All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (14 page)

M
ARY’S
D
AD

I
WONDER ABOUT
J
ESUS’S MATERNAL GRANDFATHER.
Mary’s Dad. He’s never mentioned, but he must have existed. Whatever your theological position, the Bible was peopled with human beings just like the rest of us.

Imagine.

Mary’s Dad comes home from work one day. His wife and his teenage daughter are sitting at the kitchen table. His wife looks grim. The very air of the room feels heavy. Mary has her head in her arms, weeping.
Welcome home, Daddy.

“So?”

“She’s pregnant,” moans the wife.

“So? Joseph, I suppose? They are betrothed, after all.”

“Oh, no. That would be too easy. Your daughter doesn’t do easy.”

“Who, then?”

“She says . . . I swear to God she says . . . get this: ‘An Angel of the Lord came to me in the night.’ She claims a guy wearing feathers snuck into her room and did what he did.”

“Right.”

“Not only that, she says the baby’s real father is God.”

“Right.”

“What do you mean, ‘Right’—did you
hear
what I
said
?”

Actually, no. The father has not really been paying attention. This day-end crisis reporting happens all the time. He comes home tired from work. His wife and daughter are having a scene in the kitchen. She said this. She did that. I did not. Yes you did. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Suddenly, the father’s brain recognizes what his ears have heard.

“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU SAY?”

It wasn’t the last time he said that.

For years afterward it was the same. Jesus’s maternal grandfather would come home from work. His wife would be waiting. “Well, Grandpa, guess what he did today, your grandson.”

Water into wine, walking on water, loaves and fishes, healing here, healing there, and all the rest. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

It must have made it hard for the old man to sit quietly by while the rest of his friends bragged about their grandchildren. “That’s nothing,” he would say, “Wait until you hear this. You won’t believe it.” And they never did.

I can testify on this score. Nobody ever believes what a grandfather says about his grandchildren. Nobody even wants to know. And it must be even worse if you claim your grandson is the Anointed One and the Son of God, who walks on water.

Right.

M
OTHS

A
SUMMER’S EVENING.
The front porch of Grandfather’s farmhouse. By the light of an aged and sputtering lantern, I am playing a cutthroat game of Old Maid with five card sharks under the age of ten. Neighbors’ kids and their friends. I am the “baby-sitter,” from my point of view, and the latest “sucker” to play cards with them, as they see it.

We are eating popcorn laced with grape jelly, and knocking back straight shots of milk right out of the carton, which is being solemnly passed from hand to hand. We’re all wearing cowboy hats and chewing on kitchen matches, picking our teeth. That’s the rule—hats and toothpicks—you must look
serious
when you play cards.

And these are hard core bull-goose card whippers. I have been the Old Maid three times running, and am down to nine M&M’s and four pennies in my pot. We are all cheating every chance we get. One of them has an extra deck and is passing cards under the table. I can’t prove it, but that’s what I think. Anyhow, what saved me from utter ruin at the hands of this criminal element were moths.

A flock of moths were corkscrewing around the Coleman lantern. Every once in a while one would hit the hot spot and go
zzssshh
and spin out and crash like a fighter plane in a bad combat movie. Finally, one zerked out of orbit into the nearest spider’s web, and the spider mugged, rolled, wrapped, and sucked the lifejuice out of this poor moth so fast and so mercilessly it stopped the Old Maid game dead. A Green Beret ranger could learn something about the garrote from this eight-legged acrobat with the poison mouth.

The kids loved it. Encouraged by this homicidal scene, one of the boys leaves the table, rolls up a sheet of newspaper, and starts a king-hell massacre on the rest of the circling moths. Knocking them out of the air like a heavy hitter at batting practice, and then smashing them flat on the table, leaving little furry smudges and broken parts.

I leapt to the defense of the moths. It’s bad enough that the lantern hypnotizes them into kamikaze runs and that spiders zap them into lunch meat, but small boys with newspapers are excessive handicaps to have to overcome.

“Why are you killing the poor moths?”

“Moths are
bad
,” says he.

“Everybody knows
that
,” shouts another.

“Sure, moths
eat
your clothes.”

I could not sway them. They were convinced.
All
moths are
bad. All
butterflies are
good.
Period. Moths and butterflies are not the same thing. Moths sneak around in the dark munching your sweater and are ugly. Butterflies hang out with flowers in the daytime and are pretty. Never mind any facts or what silkworm moths are responsible for or what poisonous butterflies do. With a firmness that would have made John Calvin proud, moths were condemned, now and forevermore, amen. Out of the mouths of babes may come gems of wisdom, but also garbage.

