Dinner with Buddha by Roland Merullo

you don’t forget me, Papi,” as if there were one chance in twenty billion that he could. I remembered, in a college philosophy class, being introduced to the idea that it was the pleasure of sex that ensured the survival of our species. God, Nature, the Random Whirl of Molecules—our professor left the source of the design up to our individual belief systems, but made the point that the ecstasy attached to the sex drive—“more powerful than any other impulse,” as she put it—was the force that kept the earth populated with human beings. Obvious enough, it seemed to me, though I have to say it wasn’t something I’d thought about before I enrolled in Professor Spencer’s Philosophy 102. I’ve pondered her words over the years and I’m sure she was right. It can’t be an accident that there’s so much pleasure in the act that preserves the species. Life wants to keep itself going, or the Grand Designer wants to keep it going. Either way, it works.
    But on the sidewalk there in Deadwood I had the strange urge to locate Dr. Spencer, write her a postcard, and say, “The affection of small children doesn’t hurt the cause, either.” It’s a different kind of pleasure, of course, but something turns over in the heart of an adult in the presence of a young child. No doubt it’s part of the reason why, all over the world, we celebrate birth the way we do. There’s magic in the child spirit. It’s more than just the cute remarks and mispronunciations, more even than the completely unself-conscious embraces and abundance of innocent physical contact, the smiles, the laughs, the kisses. There is an energy there, a
pureness,
I want to say, an absolute essence that hasn’t yet been messed with by the pains of grown-up life. In troubled families, in kids who’ve been abused, that essence is trampled on very early, but even in the healthiest families it soon fades. Doubt intervenes. Comparison rears its ugly head. We enter a period of biological competition for a mate, a drive set so deeply in us that nothing can stop or alter it. I remembered a scrap from my Bible classes: “Unless ye become like little children. . . .” Some people I’d met—Rinpoche was at the top of this list—managed to preserve that childishness, that untrammeled self-expression, into adulthood. But most of my fellow Americans were half-crushed by the passage of time. Our spirits were dampened, twisted, mottled, trimmed. I don’t mean we all turned into semi-humans, but, well, speaking for myself at least, there was some leaching out of the vibrancy, the joy, the faith in my absolute uniqueness, in my claim to part ownership of this earth.
    Shelsa was such a pleasure to be around. Even forgetting the odd and special aspects—the strange morning gazes, the seeming ability to know things she had no real way of knowing, to warm or cool herself by will, the hours sitting so still in the yard that birds landed on her shoulders and joined in the contemplative fun—even forgetting all that (and it wasn’t easy to forget)—she was like sunlight in every room she entered. Once or twice in any given day you’d see a spark of “normalcy” in her: She’d whine or fidget, make demands, complain. But these moments were like highlights of spice in a glass of good wine. Complexities that added to the richness. The rest of the time she was upbeat, curious, smart, warm as the summer fields. And this was especially true, for some reason, with her only uncle. She touched me whenever she could—hugs, kisses, quick back massages if my shoulders and neck were within reach. When we walked from car to restaurant or hotel, she almost always reached up and took hold of my hand, looked at me as if I were a better man than I knew myself to be, as if I actually deserved to be an uncle to such a creature, as if I carried around the reputation of a