston Globe

  “Spiritual odysseys are seldom filled with baseball games, miniature golf, Mexican food and belly laughs; this one is the exception.”

  — Valerie Ryan, The Seattle Times

  “Author Roland Merullo combines philosophy, spirituality, and down-to earth characters in his tale of the adventures of a nice but somewhat cynical editor and his not-quite-welcome traveling companion . . . Breakfast with Buddha offers an entertaining and illuminating chance to experience the world through two different lenses simultaneously and stand in the position of observer, as a single life—and then many—are changed.”

  — Spirituality and Health

  “I got to liking Breakfast with Buddha more and more as I went along and was very sorry when it ended. . . .From Chaucer to Kerouac, the road trip in fiction has always been seen as more than a casual jaunt. At the very least, it's a way to gain access to the larger world, and at most it's a path to spiritual enlightenment. We can take for granted the latter will be happening here—with [Otto] the mildly disaffected food editor stuck in a car for about a week with Volya, reputed to be the incarnation of many a spiritual bigwig, including Buddha himself. (In fact, Volya isn't necessarily a proponent of any one religion.) As they drive from New Jersey to North Dakota, the two men give each other crash courses in different but not necessarily opposing ways to live . . . On finishing this book, I decided that Roland Merullo would be a great guy to take a road trip with.”

  — Carolyn See, The Washington Post

  “Merullo is a beautifully talented writer. His books are full of great feeling, but convey that feeling humbly and respectfully. . . . His prose reflects sincere spiritual practice—there’s no neediness, no unnecessary fireworks. He’s sharing what he knows, instead of shouting or preaching it. . . . [Breakfast with Buddha] is a beautiful, moving and even necessary book . . . The simplicity of the setup, the humility of the narration, Otto’s ordinariness and his understandable doubt, allows for the book’s wisdom to take root—on Otto and, on the reader. . . The closing image is one of such sudden, unexpected grace that I wiped my eyes and reread the last chapter several times to figure out how it arrived there, and still can’t say.”

  — Josh Swiller

  (author of The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness In Africa)

  Also by Roland Merullo

  Fiction

  Leaving Losapas

  A Russian Requiem

  Revere Beach Boulevard

  In Revere, In Those Days

  A Little Love Story

  Golfing with God

  Breakfast with Buddha

  American Savior

  Fidel's Last Days

  The Talk-Funny Girl

  Non Fiction

  Passion for Golf

  Revere Beach Elegy

  The Italian Summer: Golf, Food and Family at Lake Como

  Demons of the Blank Page

  Praise for Roland Merullo’s Work

  Leaving Losapas

  “Dazzling . . . thoughtful and elegant . . . lyrical yet tough-minded . . . beautifully written, quietly brilliant.”

  — Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

  A Russian Requiem

  “Smoothly written and multifaceted, solidly depicting the isolation and poverty of a city far removed from Moscow and insightfully exploring the psyches of individuals caught in the conflicts between their ideals and their careers.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  Revere Beach Boulevard

  “Merullo invents a world that mirrors our world in all of its mystery . . . in language so happily inventive and precise and musical, and plots it so masterfully, that you are reluctant to emerge from his literary dream.”

  — Washington Post Book World

  Passion for Golf: In Pursuit of the Innermost Game

  “This accessible guide offers insight into the emotional stumbling blocks that get in the way of improvement and, most importantly, enjoyment of the game.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  Revere Beach Elegy: A Memoir of Home and Beyond

  “Merullo has a knack for rendering emotional complexities, paradoxes, or impasses in a mere turn of the phrase.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  In Revere, In Those Days

  “A portrait of a time and a place and a state of mind that has few equals.”

  — The Boston Globe

  A Little Love Story

  “There is nothing little about this love story. It is big and heroic and beautiful and tragic . . . Writing with serene passion and gentle humor, Merullo powerfully reveals both the resiliency and fragility of life and love . . . It is, quite utterly, grand.”

  — Booklist

  Golfing with God

  “Merullo writes such a graceful, compassionate and fluid prose that you cannot resist the characters' very real struggles and concerns . . . Do I think Merullo is a fine, perceptive writer who can make you believe just about anything? Absolutely.”

  — Providence Journal

  Breakfast with Buddha

  “Merullo writes with grace and intelligence and knows that even in a novel of ideas it's not the religion that matters, it's the relationship . . . It’s a quiet, meditative, and ultimately joyous trip we're on.”

  — Boston Globe

  Fidel’s Last Days

  “A fast-paced and highly satisfying spy thriller . . . Merullo takes readers on a fictional thrill ride filled with so much danger and drama that they won't want it to end.”

