All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (20 page)

T
HE
O
DDS

I
F YOU ASK
my next-door neighbor what he does for a living, he will tell you that he is a professional gambler involved in organized crime. In truth, he is an insurance agent. He has a healthy disrespect for his business, and extends that skeptical mode into his philosophy of life. “We’re
all
gamblers,” says he, “every one of us. And life is a continual crapshoot and poker game and horse race.” Then he adds, “And I
love
the game!”

He’s a great believer in hedging his bets, however, protecting himself by betting both ways when the odds are close. Philosophically this gets expressed in these sayings mounted on his office wall:

Always trust your fellow man. And always cut the cards.

Always trust God. And always build your house on high ground.

Always love thy neighbor. And always pick a good neighborhood to live in.

The race is not always to the swift, or the battle to the strong, but you better bet that way.

Place your bet between turning the other cheek and enough-is-enough-already.

Place your bet between haste-makes-waste and he-who-hesitates-is-lost.

About winning: It isn’t important. What really counts is how you play the game.

About losing: It isn’t important. What really counts is how you play the game.

About playing the game: Play to win!

Does he really believe that? Does he live by it? I don’t know. But I play poker with him. And I bought my insurance from him. I like his kind of odds.

W
HERE THE
S
NOW
G
OES

M
AN NEXT DOOR
and I look upon one another with suspicion. He’s a Raker and a Shoveler, as I see it. A troubler of the natural ways of the earth. Left over from the breed that conquered the wilderness. He thinks of me in simpler terms: lazy.

See, every week during the fall he’s out raking little leaves into little piles. And every time it snows, he’s out tormenting the white stuff with his shovel. Once, either out of eagerness or outrage, he even managed to shovel a heavy frost. “Can’t let old Mother Nature get ahead of you,” says he.

So I tell him he hasn’t the sense God gave a stump. Leaves have been falling down for thousands and thousands of years, I tell him. And the earth did pretty well before rakes and people, I tell him. Old Mother Nature put the leaves where she wanted them and they made more earth. We need more earth, I tell him. We’re running out of it, I tell him.

And snow—snow is not my enemy, I tell him. Snow is God’s way of telling people to slow down and rest and stay in bed for a day. And besides, snow always solves itself. Mixes with the leaves to form more earth, I tell him. Think compost, says I.

His yard
does
look neat, I must admit—
if
neatness is important. And he didn’t fall down getting to his car last snowtime, and I in fact did. And he is a good neighbor, even if he is a Raker and a Shoveler. I’m open-minded about this thing.

Still, my yard has an Oriental carpet of red and yellow and green and brown. And his doesn’t. And I spent the same time he spent shoveling snow collecting it in bottles to mix with orange juice next July, and I taped the sound of it falling and then took the tape out of the cassette and used the tape to wrap around Christmas presents.
(Snow has lots of uses.)

I gave him a bottle of vintage winter snow for Christmas, wrapped in some of that tape. He gave me a rake. We’re giving each other lessons in the proper use of these tools. I think he’s got no religion, and I’m trying to convert him. He thinks I’ve got too much, and he’s trying to get me to back off.

But in the end, in the end, in the final end of it all—I win. For he and I—and even you—will become what the leaves and snow become, and go where the leaves and snow go—whether we rake or shovel or not.

H
AIR

H
AIR GROWS AT
the rate of about half an inch a month. I don’t know where he got his facts, but my neighbor, Mr. Washington, came up with that one when we were comparing barbers. That means that about eight feet of hair had been cut off my head and face in the last sixteen years by my barber.

I hadn’t thought much about it until I called to make my usual appointment and found that my barber had left to go into building maintenance. What? How could he
do
this? My barber. It felt like a death in the family. There was so much more to our relationship than sartorial statistics.

We started out as categories to each other: “barber” and “customer.” Then we become “redneck ignorant barber” and “pinko egghead minister.” Once a month we reviewed the world and our lives and explored our positions. We sparred over civil rights and Vietnam and a lot of elections. We became mirrors, confidants, confessors, therapists, and companions in an odd sort of way. We went through being thirty years old and then forty. We discussed and argued and joked, but always with a certain thoughtful deference.

