Breakfast With Buddha Read Online Free PDF Page A

be off to other pastures.
    So, though I’d heard perfectly clearly when she said Volya Rinpoche would ride with me, I was pretty certain it was just another of the well-intentioned but odd ideas that twirled inside Cecelia’s gray matter for a few seconds or a few days at a time then dissolved into the ether.
    “Show me your garden,” I said, because that was always a safe subject and a sure distraction. With the bare-armed, maroon-robed Rinpoche floating along somewhere behind us, we strolled down to the sunniest section of my sister’s pleasantly cluttered back yard and inspected her plot of vegetables. Cecelia is a world-class gardener, has been since my parents gave her dominion over a twenty-foot-square piece of tilled back yard when she was six. Until the wildest of her teenage years set in, she’d practically wallpapered her room with ribbons from the Stark County 4-H competition. Tomatoes, potatoes, onions, lettuce, four kinds of squash—she seemed almost to will bushel baskets of vegetables from our black soil, undeterred by the scorching summer sun and brief growing season.
    “Magnificent,” I said, as we stepped single-file along the rows of yellow peppers and cherry tomatoes, Swiss chard and baby eggplant. “This reminds me of when you were a girl. You always had a magic touch with gardens, Seese. You still do.”

    I turned and saw how happy and proud she was, her beautiful face giving off a summery glow. She plucked two cherry tomatoes and handed one each to Rinpoche and me.
    “You don’t have to wash them,” she said. “They’re completely organic.”
    “I expected nothing less.” The tomato was like a grenade of flavor bursting against the teeth.
    “It’s almost lunchtime. I could make us a nice salad. I have some good bread. Okay?”
    “Fine, sure,” I said. The bread would taste like compressed sawdust, but I consoled myself with the idea that we could stop for something soon after we got on the road. I love to eat, love everything about food—the growing, the preparation, food photography, restaurant design, the history of the menu in various parts of the planet—and, despite a regular exercise regimen, I have the modest bubble of a belly that testifies to my passion. One of the promises I’d made to myself about the trip was that I would indulge Cecelia’s culinary quirks but not at the expense of my own. There are lines one does not cross.
    She picked a handful of vegetables, lifted her skirt into a kind of bowl in front of her, and carried them into the house that way. For a moment the man I thought of then as Volvo Rinpoche and I were face to face in a faint gust of patchouli. He was giving me a direct look from out of his rough face. “Nice tomato, eh?” I remarked, and he lifted his eyebrows and smiled widely, as if I’d said something very clever. It occurred to me—perhaps because he hadn’t yet spoken a word—that his English might be weak.
    The house was messy but in a welcoming way, mismatched vintage furniture, some kind of Nepali or Indian tapestries on the walls, statues of deities from various traditions,crystals, candles, bird feathers, potted aloe plants. It felt more like our North Dakota farmhouse than my own suburban home ever did, and I experienced a twinge of memory about Mom and Pop. It occurred to me then—just the most fleeting of thoughts—that my return to North Dakota on this particular errand might not be such a simple matter after all.
    We sat in Cecelia’s kitchen at her wonderful old white metal table with its chipped porcelain top. She served Rinpoche first, and generally looked at and spoke to him as if she were the county chairwoman of the Catholic Daughters and he was the Pope. But we all had equal portions of an exquisitely fresh salad, mismatched mugs of iced green tea, and two slices of pressed sawdust . . . and to my great relief there were no prayers said over the food, no hand-holding, no chants, no blessings of any kind. Rinpoche