  — Boston Globe

  American Savior

  “Merullo gently satirizes the media and politics in this thoughtful commentary on the role religion plays in America. This book showcases Merullo's conviction that Jesus' real message about treating others with kindness is being warped by those who believe they alone understand the Messiah.”

  — USA Today

  The Italian Summer: Golf, Food & Family at Lake Como

  “This travel memoir delivers unadulterated joy . . . [Merullo's] account of those idyllic weeks recalls Calvin Trillin in its casual tone, good humor, affable interactions with family, and everyman's love of regional food and wine . . . A special travel book for a special audience.”

  —Booklist

  The Talk-Funny Girl

  “Merullo not only displays an inventive use of language in creating the Richards’ strange dialect but also delivers a triumphant story of one lonely girl’s resilience in the face of horrific treatment.”

  — Booklist

  Lunch with Buddha

  Roland Merullo

  AJAR Contemporaries

  Lunch with Buddha

  AJAR Contemporaries

  [email protected]

  PFP, Inc

  144 Tenney Street

  Georgetown, M
A 01833

  AJAR Contemporaries eBook Edition, October 2012

  © 2012 Roland Merullo

  All Rights Reserved

  Location and author photography © 2012 Amanda Merullo

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN-10: 0984834583

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9848345-8-7

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Merullo, Roland.

  Lunch with Buddha [electronic resource] : [a novel] / [by] Roland Merullo. -- AJAR Contemporaries ebook ed.

  1 online resource.

  Title from title screen.

  Sequel to: Breakfast with Buddha.

  Issued also in print.

  Mode of access: Internet.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9848345-8-7

  ISBN-10: 0-9848345-8-3

  1. Middle-aged men--United States--Fiction. 2. Editors--United States--Fiction. 3. Rinpoches--Fiction. 4. Buddhists--Fiction. 5. Voyages and travels--United States--Fiction. 6. Self-actualization (Psychology)--Fiction. 7. Spiritual life--Fiction. 8. Electronic books. I. Title.

  PS3563.E748 L86 2012eb

  813/.54

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Peter and Nanette Sarno

  Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the

  limits of the world.

  Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

  The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

  Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

  1

  JFK was an asylum, a processing plant, a study in chaos—snaking lines, recorded announcements, furious passengers with their taped-up baggage, clerks fielding complaints in the midst of the madness. For the better part of an hour my daughter and son and I stood there in a series of queues, mute and helpless as cattle in the pens. It wasn’t the meatpacking plant that awaited us, only a flight from New York to Seattle, but with each new checkpoint I felt that another piece of our humanity was being stripped away. It was all necessary, of course; that went without saying. But set against the background of our trip, and the reason we were flying, the whole sad security dance seemed especially bothersome to me on that day. Invasive. Repulsive. Borderline obscene.

  And then, at last, we were done with the processing, searched, cleared, identified, sent down a narrow walkway and a narrower aisle, seated, strapped in. The palm of fate, unreadable, pressed against the oval window. Flight attendants with their mechanical hand gestures, the pilot with his doubtless drawl—I did not want to go. When the engines roared to life and we went speeding down the runway I closed my eyes and mouthed a prayer and felt my arm being kicked by a very small foot. We were in a battle with inertia and old assumptions, the plane thrusting itself forward and up, folding in its wheels and banking west, over the city both of us had loved.

  It was Delta Roulette: my children, Natasha, twenty-two, and Anthony, almost twenty, had for some reason been given seats in the row behind me. I was there in 32 C next to a Tanzanian-American black-haired beauty who held her little son, Levi, on her lap, as we angled and bumped through the cumulus. Levi had been on the planet exactly seven months. The chubby cheeks and wondrous eyes, the mood shifts from bubbly to despondent, the diaper changes, bottles, and soft toys, the crying, the ecstasy at being bounced up and down on his mother’s lap—it was all right there, a catalogue of memories. For a moment I thought about turning around and saying something to Tasha and Anthony about it. I wanted to tell them how well I remembered them at that age, how much Jeannie and I had enjoyed the challenge of raising them, how exhausting it could be, how much meaning it had given our lives. But our two miracles were buried in their computer screens. A film, an e-mail that had to be sent the second we landed, a dozen YouTube clips showing favorite music groups. Anything to keep from thinking about the fourth person who should have been with us on that afternoon.