After all, I
was
his customer. And he
was
standing there with a razor in his hand.

I found out that his dad was a country policeman, that he grew up poor in a tiny town and had prejudices about Indians. He found out that I had the same small-town roots and grew up with prejudices about Blacks. Our kids were the same ages, and we suffered through the same stages of parenthood together. We shared wife stories and children stories and car troubles and lawn problems. I found out he gave his day off to giving free haircuts to old men in nursing homes. He found out a few good things about me, too, I suppose.

I never saw him outside the barber shop, never met his wife or children, never sat in his home or ate a meal with him. Yet he became a terribly important fixture in my life. Perhaps a lot more important than if we had been next-door neighbors. The quality of our relationship was partly created by a peculiar distance. There’s a real sense of loss in his leaving. I feel like not having my hair cut anymore, though eight feet of hair might seem strange.

Without realizing it, we fill important places in each other’s lives. It’s that way with the guy at the corner grocery, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, co-workers. Good people who are always “there,” who can be relied upon in small, important ways. People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us, uplift us in the dailiness of life. We never tell them. I don’t know why, but we don’t.

And, of course, we fill that role ourselves. There are those who depend on us, watch us, learn from us, take from us. And we never know.

Don’t sell yourself short.

You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who.

I recall an old Sufi story of a good man who was granted one wish by God. The man said he would like to go about doing good without knowing about it. God granted his wish. And then God decided that it was such a good idea, he would grant that wish to all human beings.

And so it has been to this day.

R
EFLECTION

E
VER SINCE
the first publication of
Kindergarten
I have been asked the same question by many readers: “So, didn’t you learn anything
after
kindergarten?” The answer is, of course, yes. I learned what only time and experience teach. I found there are teachers who only appear later in life, when you have been made receptive by time and experience. My writing is the chronicle of the life I live. A keeping of accounts. Within an ever-growing list of what I’ve learned since age six, these sentences stick out:

Everything looks better at a distance.

If you made it up, you have to live it down.

Everything is compost.

There is no
they
—only
us.

It’s a mistake to believe everything you think.

You can get used to anything.

Sometimes things are just as bad as they seem.

It helps if you always have somebody to kiss goodnight.

Add those items to the Kindergarten Credo list.

There’s more, but I’m not sure I can tell you. I’m often struck these days by what I know that I can’t articulate. Somewhere beyond words there comes, at last, an understanding—a comprehension of the Big Picture—the unspeakable Unified Field Theory that even Einstein never got down on paper. Finally, I just get it.

Once I thought that getting the words just right was essential. Now I know the words will never be just right. A well-lived life is always under construction. I am no longer prone to argue with people about syntax and metaphors. What we have to say doesn’t matter as much as what we have to do. Never mind the Credo—show the life. Don’t tell me what you think or hope—show me your work. Get it? Do it.

Still, I am all too aware that I remain a living contradiction—a work in progress.

F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that “Writers aren’t exactly people . . . they’re a whole lot of people trying to be one person.” That’s me. That’s why the underlying theme in all my writing is
transformation
—a yearning for integrity so strong that it leads to the kind of change that alters one’s life and the lives of others. I am trying very hard to live my way into the truth of my stories.

Finally, after wrestling with what I might have done differently if I had known then what I know now, I can give an answer when asked: “If you had your life to live over, what would you do?”

On careful reflection, all things considered, I would live my life over.

—Robert Fulghum, at age 65.

C
ODA

M
Y FAVORITE BOOK ENDING IS
not an ending. It’s where James Joyce leaves off in
Finnegans Wake,
in midsentence, without punctuation or explanation. Some scholars believe the last phrase connects with the incomplete sentence that begins the book, implying an unending cycle. I hope it’s so. I like that.

I have reconsidered, revised, and expanded this book as part of a cycle of rethinking about where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’m going. If all goes well, I will keep on doing that, and come back to Kindergarten again and