All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (19 page)

T
HE
G
UY
N
EXT
D
OOR

F
OR SEVERAL YEARS
I lived on a steep hillside in a decrepit summer cottage that had what a real estate agent called “charm.” Which meant it was a shack with a view.

In keeping with the spirit of the house, I let the yard go “natural,” letting what wanted to be there
be
there and take care of itself without any help from me. I remember announcing from the front porch to all living things in the yard: “You’re all on your own. Good luck.”

Up the hill above me lived Mr. Washington. In a sleek ranch-style-and-shingle dwelling with a yard kept like a combination golf course and arboretum. It was his pride and joy. An older man, insurance agent, and a mighty cooking champion when it came to barbecued ribs and brisket.

Mr. Washington was also Black.

And I am not. (I’m more putty-colored, actually.)

It was the late sixties, and I was an agitated activist, into civil rights, peace, and being obsessively liberal about anything you cared to mention. Mr. Washington was into—well, I’ll use his
exact
words: “Fulghum, you are a downwardly mobile honky, and I am an upwardly mobile nigger, and don’t you forget it!” Then he’d laugh and laugh. He looked down on me in more ways than one. And I looked up to him in more ways than one. An odd twist of sociology.

It made me nervous when he used the N word. I didn’t mind “honky.” It had a benevolent charm when he said it. But that
other
word—well. But that’s what he called himself, and he always laughed when he said it.

Mr. Washington looked down from his porch onto my ratty residence with amused and tolerant contempt. He said he put up with me because I could cook better chili than he could and I had the best collection of power tools in the neighborhood.

Sometimes we played poker, and we both shared a fondness for fine cigars and the fact of wives who did not. We walked in the same marches of the times—the ones about racial justice and peace. And we liked the same music—jazz—once spending most of an evening comparing the solos of John Coltrane and Johnny Hodges.

Always there was his laughter—no matter how grim or serious the world might get, he saw the comic strip we were all in. He had the best laugh I ever heard.

In an uncommon way we provided a reference point for one another as we sorted out our daily lives, as you will see.

He’s dead now. I really miss him.

I think about him when I cook barbecue—using his recipe for sauce. Mine’s not as good as his. The secret ingredient was his laughter while he cooked.

D
ANDELIONS

M
R.
W
ASHINGTON WAS
a hard core lawn freak. His yard and my yard blended together in an ambiguous fashion. Every year he was seized by a kind of herbicidal mania. He started fondling his weed-eater and mixing up vile potions in vats in his garage. It usually added up to trouble.

Sure enough, one morning I caught him over in my yard spraying dandelions.

“Didn’t really think you’d mind,” says he, righteously.

“Mind? MIND! You just killed my flowers,” says I, with guarded contempt.

“Flowers?” he ripostes.
“
Those are weeds!
”
He points at my dandelions with utter disdain.

“Weeds,” says I, “are plants growing where people don’t want them. In other words,” says I, “weeds are in the eye of the beholder. And as far as I am concerned, dandelions are NOT WEEDS
—
they are FLOWERS!”

“Horse manure,” says he, and stomps off home to avoid any taint of lunacy.

Now I happen to like dandelions a lot. They cover my yard each spring with fine yellow flowers, with no help from me at all. They mind their business and I mind mine. The young leaves make a spicy salad. The flowers add fine flavor and elegant color to a classic light wine. Toast the roots, grind, and brew, and you have a palatable coffee. The tenderest shoots make a tonic tea. The dried mature leaves are high in iron, vitamins A and C, and make a good laxative. Bees favor dandelions, and the cooperative result is high-class honey.

Dandelions have been around for about thirty million years; there are fossils. The nearest relatives are lettuce and chicory. Formally classed as perennial herbs of the genus
Taraxacum
of the family
asteraceae.
The name comes from the French for “lion’s tooth,”
dent de lion.
Distributed all over Europe, Asia, and North America, they got there on their own. Resistant to disease, bugs, heat, cold, wind, rain, and human beings.

If dandelions were rare and fragile, people would knock themselves out to pay $24.95 a plant, raise them by hand in greenhouses, and form dandelion societies and all that. But they are everywhere and don’t need us and kind of do what they please. So we call them “WEEDS” and murder them at every opportunity.

Well, I say they are
flowers
, by God, and pretty damn fine flowers at that. And I am
honored
to have them in my yard, where I
want
them. Besides, in addition to every other good thing about them, they are magic. When the flower turns to seed, you can blow them off the stem, and if you blow just right and all those little helicopters fly away, you get your wish. Magic. Or if you are a lover, they twine nicely into a wreath for your friend’s hair.

I defy my neighbor to show me anything in his yard that compares with dandelions. And if all that isn’t enough, consider this: Dandelions are free. Nobody ever complains about your picking them. You can have all you can carry away.

Some weed!

My delight in dandelions has generated a sizeable pile of mail over the years, including several sets of instructions and recipes for making dandelion wine. It was a common brew in the America of a hundred years ago, but the only place I know where it is commercially available now is in the Amana Colonies, in central Iowa, south and west of Cedar Rapids, but you have to go there to buy it.

However, it’s not all that hard to make it yourself.

At the outset, a sound piece of advice from hard-won experience: If you’re serious about making wine, consult the experts at your local retailer of brewery supplies to get an overview of the tools and techniques of home brewing. If you don’t do this the first time you try to make wine, you’ll do it the second time for sure. Believe me.