That ended the Old Maid game. I stomped off, telling them I wouldn’t play cards with killers, and they shouted they wouldn’t play with someone who ate all the grape jelly while nobody was looking. I went to bed thinking if the future is in the hands of maniacs like these, we’re in trouble.

The next morning the youngest kid came to me with a large dead moth in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. “Look” says he, “this moth looks like a little teddy bear with wings and it has and feathers on its head.”

“You like teddy bears?” I ask.

“Yes, I like teddy bears.”

“You like small flying teddy bears with feathers on their head?”

“Yes,” says he, “I think I do.”

One must, sometimes at least, practice what one preacheth, and if one should look at moths without prejudice and with grace, one may be forced to reconsider small boys in a somewhat more generous light. Some moths can make silk. Some small boys can make sense. And know a tiny flying teddy bear when they see one.

N
EAR
-D
EATH
E
XPERIENCE

I
T IS SAID
that people don’t like to talk about death. Yet in just one afternoon I heard people say: “Your mother will kill you if you wear that outside the house.” “Working overtime is murder.” “I laughed so hard I thought I’d die.” “My feet are killing me.” And “Good luck—knock ’em dead.”

Perhaps it’s just that my mental monitor has been tuned to notice these phrases because a friend and I have been talking about near-death experiences.

He’s a physician and aware of how well documented are the reports of those who believe they have died for a short time, crossed over into some other realm, and returned. Recently his own heart failed during surgery, and in the moments when he was being revived he had a classic near-death experience. Now he’s deeply mystified by what happened and doesn’t know what to make of it.

What is certain is the affect of the event. He’s no longer afraid of death, for one thing. And he’s living what most people would call a much higher quality of life—no longer so work-driven and in a hurry. He’s moved from the fast lane to the slow lane of existence. His wife says a small dose of death improved his life.

Have you ever had a near-death experience? I have. Several times recently. Not quite the same as my physician friend. But powerful enough to get my attention and make me think hard about life.

This summer, driving through northern California, I noticed that a back door of my car was not completely closed. It took me about fifteen seconds to pull over to the side of the road, lean over into the back seat, and slam the door shut. As I drove on I rounded a curve to find that the driver of a small sports car had just shot through an intersection and hit an oncoming tractor-trailer truck so hard that he wedged his car underneath the truck, taking the top off the car and the driver. The impact jack-knifed the truck into my lane. If I had not stopped for a few seconds to close my car door, I would have been part of a deadly accident.

A week later, driving on across Nevada, I was a minute late on a curve where a huge tanker truck had lost its brakes, crossed my lane, and rolled over. If I hadn’t taken time to wash my windshield at the last gas station, I’d have crashed into him head-on at death-dealing high speed.

I don’t think I’m obsessing—just noticing anew what’s always so close by.

I think of such things as I roll along in ease and comfort on a two-lane highway at 55 mph, passing hundreds of oncoming trucks and cars by about three feet—sometimes less. The slightest little twist of the wheel by me or them and my life is over.

Flying along at 37,000 feet in a jet, looking down at the landscape, I press my nose against what looks like a very thin sheet of scratched plastic. There’s a little space and another very thin sheet of scratched plastic. After that there is only space—the air—whipping by at 500 mph at many degrees minus zero. If the plastic fails—it’s the end of me—sucked into oblivion through a very small hole. Death by extrusion.

In my travels I’ve been to Gettysburg and Auschwitz and Hiroshima. I’ve stood in the very places where thousands died horrible deaths. Only the time frame was different. If I had been in the same place at that time I would be where they are now. Dead.

Awake in bed late last night, I watched the covers gently rise and fall as my sleeping wife breathed in and out. There was a slight pause at the top and bottom of the breathing. If it were not for the continuation of some unbelievably complex neuro-chemical reactions, each breath could be her last. I’m thinking that if her heart muscle does not squeeze again, our time together is finished. She breathed again. Alive. I considered waking her up to tell her all this. She’d kill me if I did.

Do I believe in near-death experiences? Yes.

Life
is
a near-death experience.

The leading cause of
death
is
life
.

Is there life after death? I’m dying to find out.

M
USHROOMS

T
HE FIRST TIME
was at Aunt Violet’s apartment near Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., the summer I turned thirteen. I had come by train all the way from Waco, Texas, to visit the Big City on the Potomac. Aunt Violet was a hard core social climber, a lovable eccentric, a heroine in an airplane crash, and an aspiring gourmet—and she thought my mother was a twit. All of which endeared Aunt Violet to me. Aunt Violet and I got along just fine. Until the night of the Big Dinner.

