All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (8 page)

T
AXI

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY.
Winter. Corner of 52nd Street and Madison Avenue. Cold and wildly windy. Traffic jammed-slammed tight. An ill-tempered mood plagues the streets. But me, I’m waving politely at taxis. Clearly, I’m from out of town.

Yellow Cab eases up in front of me. The driver, a massive Black lady wearing a pink nylon jacket and black turban, barks at me—a don’t-mess-with-me-expression on her face: “You want a ride or a date or what?” Yes, I want a ride, so I get in the back seat. She turns and barks at me again. “So. Just where’re you going, my man?”

“I’m going uptown. Ninety-First and Fifth.”

She laughs. “Not with me, you ain’t.”

“Why not?”

“The city is set like cement. Must be a fifty-foot brick wall across midtown. This town’s always locked up for something. A parade of anything—retired dogcatchers, the Ku Klux Klan, dentists, who knows what? Could be His Blessitude the Pope is still here. Could be the president is back in town. Could be Jesus Christ hisself, for all I know. He’s about the only one who hasn’t been here this year.”

She laughs again. Big laugh.

“So, I can’t get uptown?”

“Not in this cab—not unless you go around by way of Chicago. But I’ll take you downtown as far as you want to go—Wall Street, New Jersey, Florida, or Rio de Janeiro. I mean as
far
as you want to go, my man. We could have some fun going downtown. But not
uptown
. No way today.”

“Thanks. I like your turban, by the way. What country are you from?”

Big laugh. “The turban is just my hat. I’m from the country of New York City. Bred here, born here, grew up here, still live here, can’t get away from here, and going to die here. But I keep thinking—somehow, someday—I’m leaving. But I know I’m dreaming. Maybe they’ll stuff me and put me in a museum with a sign under me that says here’s the dumbest broad who ever lived—she should have left New York a long time ago and was too slow to go.”

“How come you don’t leave?”

“Ain’t you got a list of things you shoulda done a long time ago?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s your
why
, my man, and all the
why
there is. Who knows? Besides, it’s dangerous and weird outside New York. Tornadoes and the woods on fire and bears and rednecks and born-agains and slow-talking people and beauty queens and cowboys and Indians and all that. I’d rather take my chances in New York.”

“You still don’t look very happy about it.”

“Well, I’ve had a bad day, my man. Like I say, town’s locked up—like somebody spilled glue on a cockroach convention. Weather’s bad but not bad enough—too many people walking. The cab is running rough and my boyfriend has run off with two other women—not one, but
two
. And my rent’s way overdue. God is definitely not on my side. But, hey, rain’s over—you gonna talk or ride?”

“I should pay you just to drive me around and talk to me. But I’ve go to go uptown to a meeting, so I’ll get out.” Standing by her door, I make an offer: “Here’s twenty dollars—a gift—to balance out a bad day.”

“Twenty dollars? It’s not enough.”

“Not enough?”

“If you think twenty dollars will pull me even with the craziness of New York City and the wrath of Almighty God, then you’re weirder than you look and you need the money more than I do. Here, take it.”

“How much would pull you even?”

She thinks in amused silence, laughs, holds out her hand.

“There’s not enough money in the universe. Here, gimme that twenty. If I don’t take what I
can
get, I’ll never get
nothing.
I’m grateful, my man.” Honking and waving and laughing, she charged off into the impossible traffic more like the driver of a tank than a taxi—just possibly working her way uptown or beyond. Somehow. Someday. Onward.

Attitude. It’s all attitude.

Another mermaid.

S
UMMER
J
OB

T
WO DESPERATE YOUNG MEN
were at my door one night last week. “We’re desperate,” they said. They didn’t look desperate. Neat and clean—tennis shoes, jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps on the right way. “We’re fifteen years old,” which is why they were desperate. They needed summer jobs and nobody was hiring unless you were sixteen. “Being fifteen isn’t good enough,” said one. I remember. Being fifteen is being in-between—a transitional phase.

“Just how desperate are you?” I asked.

“Really desperate—we’ll do anything for money.”

Wonderful. Actually I had been looking for a couple of guys in this condition. See, a neighbor has been needling me about my excessive firewood. He thinks it weighs too much and is maybe bending the timbers of the decking on the dock in front of our houseboats, and since the dock decking is common property, it’s his business. Furthermore, he thinks that burning wood in a stove contributes to serious air pollution problems and I am therefore irresponsible for not heating my house some other way. Right. I agree. That’s exactly why I have so much firewood: I don’t burn it anymore. But this guy keeps yawping at me and I’m steamed.

