Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

I’d started to get a bit excited about showing my great country to the Rinpoche from Russia. It was what Cecelia had asked me to do. But even if she hadn’t asked, it was the kind of thing I would have wanted to do anyway, because I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid. I love my country. But I love it the way you love a wife of many years: not because you have some sentimental notion of her perfection, but because you know her thoroughly, from the courage of the maternity room bed to the pettiness of her morning moods; from seeing her sit for weeks by her dying mother’s bedside, to watching her worry about which shoes to wear to a cocktail party given by a person she does not like. You know she has the capacity to get up at five in the morning and make you pancakes before you set off on a particularly arduous business trip, and you know she also has the capacity to say things, in the heat of an argument, that she should not say, to sneak the last piece of chocolate cake, to lose track of time and keep the rest of the family waiting for an hour, at the beach, on a burning hot afternoon. You know everything from what flavor of lip gloss she likes to what books she would bring with her to the proverbial desert island a...