Graduate school, in my case, was a theological seminary—a school for ministers. Working as a bartender could get me suspended from school. That’s what I thought after I took the job. That’s what my wife thought after I took the job. And my friends thought the same thing. Bad move.
In a defiant frame of mind I decided to turn myself in to the authorities at the school. Before the gossip got around I would just march into the dean’s office and put it on the line: “I’ve got a job as a bartender. What are you going to do about it?”
The dean gave me his shrewdest look. A look I would learn over time to respect as an early warning sign of an educational experience.
“Wonderful,” he exclaimed. “This is wonderful news.”
“What?”
He explained that he and the faculty thought of me as young, green, arrogant, wet-behind-the-ears, inexperienced, and gener-ally naïve about the real world. “Worse, you think you know everything.”
Well, I was twenty-one.
He went on to explain that what was wrong with me could be fixed. What I needed to know most to become a minister was not something the school could teach me in a classroom. It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.
As a bartender I would see many kinds of people with many kinds of needs. It would be a challenge to be useful and do my job and keep my values at the same time. Finally, the dean explained that being a minister was to be where you were really needed—not just safely yammering away in a pulpit on Sunday morning. Most bars could use a minister, he thought.
“Jesus,” he said, “did not spend much time in church. He was out in the world.”
The dean had a plan. He would consider my bartending job as a work-study program. A course in Life 101. Every Monday I would come in for an hour’s conversation with him. He would ask what I had learned behind the bar. As long as I was learning something meaningful, I could get course credit.
“Keep your eyes open. Suspend judgment. Be useful,” were his final instructions.
I tended bar for almost three years. The learning never ended. I discovered how willing people were to tell their life stories to a bartender. Not only did they have great problems, they sometimes had great solutions.
Not many ministers have Bartending 101, 102, and 103 as part of their education. When I graduated three years later, the dean gave me a fine evaluation. I had passed the bartending test. I knew a lot more about the world.
He did make one troubling comment: “Fulghum is not as good as he thinks he is.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “be patient. In time you may be better than you think you are. Keep your eyes open. Suspend judgment. Be useful.”
HELP
SAME 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.
STUFF
MOVING 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.
VACUUMS
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.
THE MERMAID
GIANTS, 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.
TAXI
NEW YORK CITY. 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 lau
gh. “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.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Page 5