Attitude. It’s all attitude.
Another mermaid.
SUMMER JOB
TWO 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.
WEISER, IDAHO
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.
BIBLE STORY
AS 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, a
nd 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.
THE NAMES OF THINGS
ANYBODY SEEN A NAKED BROOMRAPE, a Bastard Toad-flax, a Lesser Dirty Socks, or a Crouching Locoweed? These items are listed in various field guides to the wildflowers of North America. I am not making up these names. I can show you the photographs, too. Trying to mitigate my ignorance and to stop asking “What’s that?” of anybody I go hiking with, I’ve been working my way through the field guides and stumbling over these wiggy labels. My suspicions are aroused. Do these flowers with the bizarre names really exist, or is there some conspiracy among botanists to pull the public’s leg?
If the plants are really out there, then I’d give a prize to meet the yahoos responsible for sticking such miserable names on nature’s blooming flora. How could you look at a flowering plant and say, “Let’s call that sucker a Naked Broomrape”? Especially when the purported flower has a pale violet trumpet shape with a dab of purest yellow in the center. You’ve got to be in a bad mood to do that.
Worse, I want to get a look at the crab who had the peevish gall to say, “Well, that looks like a Bastard Toad-flax to me.” The actual plant is small, the complex flowers pale ivory, and the leaves olive green. Come on.
And someone must have had a bad day in the bush when they declared, “See that—I say that sorry sonofabitch deserves to be called a Crouching Locoweed.” Referring to a plant with slender leaves, bearing a tall flower with multiple silvery-white petals.
And as for “Dirty Socks”—a pinkish flower with touches of purple in the middle—I’d like to see the socks of the one who did the christening. I’ve seen ugly and unlaundered socks on some hikers, but I wouldn’t stick the name on a plant.
All I can figure is that some plant mavens have a sour sense of respect for the subjects of their vocation. Field guides are full of mean-spirited adjectives—the “lowly” this, the “false” that, the “dwarf” whatnot and the “pygmy” something else. Wonder what they name their dogs and cats and children?
And I’d sure like to know what was going on in the mind of the guy who named a small yellow sunflower the “Nipple Seed.” I’d like to meet his girlfriend, too. If he ever had one.
So who cares, really? There are lots better things to get stirred up about, aren’t there? I suppose political correctness in naming wildflowers is not a bandwagon with much steam behind it, though dumber matters do get a lot of press.
But I do wonder what would happen if we were to wipe the slate clean of all the names for things around us and start over. If our generation were responsible for labeling the environment, would we do any better, be any kinder to our plant friends? Probably not. Can you imagine the meetings—the congressional hearings?
Besides, the experts tell us that the evolution of living things continues at such a rate that plants and animals and insects come into and go out of existence faster than human beings can catalog them. The number of living things we have identified and named is far outnumbered by those we don’t even know about. Most of what we have named is dead and gone, actually. There may have been a Naked Broomrape once, but it may be extinct by now. Something else will take its place. And we get to name that one. Better job next time.
And sometimes we actually do a better job. My favorites from the field guides are the Rosy Pussytoes, the Enchanter’s Nightshade, and the Chocolate Lily. Progress.
I wonder what flowers would call us? Creeping Fat Farm Fungus? Deadly Sucker Bush? Night-Screaming Doodlebugs? Weeping Wooky Weeds?
Almost every living species has been here far longer than ours—the fossil evidence is clear. And many will likely be here long after we’ve wandered off into the doomsday dustbin ourselves, still sticking names on things as we went. Scientists tell us the Earth has been around 4.5 billion years and has another 5.7 billion to go.
What does a flower care about what label we apply in passing?
The labels only stick to us.
WATER
“WHAT KIND OF WATER WILL YOU HAVE?” A question asked by my hostess at a dinner party. She offered fizzy or flat, French or Italian, mountain glacial or deep artesian. I could also choose natural or flavored, iced or room temperature, with lime wedge or lemon twist.
Actually, I was surprised at the somewhat limited choices offered by my hostess. Our corner grocery store alone carries thirty-one brands of bottled water—from sources in France, Canada, Wales, Germany, Italy, and Norway, as well as the USA. Even the island of Fiji. The water comes from ancient springs, high mountain streams, and mineralized deposits. Three colors of bottles—clear, sea green, and deep blue—and all with elegant labeling.
This so-called “designer water” has taken its fair share of abuse for appearing to be a pretentious extravagance. But the same criticism could be made of the marketing of beer, wine, and hard li
quor. Or even films and novels and music. The appeal is to the imagination—to the romantic side of human nature.
I like fancy water.
I’m delighted to drink a glass of liquid that began as snow in the French Alps hundreds of years before I was born, then became ice in a glacier, melted into deep underground springs, and finally was bottled and hauled all the way across sea and land to sit available on my grocer’s shelf.
For a very small price, I can have a reflective reverie in a glass—an ordinary glass that reveals the wonders of nature, the inventiveness of the industrial revolution and the pleasures of a poetic view of life.
Moreover, this liquid is good for me. It is me, as a matter of fact—90 percent of my body is water. I’m please to have my essential juices get an occasional transfusion of fanciful pizzazz.
There is a high end of the water market as yet untouched: rare and historic water. I’m thinking beyond natural purity—of water that has value because of its age or its association with special events or because there simply is no more of it ever to be had. This is the fine-wine division of bottled water.
A few examples: Several years ago, a former student brought me a liter of water all the way from the spring at Delphi in Greece—a source from which the noble Greeks of the fourth century drank when they went to consult the oracles of fate. I drink a little on April Fool’s Day.
One Christmas my wife gave me a bottle of water from the creek we hike alongside in summer. She had carefully filtered the water and filled the bottle on my birthday. I’ve great memories of fine days in that valley. We drank a toast with the water during our Christmas dinner—a toast to past happiness and present joy.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Page 6