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engaging, affable, and less cynical, by a factor of three, than most of my Manhattan colleagues. But Cecelia’s syrupy condescension, and Rinpoche’s lippy grin, and this good man with the broom and dustpan sweeping grit from the front of an old textile mill as though he were dusting a sacred icon—the combination made me feel like a curmudgeon.
    In any case, thanks to the joyful sweeper, we found the entrance to 80 West without any further trouble andwere soon humming along the interstate with the bridges and bricks of greater New York already giving way to the greenery of western New Jersey. My plan was simple: maximize time on the fast highways, maximize hours behind the wheel, get to North Dakota in three days or less, drop off the Volvo Rinpoche, do my business, and then enjoy a leisurely ride home, complete with fine meals and maybe a modest adventure that I could take back as material for office conversations. People would ask about my time away, my big trip. I wouldn’t have to mention the guru, could talk about wading in the upper reaches of the Delaware, or a phenomenal little trattoria I’d stumbled upon in the wilds of western Indiana.
    At the same time, though, I was determined to be civil and decent to my traveling companion. Here is a lesson I learned long ago, and which my kids remind me of whenever I need reminding: When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable. So I would be decent, I’d be perfectly polite. I’d give Mr. Rinpoche a taste of solid old midwestern American hail-fellow-well-met.
    “So,” I said, with the car already on cruise control and sailing past lumbering eighteen-wheelers, “tell me something about what it’s like to be a Rinpoche. Am I pronouncing it right?”
    He swiveled his shaved head so that the muscles of his longshoreman’s neck flexed, and he fixed me with a gaze that might have come from Natasha surveying the clumsy eyebrow piercing of a new sophomore girl. As if to make up for the look, he smiled. Then he turned his eyes forward out the windshield and chuckled, and it was a low, mucusy, raspy chuckle, which floated across the seat and went onfor longer than would have been polite in most circles. In fact, it went on to the point where I started to believe that he was laughing at me. Just at that moment he stopped, sighed somewhat sadly, and said, “Boring life,” though it sounded almost like wife in his pronunciation. “Most very boring, boring life.” And then he chuckled for another few seconds.
    I was undecided at that point as to whether I liked or disliked the man. But I pressed on in a friendly tone: “Oh, come on. Seese says you’re a big shot. You have centers all over the world. That doesn’t sound boring to me.”
    “Boring, boring,” he repeated, and coughed up some phlegm.
    “No, really. Tell me what you do. I want to know.”
    “Want to know? Really?”
    “Absolutely.”
    Again the swiveled head, the look, a last gurgle or two of the mucusy chuckle. “I sit,” he said, and he lifted his coarse hands helplessly off his thighs and let them fall back again, two little slaps.
    “Not good for the shape,” I said. “You know, you sit all day you can get . . . wide. At our age, especially. My age, anyway.”
    Rinpoche seemed to hear none of this ridiculous patter. The hills to either side of the road were growing steeper now as we moved closer to the Pennsylvania border. He seemed taken with them. Wherever it was that he came from, they didn’t have hills like this, apparently.
    “How old are you, anyway?”
    He shrugged.
    “No, come on. If we’re going to spend a few days together on the road we ought to be able to talk about such things.”

    “You should get off the fast road,” he said.
    “What? What fast road?” I thought he was making a comment about my hectic but satisfying career. I heard this remark as a preliminary foray into the terrain of spiritual advice, and I was having none