All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (7 page)

H
ELP

S
AME MAN.
Dean Bartlett. This time it’s a couple of months before graduation. The pressure of studies had forced me to give up my bartending job, and there were no immediate prospects for a job after seminary. I had a wife and a baby son. I was flat broke for the first time in my life. I was scared.

I went to the dean to explain my plight and ask for help.

Once again he surprised me.

“Wonderful,” he exclaimed. “This is wonderful news.”

“What?”

“You are a stubbornly proud young man. You are independent to a fault. Nothing really wrong with that in itself, but we thought you would never learn how or when to ask anyone for help. How can you be a minister—be in the profession of helping others—if you don’t know what it’s like to need help yourself? Now you know how it feels to have to ask.”

He paused to let that powerful admonition sink in.

“We will help you. You are worth helping. And before I go on, think about how you felt when I said that. Lovely words.
We will help you
.
You are worth helping
.”

Lesson Two for the day.

Dean Bartlett explained the next step for me was to prepare and submit a budget. Give the budget to his secretary, come back the next day, and help would be ready in the form of a check.

Greatly relieved, I went home and carefully crafted a tight-but-reasonable budget. Took the budget to the secretary. Went back the next day for the check.

“Sorry,” she said, “but the dean says your budget is unacceptable.”

I felt bad about that. I must have asked for too much. So I revised the budget downward to a bread-and-water and rent-and-utilities level. Took the budget back to the secretary. Returned the next day. No check.

“Sorry,” she said, “but the dean says your budget is still unacceptable.”

Angry and confused, I opened the dean’s office door without knocking, and unloaded my frustration on him. “You said you’d help me. You said I was worth helping. But you won’t accept my budget. You know I can’t live on less. What the hell is going on?”

He smiled. “Wonderful,” he said. “Just wonderful.”

I collapsed in a chair, realizing I was going to learn something again.

“Now that your fit is over, would you like to know exactly
why
your budget is unacceptable to me and this educational institution?”

“Yes.”

“Listen to me carefully:
There is nothing in your budget for joy
. No books, no flowers, no music, not even a cold beer. And there is nothing in your budget to give away to someone else.
We don’t help people who don’t have better values than you do.
”

WHAM!

Nothing for joy.

Nothing to give away.

No help for people who don’t have better values than I.

Lesson Three. Lesson learned.

There was much joy in my next budget. The dean approved it. But it wasn’t until I told someone else this story that I realized that what I had to give away was this story itself.

S
TUFF

M
OVING IS A BLOW
to my self-image. I like to think I am reasonably clean and tidy. But comes that moment after all the furniture and possessions have been removed from my rooms, and I come back to see if I’ve left anything, and I look at the floor and there’s all this STUFF around. Behind where the desk was, and behind where the bookcase was, and behind where the bed was, and in the corner once occupied by the chest-of-drawers.

Stuff. Gray. Fuzzy. Hairy. Grotty. Stuff.

Look at all that dirt, I think. I am not so very nice and clean after all, I think. What would the neighbors think? I think. What would my mother say? I think. What if
they
come to inspect? I think. I got to clean it up quick, I think. This Stuff. It’s
always
there when I move.
What is it?

I read in a medical journal that a laboratory analyzed this Stuff. They were working on the problems of people with allergies, but their results apply here.

The findings: particles of wool, cotton, and paper, bug chunks, food, plants, tree leaves, ash, microscopic spores of fungi and single-celled animals, and a lot of unidentifiable odds and ends, mostly natural and organic.

But that’s just the miscellaneous list. The majority of Stuff comes from just two sources:
people—
exfoliated skin and hair; and
meteorites—
disintegrated as they hit the earth’s atmosphere.
(No kidding—it’s true—tons of it fall every day.)
In other words, what’s behind my bed and bookcase and dresser and chest is mostly me and stardust.

A botanist told me that if you gather up a bunch of Stuff in a jar and put some water in it and let it sit in the sunlight and then plant a seed in it, the seed will grow like crazy; or if you do the same thing but put it in a damp, dark place, mushrooms will grow in it. And then, if you eat the mushrooms, you may see stars.

Also, if you really want to see a lot of it, take the sheet off your bed, shake it hard in a dark room, and then turn on a beamed flashlight. There you are. Like the little snowman in the round glass ball on the mantel at Grandma’s house. London Bridge is falling down and I am falling down and the stars are falling down. And everything else is falling down, to go around again, some say.

Scientists have pretty well established that we come from a stellar birthing room.

We are the Stuff of stars.

And there behind my desk, I seem to be returning to my source, in a quiet way. Recombining with the Stuff of the universe into who-knows-what. And I’ve a heightened respect for what’s going on in the nooks and crannies of my room.

It isn’t dirt. It’s all compost. Cosmic compost.

V
ACUUMS

A
MAN
I
HAD NOT SEEN
in years stopped me on the street recently. He once was a nodding-acquaintance neighbor who lived up at the end of the block. “How’s business?” I asked, and he came back with “Business really sucks!” and laughed. I knew he was going to say this. It’s been his trademark quip for years. He’s a regional sales manager for a vacuum cleaner company. His humor is tacky, but I like his enthusiasm and the confidence he has in his product line.