Suddenly I have a genius solution for the firewood fracas.

“Gentlemen,” I say to the young men at my door, “I have a job for you.” They are excited. “You see all this firewood along the dock?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I want you to haul it all up onto the street where you will find my neighbor’s very large four-door green Buick sedan. And I want you to fill that Buick with this firewood.”

“There’s too much to go in the trunk, sir.”

“Exactly. So, I want you to fill the whole inside of the Buick completely with firewood—door to door and floor to ceiling. And if you have any left over I want you to stack it on the hood and roof. Doing it carefully, of course.”

“We couldn’t do that sir—we might get in trouble.”

“How about if I pay you ten dollars each and you do it at night?”

“We could do that, sir. But what if we get caught?”

“For an extra five dollars apiece you will not get caught.”

“Right, sir.”

“And besides,” I tell them, “at fifteen you’re still juveniles—they won’t give you the electric chair for misplacing a pile of firewood. Do it.”

I am tired of being patient and reasonable and fussing around with the minutiae of life. Direct-and-swift action is my mode these days. A one-man SWAT team am I. Don’t mess with me. My neighbor is lucky I didn’t pile up the wood on his front porch and set it on fire. After all, who would believe that a nice man like me would do such a thing? I’ve worked hard all these years on my disguise of benign gentleness and the time has come for the Bad Samaritan to rip off his mask and strike.

So the neighbor is away for the weekend. And I happen to know where he keeps his hide-a-key: in a really dumb place under the rear bumper of his Buick—I saw him put it there. I make sure his car is unlocked, and during the night I hear the lovely sound of firewood being moved by desperate fifteen year-olds.

The next morning I am pleased to find the wood gone. And the Buick looks like a movable wood yard. Ha. Brilliant. I’m thinking my neighbor is going to have a cow when he gets home. Funny.

Did this really happen?

Yes and No. The young men did come to the door. The neighbor and the firewood are real. And the whole scenario did flash through my mind. The thing even went as far as the midnight moment. And there was a time in my life when I would have gone through with it.

But now. Well. I am, alas, older and wiser. Too bad.

I stopped the young men. Paid them. But I had considered that my neighbor is a cunning devil with a wicked sense of humor. He would have got even. He would have paid the young men to stack the firewood in my bathroom. Not so funny.

Maybe I’m going through a desperate transitional phase like I did at age fifteen. I often have these loony ideas and come close to acting on them.

But. Maybe. And However.

The imagined memory must suffice sometimes.

If you only make it up, you never have to live it down.

W
EISER
, I
DAHO

I
ONCE SPENT
a week in Weiser, Idaho.

Maybe that’s hard to believe. Because if you’ve ever looked at an Idaho map, you know Weiser is nowhere. But if you play the fiddle, Weiser, Idaho, is the center of the universe. The Grand National Old Time Fiddlers’ Contest is there the last week in June. And since I’ve fiddled around some in my time, I went.

Four thousand people live there in normal times. Five thousand more come out of the bushes and trees and hills for the contest. The town stays open around the clock, with fiddling in the streets, dancing at the VFW hall, fried chicken in the Elks Lodge, and free camping at the rodeo grounds.

People from all over show up—fiddlers from Pottsboro, Texas; Sepulpa, Oklahoma; Thief River Falls, Minnesota; Caldwell, Kansas; Three Forks, Montana; and just about every other little crossroads town you care to mention. And even Japan and Ireland and Nova Scotia!

It used to be that the festival was populated by country folks—pretty straight types—short hair, church on Sunday, overalls and gingham, and all that. Then the long-haired hippie freaks began to show up. The trouble was that the freaks could fiddle to beat hell. And that’s all there was to it.

So, the town turned over the junior high school and its grounds to the freaks. The contest judges were put in an isolated room where they could only hear the music. Couldn’t see what people looked like or what their names were—just hear the fiddling. As one old gentleman put it, “Son, I don’t care if you’re stark nekkid and wear a bone in your nose. If you kin fiddle, you’re all right with me. It’s the music we make that counts.”

