What On Earth Have I Done?

by Robert Fulghum

  Ah, but what to write? Maybe some comments? This morning early I went back to the Unknown Chalker’s statements, and wrote:

  “The Vikings come bearing gifts.”

  “Parrots speak your mind.”

  “A fourth mitten has been found.”

  And “Who needs faithful teeth?”

  And then I added at other locations, these inquiries:

  “Will I ever learn?”

  “Whatever became of me?”

  “If you love me still, will you love me moving?”

  “Who knew?”

  “How do you plead?”

  “Will the circle be unbroken?”

  Granted, my words were not quite as obtuse as the Unknown Chalker’s, but maybe I’ve raised the intellectual level of discourse.

  Now it’s a day later. Beginning to rain at daybreak. I rushed out to see if my challenge had been accepted. The rain had washed away most of the chalkings, but at two locations, in large block letters someone had printed:

  “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?”

  Aha! There are three of us loose in the neighborhood with chalk. But I don’t know if the last question is an addition to my questions or a cry of dismay. It is a good question, you must admit. One most of us have muttered most of our lives—weekly, if not daily.

  On the way home this afternoon I checked the sidewalk signboards, but the heavy rain had dissolved the chalk. It’s just as well, I suppose. But I’m still thinking about how far this could go over time. And the next sunny day I’m going to write, “WHY ME?” That’s the other great question we ask most of our lives.

  The appearance of mysterious writing has been going on a long time. Things like this happened in the Bible, you know. Book of Daniel 5:24–28. “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin.” The words appeared on the wall during a feast given by Belshazzar, king of Babylon. Daniel interpreted the message to mean “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

  Bad news. Belshazzar may well have asked:

  “What the hell is going on?” and “Why me?”

  30

  Taking Chances

  Major event this past weekend: a sleepover at my house—with two beautiful young women and a handsome young man—all three with an intense interest in learning the rudiments of investment strategizing and financial risk taking.

  Or, to put it less abstractly, two seven-year-old girls and a nine-year-old boy—cousins—spent the night with their grandfather—me—learning poker. Five-card draw, to be specific.

  Oh, they know about poker. They’ve seen it on TV. Their parents play, as do some of their older cousins and friends. But, like driving a car, poker is best not learned from a parent. By family consensus this is a job for grandfather. And these are the last three in the family who do not know the game. The time has come.

  It was a little awkward to begin with. First of all, I kept my distance, having caught pinkeye from them the last time they stayed at my house. And they were grumpy right way about my rule that eating ice cream cones while playing cards was not OK. Also I was clearly out of my mind to think they would play with their own money. “What? No way!”

  There were some small glitches to overcome: Getting them to say “Queens” instead of “Old Maids,” convincing them that it doesn’t matter that all the faces on the face cards are not looking in the same direction, and making them put all their cards back in the deck for another game when they wanted to hold on to their good cards for next round.

  Bluffing was a stumbling block. When I explained that sometimes you must pretend you had good cards when you didn’t, the grandson asked, “Isn’t that lying?” Well, yes, in a way.

  “I’m not good at lying,” said a granddaughter, but then she admitted, “I like to lie and I lie all the time. It’s just that I’m not good at it.” Perfect. Every poker game needs an inept greenhorn.

  A victim of the first hand dropped out. She didn’t want to lose any more money. “But that’s my money,” said grandfather. “Not anymore,” she explained.

  Using all the extra loose poker chips, she started a make-believe cookie factory on the kitchen table. The second loser soon joined her. So grandfather is left playing three hands against one grandson, and grandfather is deliberately losing to keep him in the poker game and out of the cookie operation in the kitchen.

  “Stick to men’s work,” I advised him.

  After a while it occurs to grandfather that grandson knows exactly what is going on and is willing to go along and take all of grandfather’s money. Fortunately, the make-believe cookies were ready and the girls needed a customer, and since grandson had won all that money, maybe he would buy some. And he did. Leaving grandfather alone at the table, six dollars in the hole.

  Why is it I think I know more about poker than they do? Why is it I worry if the younger generation is as smart as mine? Why is it I ended up buying all the rest of the cookies and the cookie factory and cleaning up the cookie mess as well? Why did I not notice that the cookie makers had no qualms about making cookies out of ice cream and poker chips?

  This is how wisdom comes to grandfather: By being taken to the cleaners by my own genetic spawn.

  Finally, bedtime. Like most little kids, they like scary stories.

  “You can’t scare us,” they say.

  “How much would you like to bet?”

  “All the money we won at poker.”

  Oh, really? Well, then.

  Lie down and hold on.

  There’s the story about the one-eyed old man who was always teased by little children. He hated little kids. They didn’t know he could see through walls with his one eye. And they didn’t know he grew pencil snakes, which are long and thin, with razor-sharp teeth. At night he would slip his snakes into a bedroom and the snakes would be drawn to the open eyes of little kids. In seconds the snakes would eat their way in through the open eyes and eat up the kid’s brain and then eat its way out through the other eyeball, while the kid was screaming but couldn’t be heard because the snake ate so fast he disconnected their voice. Horrible way to die.