  I leaned back and tried one of the meditation techniques my sister’s husband, the famous spiritual master Volya Rinpoche, had taught me. Let the memories go, I told myself. Let the thoughts appear and disappear like ripples in a quiet bay. Let go of the sorrow and bitterness, release the sweet past. It worked for a while, until the plane began to bounce and shimmy, and Levi serenaded us with a patch of loud misery. His mother prepared the formula bottle. I stared down at the green buckled hills of western New Jersey. God’s country.

  My children and I were headed to Washington State to distribute my wife’s ashes, according to her wishes, near the banks of a certain stream on the eastern slope of the Cascade range. I am not a person who has much affection for ceremonies, and we were still buried to our necks in grief, and so I’d put it off for as long as I could—as long, in fact, as my neighbor Levi had been on the planet, almost to the day. Jeannie had died in the first week of January, and here we were at the end of a steaming July, just getting around to it.

  “Do you have children?” Levi’s mother asked.

  “These two specimens behind us,” I hooked a thumb over my shoulder. “Leaving for college soon.”

  Levi, who’d been bouncing and bouncing between gulps from his bottle, spit up enthusiastically all down his bib.

  “Empty nest,” his mother said, as she cleaned him. “I can’t imagine.”

  “Well, I’m agitating for an early pregnancy or two.”

  My sense of humor, I’ve been told, isn’t for everyone. Fortunately, she was busy balancing Levi with one hand and folding the soiled bib into a plastic bag with the other. I remembered the drill. I wanted to offer to hold the boy for a moment but worried it might be taken wrong. We were flying over Pennsylvania by then.

  I turned and gazed out the window, pondering the various forms loneliness can take. The loneliness of adolescence, on days when it seems your friends have abandoned you and your parents inhabit another universe. The loneliness of the early, mid, and sometimes late twenties, when it seems you’ll never find a mate, a career, a route through this world. The loneliness—I had known little of this—of a marriage in which you feel distant and misunderstood, mismatched, battered by regret. For so many years, surrounded every day by wife, children, and co-workers, I’d managed to keep all fear of loneliness out of my thoughts, to forget what it felt like, the grind and gnaw, the darkness. I was protected, confident, happily busy, girded with love. And then came Jeannie’s diagnosis, her gradual, torturous decline, her final breath, and in what seemed like an hour the walls of the fortress had crumbled. Another few weeks now and the kids would be gone. Our house, already so big, would turn into an immense echo chamber of memories.

  You wonder, at such moments, if there will be another chapter to the story, if you’ll somehow survive the solitary passage across this cold land. On good days, that seems unlikely; on bad days, impossible. Still, there must have been the tiniest seed of hope turning in the dark soil of our bereavement. I spotted it, at moments, in my children: an unguarded laugh, a plan for next summer. I felt it, only rarely, in myself. Looking back, I see that this hope had something to do with my odd sister and her even odder husband, though I never would have admitted it at the time. I will go into more detail later, but for now let me say that Cecelia and Rinpoche seemed to live on the far side of some line that marked the boundary of ordinary American reality. In the bottom of my luggage I had packed a small idea: maybe, somewhere in that strange territory, the sun still shone.

  2

  Seattle’s is the only airport I’ve ever been to where you have to walk eleven miles and take three escalators and a train in order to retrieve your bags. No doubt the architects wanted to make sure you were in shape before you got to the heavy lifting. But our belongings had arrived in g
ood order, and my son and daughter seemed happy to be off the plane. They were busy with their phones, checking, asking, answering, as though an elaborate web of electronic threads reached out from their hearts into the world, and those fragile, silken links needed to be monitored every few seconds to make sure none of them snapped.

  We rode a shuttle bus ten minutes to the car rental building, with Seattle’s snow-topped mountains hanging in the distance above a thin fog. I let the young woman at the desk talk me into an upgrade: A black Lincoln MKX with leather interior and a dashboard you had to spend twenty minutes looking at in order to understand. Why not? We had money enough. The clerk had offered a drastic discount. And the decision brought a spark of pleasure to the eyes of my offspring, a moment of forgetfulness, a wry twist of the mouth at their father’s always-entertaining lack of common sense. Instead of arguing over the front seat as they normally would have done, they both sat in back. I managed to start the vehicle and adjust the mirrors, and we headed out of the lot and north on I-5, past the stadium and the Space Needle and Seattle’s silvery downtown, in the direction of Whidbey Island.

  “One of our famous Ringling Family Plans, huh, Dad?” Anthony said, during a pause in his texting. There was a slight edge to the remark. He’d made no secret of the fact that he thought the idea of a family ash-spreading ceremony completely absurd.