The lineup included a senator, a couple of generals, and assorted foreigners with their assorted ladies. A very large deal, indeed, for a kid from Waco who had been upholstered for the occasion by Aunt Violet with a striped seersucker suit and a bow tie.
Très chic!
Glorious me!

Anyhow. Having asked if I could help with dinner, I was handed a paper bag and told to wash the contents and slice them salad-thin. In the bag were mushrooms. Frilly-edged, mottled-brown, diseased-looking creepy things. Fungus.

Now I had seen mushrooms and knew where they grew. In dark slimy places in the cow barn and the chicken yard at home. Once some grew out of a pair of tennis shoes I left in my gym locker over the summer. And fungus I knew because I had it between my toes from wearing the same tennis shoes every day for a year. But it had never occurred to me to
handle
mushrooms, much less wash and slice and
eat
them.
(My father told me Washington was a strange and wicked place, and now I understood what he meant.)
So I quietly put the whole bag down the trash chute, thinking it was a joke on the country-boy-come-to-the-city.

Guess they must have been
some
mushrooms, considering how old Aunty Violet carried on when she found out. To this day I’m convinced that’s why she left me out of her will when she died. I had no class.

I confess that I still regard mushrooms and mushroom eaters with a good deal of suspicion. Oh, I’ve acquired the necessary veneer of pretentious sophistication all right—enough to eat the things when invited out to eat and to keep my opinions to myself, so I’m cool and all. But I still don’t understand about mushrooms and mushroom eaters—not entirely, anyhow.

In fact, there are a whole lot of things I don’t understand about entirely—some large, some small. I keep a list, and the list gets longer and longer as I get older and older. For example, here are a few mysteries I added this year:

Why are grocery carts made with one wheel that has a mind of its own and runs cockeyed to the other three?

Why do so many people close their eyes when they brush their teeth?

Why do people believe that pushing an elevator button several times will make the car come quicker?

Why can’t we just spell it “orderves” and get it over with?

Why do people drop a letter in the mailbox and then open the lid again to see if it really went down?

Why are there zebras?

Why do people put milk cartons back into the fridge with just a tiny bit of milk left in the bottom?

Why aren’t there any traditional Halloween carols?

Why does every tree seem to have one old stubborn leaf that just won’t let go?

Is the recent marketing of cologne for dogs a sign of anything?

I know. Those aren’t what you’d call industrial-strength mysteries. All the big-ticket things I don’t understand are at the beginning of the list, and have been for a long time. Things like electricity and how homing pigeons do what they do and why you can’t get to the end of rainbows. And even further up toward the beginning of the list of things I don’t understand are the real big ones. Like why people laugh and what art is really for and why God doesn’t fix some things or finish the job. And at the top of the list is why is there life, anyway, and how come I have to die?

Which brings me back to the subject of mushrooms. They were in this salad I was served for New Year’s dinner, and I got to wondering about mushrooms again. So I got the encyclopedia out and read up on them a little. Fungi they are—the fruiting body, the sporophore of fungi. The dark underworld of living things—part of death, disease, decay, rot. Things that make their way in the world by feeding upon decaying matter. Yeast, smuts, mildews, molds, mushrooms—maybe one hundred thousand different kinds, maybe more, nobody knows for sure.

They’re everywhere. In the soil, the air, in lakes, seas, river, rain, in food and clothing, inside you and me and everybody else—doing their thing. Without fungi there’s no loaf of bread or jug of wine or even thou. Bread, wine, cheese, beer, good company, rare steaks, fine cigars—all moldy. “The fungi,” says the big book, “are responsible for the disintegration of organic matter and the release into the soil or atmosphere of the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus that would forever be locked up in dead plants and animals and all people as well.” Fungi—midwives between death and life and death and life again and again and yet again.

There is a terrible and wondrous truth being worked out here. Namely, that all things live only if something else is cleared out of the path to make way. No death; no life. No exceptions. Things must come and go. People. Years. Ideas. Everything. The wheel turns and the old is cleared away as fodder for the new.

So. I picked at the mushrooms in that New Year’s salad and ate them with respect if not enthusiasm. Wondering at what is going and coming. Quietly awed into silence by what I know but cannot always express. Borne by grace downstream into the great pool of The-Way-It-Is.