  “Is this true?”

  “What do you think?”

  (Silence.)

  Three little children, eyes tightly closed, curled up in one bed together, didn’t move. As I went to my room, I heard one small voice say, “Don’t open your eyes.”

  I can’t really say I’m six bucks ahead, because it was my money in the first place. But as I see it, we’re even. I won my money back. They got their money’s worth. And my seniority is intact: they know I still have a few cards up my sleeve. I may be old and stupid, but I’m still scary. I even manage to scare myself. I kept my eyes closed all night. It’s a safe bet I wouldn’t want to take any unnecessary chances with pencil snakes.

  31

  My Fault

  It’s been my fault all day today.

  It’s always my fault on Sundays.

  Explanation: In my Seattle household there are seven of us: five core family, a housekeeper, and a large stuffed toy moose. We have instituted a scapegoat system of blame. Each person takes a turn and whatever around the house goes wrong or cockeyed, that person is at fault that day.

  We’re well organized. For example, the housekeeper is to blame on Saturdays, which is easy, because she’s not even there. John, the stuffed moose, is to blame on Tuesdays. And Sunday is my day. Everybody else has his own special day as well.

  The moose started it. A sad-eyed gray-plush creature, the size of a large dog, he has been around the house so long we forget how he got here—a gift from somebody for some reason. And my nineteen-year-old Japanese niece took pity on him, adopted him as a companion, and named him John.

  One morning when I was raging around the kitchen over who drank the last of the milk again and didn’t go to the store for more again, in walked Myra with the moose. “John did it,” she said, “and he’s so very sorry.” The moose did look guilty. We laughed. John took his chastisement gracefully. Milk crisis forgotten.
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br />   For a while after that, everything got blamed on the moose, who always accepted his martyrdom with silent dignity.

  Then Myra complained that John was being unfairly ostracized. His burden was getting too heavy to bear. She said he was depressed.

  Then and there we decided to share the blame with John.

  The scapegoat’s job is to apologize and grovel a little while asking for forgiveness, which is easy when you know and everybody else knows that you are not really to blame for whatever happened. What started out as a silly joke became our family way—because, in reality, it really works out well. And it certainly seems to be appreciated by the John the moose.

  So today it’s all my fault.

  I haven’t been home all day. All I had to do was come in the door and say, “I’m really so very, very sorry.” In return I got laughter and shouts of “We forgive you.” Which made me curious, not defensive, about what I did—since I really didn’t know. And I can be truly repentant about spilling nail polish on the rug and breaking another plate and forgetting to get milk again.

  Absurd, you say. Of course, I say.

  But we laugh a lot while going through this daily drill of condemnation and repentance. We lose track of guilt and blame in the process of being ridiculous about the minor shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of our household. Small-minded finding of fault has become a high-spirited family game.

  Everybody knows they could do better, but nobody feels bad getting reminded in a secondary loony way.

  There are a lot worse ways to live together with other people.

  I know.

  I’ve tried them.

  32

  Neighborly Solutions

  Saw my next-door neighbor with her hands clasped to her face in small-scale grief, while standing at the stern of a garbage truck, which had just dumped its accumulated rear load up and over into the fetid innards of its maw. “Can I help?”

  She blurted out her story. First she shoved a cork down into a fine bottle of wine she was going to serve to her in-laws. Then she destroyed her fancy corkscrew trying to get the cork out, meanwhile covering herself and her kitchen with bright crimson stains when the cork all-of-a-sudden plunged into the bottle, causing a major blow-back of the wine.

  Then she went to the store and got two standard tear-the-cork-out-by-sheer-force cheap corkscrews and a new bottle of fine wine, along with some milk and other things while she was at it. She thought she’d emptied all the groceries out of the paper bag, which she wadded up and put in the garbage, which she put in the kitchen can, which she hauled out to the big can out on the curb.

  Later she couldn’t find the corkscrews when she was ready to open the wine. She remembered when she heard the garbage truck. And ran out.

  I told her one of my father’s oft-told jokes. A man was sitting in a two-hole outhouse with another man. After he did his business, he pulled up his pants, and said, “Damn, I had a five dollar bill in my hand and I dropped it through the hole.”

  Turning to the other man—a friend—he said, “Loan me a hundred bucks. I need it immediately.” His friend took out his wallet and gave him a hundred dollar bill, which the man immediately threw down the hole. “What the hell did you do that for?” asked his friend. “Well,” said the man, “I ain’t going down there for no lousy five bucks.”

  My neighbor smiled.

  “Throw your wedding ring into the back of the garbage truck,” I advised, “and I guarantee you’ll find the corkscrews. Some solutions require a bigger problem.”

  Giving me her I-know-you’re-an-idiot-but-you’re harmless look, she retreated in silence up her driveway and into her house.

  I would have loaned her a corkscrew, but she was obsessed with the corkscrews in the garbage truck and her own series of mistakes that got them there.

  The real solution lay in giving up the problem.

  As is so often the case.

  I’ve also vexed the neighbor lady who lives on the other side of me.

