Breakfast With Buddha by Roland Merullo Page B

Forces Recruiting Center. On the right, in the windows of what looked to be a turn-of-the-century office building, JESUS IS LORD was spelled out in large capital letters, with a five-foot-tall poster of a bearded white man from a place where, to the best of my understanding, the men had been, in his day, bearded and brown. Now, I saw these things—the recruiting center and the window-sized letters—almost at the same time, but I do not mean to imply that anyone in Bedford had wanted me to do so, had tried to link Jesus and the military. But there was a linkage all the same, in the America through which I was driving my new friend. It made me uneasy. As I said, I consider myself a Christian, which means I hold Jesus up as a sort of model for how to behave in the world. My father and two uncles were decorated Korean War veterans, and a cousin lost a leg in Vietnam—so I have a pretty good appreciation of and respect for military people and their families. But something was going on in my America in those years, somewave of bad thinking that even a middle-of-the-road type like me could not be at peace with. My colleagues at Stanley and Byrnes were guilty of ignoring religion, maybe, or dismissing it. But there was another segment of Americans that used it—via a process I did not fully understand—as a springboard to a kind of aggressive ethnocentrism, as if there was obviously a God, and the God was obviously Jesus and only Jesus, and he obviously loved the United States of America more than any other nation in his millions of universes, and therefore any military action we took must have Jesus’ blessing. I could not swallow this, and had become sensitized to it, and so, driving into Bedford, it was on my mind.
    We pulled to the curb in front of a tourist information office. Inside, there was a poster advertising a talk by a man whose life had been altered forever when he discovered levitation, so obviously Bedford had more levels to it than I’d at first supposed. My hopes for a decent meal lifted. The couple who presided over the tourist office were as friendly as could be. The woman came out from behind the counter and listened to my short rant about chains and healthy food, smiled at Rinpoche, who was standing peacefully off to one side like an embarrassed spouse, and directed us to a place called the Green Harvest, only a couple of blocks away.
    It was hot. I was ravenous by that late hour, tired from the road, big questions about war and love spinning through my thoughts.
    The Green Harvest was a find. Wonderfully original oil paintings on the walls, an airy, sunny atmosphere, a screen curtain keeping out the bugs and letting in whatever coolair was to be found in that part of Pennsylvania on that afternoon. Behind the counter, a young woman presided, and it turned out that this was her first day on the job; she was backed up by a slightly older woman who seemed to own the place. Iced coffee? Yes! Hummus plate? Yes again! Hummus plate with olive tapenade, some kind of cream-cheesy pineapple spread, an excellent fresh salad, even whole wheat pita bread! A magnificent surprise! A find! Rinpoche and I sat at a thickly shellacked table, the young woman served us identical meals, and all was well.
    All was well, that is, until, from beneath the mysterious folds of his garment (he had two maroon robes, I later learned; he’d wash one in the sink or tub every other day and hang it up in his room to dry) Rinpoche drew a piece of white paper. We were finished with the hummus by this point, and savoring the last sips of the excellent strong coffee, and he pulled out the sheet of typing paper, folded to one-fourth its size, and handed it across to me without comment.
    “What’s this?”
    He shrugged, smiled shyly. I thought it might be a poem he’d scratched out the night before, thanking me for my generosity in agreeing to take him west, or for helping him in his struggles to master English. Or perhaps it was some