Dinner with Buddha by Roland Merullo Page A

Hall of Fame father. There were times when I felt, with an eerie certainty, that I wasn’t in the presence of a child at all. “Uncle Ott,” she’d asked me at one of these moments, “do you think Aunt Jeannie was reincarnated yet?”
    â€œI don’t know. What do you think?”
    â€œI think she probably was.”
    â€œWhy do you think that?”
    â€œBecause Tash came out of her body. Her wound. And if a girl like Tash was borned into a wound like Aunt Jeannie’s then Aunt Jeannie must be very, very special. And if Aunt Jeannie is that special then God won’t let her just rest and sleep and take naps. She would come back to some other wound and pretty soon help people.”
    â€œI miss her. How could I know which wound she was born into?”
    â€œYou can’t always know but maybe you’ll feel it when you meet her and then you’ll know. Like I knowed when I met Tash that we were friends a long time.”
    â€œWhen did you feel that?”
    â€œI feeled it all the times with her. Like with you. Like with Mami and Papi. Maybe one day Aunt Jeannie will be born into Tash’s wound.”
    â€œDo you feel it with Warren, too?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWith the people who come to the Center to meditate?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWith anyone else? In town?”
    â€œSia at the coffee shop. The woman, Marta, who is the wife with the farmer next to us.”
    â€œSpecial woman?”
    â€œYes.”
    These were the kinds of conversations we had. You could look at them two ways. You could suppose she was merely mimicking what she heard her mother and father say, reflecting their rather unusual (by American standards at least) worldview, repeating what she’d heard. Or, as my sister put it, you could “knock down the walls of the little room in which we’ve been taught to think” and imagine the world the way she and Rinpoche described it, a place of continual rebirth, of eternal connections, of spiritual evolution fueled by certain souls who kept returning and returning to aid the rest of us in our movement toward celestial ecstasy.
    I was, in this one regard, bipolar. The steadiest of men in every other way, in the realm of having faith in the spiritual legitimacy of my three companions I was, in those days, a waffler, a doubter, a fair-weather fan. I confess this with no small degree of shame.
    Waving good-bye to my niece through the bus window caused me an actual, physical pain. Shelsa was pressing Topo Gigio against the glass and moving him right and left, pretending to make him speak. Seese lifted a hand, blew her husband a kiss, sent me a smile and a good-luck nod. And then, in a burst of engine noise and a puff of diesel smoke, they were gone.
    When they were out of sight I sent a text to my daughter, telling her what time the bus would arrive in Dickinson and asking if all was okay. She responded immediately with this message: FINE, DAD. IN LOVE. To which I responded: GLAD ON BOTH COUNTS. MISS YOU.
    I found myself remembering Jeannie’s mother, and thinking:
If you marry him, your children will be giants.

Nine

    South and east of Deadwood the land was dry as dust, vast rolling stretches of it, good for almost nothing but looking at. Too parched for farming. Too sparsely vegetated for successful ranching. After an hour or so of driving we saw a sign, ENTERING OGLALA SIOUX RESERVATION, which, in a sad way, made perfect sense: Of all the corners of this earth into which they might have been herded, the Indians had been “given” this land, the worst and most useless in the continent, land that—once the bison were gone—nobody wanted. It was like taking over a family’s house after the family had been living there for millennia and telling them they could camp out in one corner of the basement but you were keeping the kitchen and living room and all the upstairs, destroying the garden in the back yard