  And I’m sorry, but not very.

  She can’t figure out why the theft alarm in her old diesel Mercedes keeps going off. She doesn’t know it, but it all has to do with her dog, a friendly but neurotic mutt who barks relentlessly every nine seconds when he’s outside and lonely.

  (And I do mean exactly nine—I timed him.)

  It drives her next-door neighbor, me, crazy when I am trying to read my evening paper. But I like the lady, and there’s really nothing to be done about the dog. I think the dog is just old and weird like me. He will probably die before I do. I just have to wait him out.

  Yesterday I discovered by accident that if I slammed my back door hard it would set off the old Mercedes’s theft alarm. And the lady would come out. And the dog would shut up. Well, then . . . door slamming. . . .

  It works, but it’s not a lasting solution. I know that. But it’s an amusing diversion. I’ll settle for that. And it seems to have affected the dog. It only barks every seventeen seconds now. What can’t be entirely fixed can be warped into a different problem.

  Maybe I could get the dog to jump into the garbage truck . . .

  33

  Amateur Joy

  The winter of ’03. I remember. The Rockettes came to town at Christmastide—a road show version of New York’s Radio City Music Hall spectacular, featuring the long-legged lovelies who dance in unison, kick high, and strut around to big band music. The hot ticket for Christmas. “You just gotta go!”

  Spectacular is the operative word. And even more extravaganza was available that winter—a Big samurai movie, and a Big sailing-ship-battle movie, and another Big round of the Lord of the Rings, and the Big college football games, and the Big TV superspecial phantasmagorias.

  All spectacular. All big, Big, BIG!

  But somehow, hyperstimulation was not what I wanted for Christmas.

  Some low-key joy would do. Amateur joy.

  I remembered a conversation I had with a Greek friend in a small village on the island of Crete. I asked why the Greeks minimalize the celebration of Christmas but go all-out for Easter. He explained that December Twenty-fifth was just a birthday. Everybody has a birthday. Easter, on the other hand, celebrates a resurrection from the dead. That’s amazing. That’s spectacular. That’s Big.

  Besides, by the end of December the Cretans have survived the stress of the tourist season, the exhaustion of the olive and orange harvest, and the first storms of the winter. Nobody is up for roasting lambs outdoors in the windy rain and dancing around in circles in the village square. A quiet church service, a walk home in the silent night, soup and bread, some old songs with family around a fire, and bed—that’s it.

  The work of amateurs.

  And that would explain why on a Saturday night in December when I could have seen the Rockettes or gone to the symphony or watched explosions on a Big screen, I was somewhere else:

  In a small Lutheran church in my neighborhood, listening to a choir of dedicated amateurs sing their hearts out. At the intermission there were home-baked cookies provided by the ladies of the church. And I bought a raffle ticket on a handmade Christmas quilt. The proceeds would be given to the needy in the neighborhood.

  Then we returned to the sanctuary to hear a reading of Dylan Thomas’ account of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Finally, the audience joined the choir in singing carols, ending with “Silent Night.” Off-key, but sincere.

  Unspectacular. No glitz, no glamor, no extravagance. No Big deal.

  Walking home in the rain, I realized this was not a Lutheran deal or even a Christian one. It was about the universal Companionship of Amateurs of any faith or culture, struggling like me to feel at home in the winter’s dark, and awed to be part of the Mystery of It All.

  I wasn’t excited when I went to bed. Just contented with getting what I wanted most so early in the holiday season: the company of people like me who find in themselves in the middle of winter a capacity for joy—small and deep and ordinary.

  Amateur
joy.

  34

  Intersection II

  Moab, Utah, is a small town in the far four-corners area of the American Southwest—where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah touch. The town is a green oasis in a land of red rock canyons, high desert plateaus, wild-rapid rivers, snow-capped mountains, and vast empty spaces. Most of the land is public—state and national forest and parks. Water is scarce. It’s hot and windy in summer, cold and windy in winter, and arid in any season. Not many people—mostly Navajo Indians, Hispanics, Mormons, cowboys, dry-land bean farmers, ranchers, miners, and fossil hunters. Or that’s the way it was.

  Then the great outdoor recreation boom hit in the early Seventies. Hikers, river-runners, bicyclists, climbers, backpackers, jeepers, hunters, and just plain tourists discovered the area. They came to have a look and be in the middle of nowhere. And maybe stay awhile.

  I was one of those—thirty years ago.

  In spring and summer the town and the backcountry gets crowded.

  But in autumn, when the aspens turn yellow and the first snows fall in the mountains, most of the recreational itinerants leave. And in winter it’s quiet again. The town still has only five thousand year-around people. Many of the stores and restaurants and motels close. If you pass through Moab in winter at three o’clock in the morning on the way to somewhere, you might think the town has been abandoned.

  For many years I have returned to this landscape in the quiet seasons. To a small house and art studio in a mountain valley twenty miles south of town. I go to get away from city life, to be in touch with myself, to shut my mouth and open my spirit, and to allow my senses to function free of the noise of civilization.