So I was standing there in the middle of the night in the moonlight in Weiser, Idaho, with about a thousand other people who were picking and singing and fiddling together—some with bald heads, some with hair to their knees, some with a joint, some with a long-necked bottle of Budweiser, some with beads, some with Archie Bunker T-shirts, some eighteen and some eighty, some with corsets and some with no bras, and the music rising like incense into the night toward whatever gods of peace and goodwill there may be. I was standing there, and this policeman—a real honest-to-god on-duty Weiser policeman—who is standing next to me and
picking a banjo (really, I swear it)—
says to me, “Sometimes the world seems like a fine place, don’t it?”

Yes.

Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself. Weiser’s still there. The festival still happens. They still don’t care what you look like. It’s the music that counts.

B
IBLE
S
TORY

A
S A FORMER HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER,
I’m often invited to reunions. Sometimes the reunions are very private—one-on-one—as happened last week. While a student was in town for a class gathering he called to ask: “Could we get together for a cup of coffee? I have something to get off my chest.”

His confession cleared up a long-standing mystery. In his senior year he had called me at home on a Sunday afternoon to say that he knew I was a parish minister and he had an urgent religious question to ask. Serious possibilities passed through my mind—“Sure, go ahead.”

“Mr. Fulghum, do you know how to clean puke out of a Bible?”

“What?”

“It’s awful—I just can’t tell you—but I’ve got to do something before my mother gets home tonight.” I couldn’t help him. There are some things not covered in seminary. I admit to being chickenhearted. A prudent man avoids a mess like this.

On Monday I asked what was going on, but he said that I wouldn’t really want to know. Now, ten years later, comes the truth. His parents were away for the weekend. And he had done
exactly
what they told him
not to do
: had some friends over for a party. Of course. There was beer. A girl drank too much, lay down on the bed in his mom’s room, and tossed her cookies. Trying not to throw up in the bed, she aimed over the side and hosed the nightstand. On the nightstand lay the mother’s Bible. Open.

All evidence of the party could be cleaned up. Except the mess on the Bible.

Desperate, our tragic young hero wrapped the evidence in a plastic bag.

He buried it in the back yard.

He bought his Mom a new Bible, and told some terrible lie about borrowing hers for a school project and losing it on a bus. She was really mad, but not nearly as mad as she might have been if she knew the truth. He could handle his mom’s wrath. She would never know. But he knew God knew, and he was sure God was going to get him. The experience kept him out of trouble and in church for the rest of his senior year.

Now, ten years later he still hasn’t told his mother the truth. He still thinks she would kill him if she knew. It wasn’t just any old Bible. It was the Family Bible—passed down from his grandmother to his mother. And the Bible is still out there in the yard somewhere. Of course, he’s forgotten
exactly
where by now, but if he knew he would sneak home sometime when his mother was away and dig it up. But, of course, he wouldn’t be able to explain why the backyard was full of small craters.

“Well,” I said, after laughing myself limp, “the only thing I can do for you is to give you an example of the things adults and teachers and parents do that are just about as awful. At least you will know you have company.” I told him my tale.

That same spring I had a very full teaching load. My classroom was on the third floor and the nearest men’s toilet was three floors down. In desperate circumstances one morning in the middle of a class, I excused myself, walked swiftly down the hall into a closet to use the janitor’s sink. But the sink had a sign on it, saying “Does Not Drain.” Panicked and about to explode I used a large plastic bucket that was handy. Snapping the lid on the bucket I moved it into an art supplies storage closet—I had the only key.

Alas, the convenience of this solution to my problem was too easy not to use again another day. By the end of the week, however, I had a different problem: what to do with a bucket containing a rather amazing amount of urine?

Late one afternoon, long after school was out, I tried sneaking down the stairs with the bucket to empty it in the toilet three floors down. I stumbled on the stairs. And let go of the bucket. Which sailed through the air and exploded like a mortar shell into the hallway. True.

Disgusting. Yes. Stupid. Yes. Go ahead, beat me up over this—a nice man like me. Tell me you never did anything dumb or gross in your entire life. Tell me you never had to clean up your own mess. Besides, what I did was not illegal, immoral, or a sin. Just
stupid
. The Bible says those without guilt should throw the first stone.

It took a couple of hours to mop up the mess. And a couple of bottles of air cleaner to kill the smell. When people complained the next day that something awful seemed to have happened in the hall overnight, I kept my mouth shut. And have, until now.

“Welcome back to the best part of the reunion,” I said to the Bible-burier—“where the truth can finally be told.” Maybe, someday, his mother will tell him things she did behind his back. Then they can they dig up the backyard looking for her Bible.