Here’s a fine recipe for dandelion wine—makes about a gallon:

Get your equipment all set. Plan ahead. Consider, for example, how and where you can boil enough water to fill a six-gallon crock.

On a fine day in April or May, collect about six quarts of dandelion heads. You should not wash the flowers, which also means you should not collect them where pesticides or fertilizers have been used. Important.

Place the flowers in a clean six-gallon crock. Fill the crock with boiling water, cover the crock with cheesecloth or muslin, and let the flowers steep overnight.

Next day, strain the mush through a colander to remove the flowers, and then again through muslin to clear the liquid. Put the liquid back into the crock, add five sliced lemons, five sliced oranges, two pounds of dried yellow raisins, two cakes of brewer’s yeast, and five pounds of raw sugar. Stir well.

Place the crock in a warm, draft-free place and cover it with a clean towel. Stir once a day for a week or until the brew stops bubbling. Skim off the scum every day, too. Let the sediments settle for a day or two.

Next, siphon off the wine into clean bottles. Corks or screw tops will both work. Place the bottles in a cool, dry place until December. You can drink it the first year, but it will also keep for several years and will improve over time.

Mark the bottles with the actual date the flowers were picked, along with a weather report. The ingredients of the wine will thereby incorporate the memory of spring. The wine should have a clear, warm, yellow tinge—like a fine April or May day on which it was begun. Another hint from experience: open a bottle or two and taste before you give any away, just to make sure you got it right.

Winemaking is an art. You will have to make about three batches until you get your skills to the point where the wine is consistently potable. But whatever the actual quality of the wine, you will have had a fine experience.

Some weed.

S
TICK
-P
OLISHING

T
HE MAN NEXT DOOR
cleaned his gutters yesterday. Downspouts too. He’s done it before. I saw him last year. Amazing. I was forty years old before I even knew that people cleaned gutters and downspouts. And I haven’t been able to get around to doing it once yet.

I live in awe of people who get those jobs done. The people who live orderly lives. The ones who always do what needs to be done and do it right. I know of people who actually balance their checkbooks each month. I know that’s hardly credible, but I swear it’s so.

These people also have filing cabinets
(not shoe boxes)
with neat, up-to-date, relevant files. They can find things around the house when they need them. There is order under their sinks, in their closets, and in the trunks of their cars. They actually change the filter on their furnace once a year. They put oil and grease on mechanical things. Their warranties runneth not out. Not only do their flashlights work, they actually
know
where the flashlights
are!
And they have extra batteries.

When their car was last serviced—they know that too. The tools in their garage are on the pegboard—right where they are supposed to be. Their taxes are based on facts, not hunches and prayer. When they go to sleep at night, their list of Things to Do has a line through every item. And when they arise in the morning, their bathrobe is right there beside the bed and it is clean and new. Socks—right there in the drawer, folded into matching pairs. Yes! And as they prepare to walk out the door into a new day, they know exactly where their car keys are and are not worried about the state of the car battery or if there is enough gas to get to work.

There
are
such people. Ones who have it all together. Exempt from the reign of chaos and the laws of entropy. I see them every day all around me. Calm and easy pillars of society. They are the people in your high school yearbook you wanted to be. The ones who made it.

Well. I am not one of them. Out of the frying pan, into the spilled milk is more me. Most of the time daily life is a lot like an endless chore of chasing chickens in a large pen. Life as an air-raid drill. Never mind the details.

But I have a recurring fantasy that sees me through. It is my stick-polishing fantasy. One day a committee of elders will come to my door and tell me it is time to perform the ritual of the polished stick—a rite of passage for the good-at-heart-but-chronically-disorganized.

Here’s the way it works. You get selected for this deal because you are such a fine person, and it is time you were let off the hook. First, a week of your life is given to you free of all obligations. Your calendar is wiped clean. No committee meetings, no overdue anything—bills, correspondence, or unanswered telephone calls. You are taken to a nice place, where it is all quiet and serene and Zen. You are cared for. Fed well. And often affirmed. Your task is simply this: to spend a week polishing a stick. They give you some sandpaper and lemon oil and rags. And, of course, the stick—a nice but ordinary piece of wood. All you have to do is polish it. As well as you can. Whenever you feel like it. That’s it:
Polish the stick.

At the end of the week the elders will return. They will gravely examine your work. They will praise you for your expertise, your sensitivity, and your spiritual insight. “No stick was ever polished quite like
this
!
”
they will exclaim. Your picture will appear on TV and in the papers. The story will say, “Man who is good at heart and well intentioned has thoroughly and completely and admirably polished his stick!” You will be escorted home in quiet triumph. Your family and neighbors will give you looks of respect. As you pass in the streets, people will smile knowingly and wave and give you a thumbs-up sign. You will have passed into another stage of being.

But more than that. From this time forward, you may ignore your gutters and downspouts. Your checkbook and files and forms and closets and drawers and taxes and even the trunk of your car will be taken care of for you. You are now exempt from these concerns. You are forever released from the bond of Things to Do. For you have
polished the stick
! Look at it hanging there over your mantel. Be proud, stick polisher! This is really something. And, it is enough.

Oh, don’t I wish.