“Anything you want to suck up or blow away, anywhere, anytime, we got the machine,” he says. HandiVac, ShopVac, SuperVac and specialty rigs to clean out chimneys and furnaces. He’s got built-in systems for whole buildings, vacuum cleaners to slurp up chemical and oil pollutants. And he’s got blowers—leaf blowers, grass blowers, and underwater trash blower systems for pools. Indoors, outdoors, on the ground, in the sea, or in the sky—no task too big or small. It’s a large company and he’s been their gold-medal salesman for years.

“Stand back, give me AIR!” is his war cry.

His personal hero is a man named James Murry Spengler. In 1907 Spengler was a janitor in a department store in Ohio. But he was going to have to give up his job because the mechanical carpet sweeper he had to use kicked up so much dust and mold, he had developed chronic allergy problems. So Spengler solved his problem by inventing the first vacuum cleaner.

You’d laugh to see the original model—made out of a pillowcase, a soapbox, a fan, and yards of tape. Still, the device not only worked, it solved Spengler’s allergy problems and saved his career as a janitor. You’ve never heard of Spengler because he sold the patent to a man whose name you do know, William Hoover.

My friend the salesman reveres Spengler because he took common items he found at home and, using the most obvious natural resource,
air
, he changed domestic history. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this story from my former neighbor. When he told it to me one more time last week, I couldn’t resist asking him if he was still a hypocrite.

He blushed. Smiled. “Yes.”

Perhaps hypocrite is not quite the right word. Maybe “philosopher.”

I’ll explain the accusation and you can decide.

Early on in our neighbor experience, I noticed a profound contradiction in the life of this air salesman. It puzzled me. I’d be out in my yard and would look up and see him mowing his yard with an old hand-powered push mower. Then he would pile up the grass clippings using an equally old-fashioned hand rake. Finally, he would sweep his sidewalk and driveway with a classic straight broom and pick up the piles with a dustpan. In the fall he raked his leaves by hand—no blower. And when he tidied his car, he swept it out with a whisk-broom. Where was all the machinery that sucked things up and blew things away?

One day I confronted him and he confessed.

He had once tried to sell his wares to an Amish farmer in Iowa whose religious and social values did not allow the use of electricity and gasoline engines. The Amish believe that those things that do not serve the family, the community, or the individual well should be avoided. Noisy engines separate people and make it hard for them to sing together while they work, and even harder to think when they work alone. Hand tools are cheap, easy to repair, and give the user good exercise. Speed and efficiency do not always increase the quality of life.

When my friend’s life gets to be too much of an air raid and he needs sanity, he remembers the Amish. He goes out into his yard with his hand tools for an afternoon of seeking wisdom in simplicity. A noisy machine won’t help when his soul feels empty. In his middle years he has acquired the wisdom of choosing appropriate technology. Pushing leaves with mechanical air is not the same as hearing the wind blow through the trees.

T
HE
M
ERMAID

G
IANTS, WIZARDS, AND DWARFS
was the game to play.

Being left in charge of about eighty children seven to ten years old, while their parents were off doing parenty things, I mustered my troops in the church social hall and explained the game. It’s a large-scale version of Rock, Paper, and Scissors, and involves some intellectual decision-making. But the real purpose of the game is to make a lot of noise and run around chasing people until nobody knows which side you are on or who won.

Organizing a roomful of wired-up grade-schoolers into two teams, explaining the rudiments of the game, achieving consensus on group identity—all this is no mean accomplishment, but we did it with a right good will and were ready to go.

The excitement of the chase had reached a critical mass. I yelled out: “You have to decide
now
which you are—a GIANT, a WIZARD, or a DWARF!”

While the groups huddled in frenzied, whispered consultation, a tug came at my pants leg. A small child stands there looking up, and asks in a small, concerned voice, “Where do the Mermaids stand?”

Where do the Mermaids stand?

A long pause. A
very
long pause. “Where do the Mermaids stand?” says I.

“Yes. You see, I am a Mermaid.”

“There are no such things as Mermaids.”

“Oh, yes, I am one!”

She did not relate to being a Giant, a Wizard, or a Dwarf. She knew her category. Mermaid. And was not about to leave the game and go over and stand against the wall where a loser would stand. She intended to participate, wherever Mermaids fit into the scheme of things. Without giving up dignity or identity. She took it for granted that there was a place for Mermaids and that I would know just where.

Well, where
do
the Mermaids stand? All the “Mermaids”—all those who are different, who do not fit the norm and who do not accept the available boxes and pigeonholes?

Answer that question and you can build a school, a nation, or a world on it.

What was my answer at the moment? Every once in a while I say the right thing. “The Mermaid stands right here by the King of the Sea!” says I.

So we stood there hand in hand, reviewing the troops of Wizards and Giants and Dwarfs as they roiled by in wild disarray.

It is not true, by the way, that mermaids do not exist.

I know at least one personally.

I have held her hand.