What On Earth Have I Done?

by Robert Fulghum

  19. If you could know how your life will end but you still could not change it, would you want to know? Why or why not?

  20. If you could live one short episode of your life over again—a day, week, month—which would it be? And why?

  21. Do you remember your first love? Tell me.

  22. Have you ever experienced the kindness of a stranger? How?

  23. Do you ever have any bizarre thoughts? (I’ll report on the unexpected responses to this in a later essay.)

  The list is field tested. I’ve asked or had people choose to answer every one of these. The list changes—gets trimmed or expanded by what works or not. It’s still not a sure thing. I’ve had people close their doors in my face—not willing to play. But most of the time I end up connected to astonishing dimensions of humanity. And the response to the list leads to topics I’ve never considered. There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that:

  Everybody has a story to tell and a willingness to tell it if asked.

  Everybody knows things you don’t know, but wish you did.

  Everybody is a door into some other room in the world.

  Anybody is capable of inspiring you.

  Every situation contains opportunity.

  A friend of mine simply waves and smiles at people he doesn’t know.

  More often than not, they wave and smile back.

  Or ask, “Do I know you?” and he responds, “No, but you could.”

  The contact is brief, wordless, hopeful.

  True, if you do these kinds of things, you risk something.

  People might think you’re simple-minded.

  That’s a good thing.

  66

  Talking with a Child

  About Things

  Called a friend in Texas. The phone was answered with silence.

  Then, from a distance a deep male voice said,

  “We have a plan. Now we need a gun.”

  Silence again. The phone was hung up.

  What?

  I called again. The phone was answered with a standard “Hello?”

  “Jack, is one of your grandchildren around?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old?”

  “Five.”

  “Does the kid like to answer the phone?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Are you sitting around watching the TV soaps with the kid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you just go out of the room to pee?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. I had the impression you were planning a murder.”

  “What?”

  Too bad I couldn’t get the kid to talk to me. He would have, but his grandfather was probably too close by. Little kids who answer phones when their parents aren’t around are great conversationalists. If you will only listen, they will talk and talk and talk.

  And if you will reply to them as if they were real people and not stupid little kids, the conversation is often rewarding.

  I recall the time I got a detailed account of the THING that lived under a kid’s bed. Terrifying! Sure, I encouraged him. But nobody had ever asked him for an objective, clinical description of the THING before. The kid seemed to appreciate my sincere interest.

  And he was just as fascinated by the description of the THING that lives under my bed. He was relieved to hear that the THING under my bed is old and slow and stupid now. No problem. I’m used to it. It’s used to me.

  I thought it my duty to explain to him that THINGS will be under your bed as long as you live, but they never ever hurt you. In fact, when they are old and feeble, they become amusing pets and sometimes retire to live way in the back of a closet somewhere else in the house or even move next door. They won’t bother you if you stay out of closets that are not yours.

  He seemed comforted.

  “Your parents know all about this, by the way.”

  “Are there THINGS under their bed?”

  “Yes. Are your parents home now?”

  “No.”

  “Then go look under their bed and see.”

  “OK. Do you want me to call you back?”

  “No. I’m Fulghum, the Federal THING Investigator, and I’m just checking. They know me. They’ll understand.”

  “OK. I’ll tell my mom and dad you called.”

  “OK. Good luck with every-THING. Good-bye.”

  67

  Recollection While on the

  Way to an Appointment with

  an Opthamologist and Seeing

  Boys Choosing up Sides to Play

  Basketball, Leaving a Kid with

  Glasses Standing on the Sidelines.

  We called him “Coach Price.” He must have had a real first name. But the given name of an athletic director of junior-high sports teams is forever just “Coach.” He was also team manager, team doctor, bus driver, referee, and mother-and-father surrogate to pubescent boys between the ages of eleven and thirteen—half too young and self-conscious to remove their underpants in the locker room, and half old enough to proudly wear their jockstraps on their heads in the shower. Mr. Price may have been the coach, but hormones ran the team.

  One year Coach finally had a basketball team of promise. Five eighth-grade boys whose height and physical skill and intelligence had arrived early enough and settled down enough to make team play a real possibility. It was now or never, because the scrubs coming up from the seventh grade were still a long year behind in being anything useful on a basketball court.

  And then there was “The Kid.” The youngest member of his class, deranged by puberty-in-process, and legally blind without his glasses. To look through his thick lenses was like watching goldfish in a bowl. One eye wandered a bit. Without his spectacles he could barely see the basket, the ball, or the other players of either team.

  The Kid did have his virtues. For one thing, he was determined to play basketball. He was small and fast, and when he dribbled down the court he had the erratic, unpredictable moves of an alarmed jackrabbit in full flight. Furthermore, he was a tenacious ball handler—unwilling to give up possession to any player, no matter which team they were on.

  On the negative side, he seemed dyslexic in the face of diagrammed plays, reliably doing the opposite of any play devised. In short, he brought chaos to the court. And not even in practice had he ever put a ball through the net. He didn’t care. He came to play.

  As the varsity squad was trimmed of the truly inept, The Kid remained. He would not quit. And, to the surprise of all, Coach did not cut him from the team. Because Coach had a crazy idea.

  For one thing, there were only ten players left. Without The Kid, the team could not practice. But even more important, Coach began to see The Kid as a secret weapon. The kid’s vision-impaired eagerness could bring total confusion to the court. If inserted into a game when the opposing team was on a roll, The Kid might completely disrupt the flow of play. Coach thought that, in a close game, The Kid could be a living, breathing, fire-eating psych-out—one-man myopic mayhem.

  In the kindest terms Coach explained these matters to The Kid and the team. He promised The Kid he would award him a team letter and a letterman’s jacket if he would stay the season, whether he played or not.

  “I need you. The team needs you,” said Coach. And that was more than enough for The Kid.

  He redoubled his efforts in practice, falling on loose balls as a Medal of Honor winner might cover a grenade. His unpredictable play on the practice squad made the varsity team think hard about what they might face in a real game. They called him “The Bomb,” partly out of amusement, partly out of a mixture of contempt and respect.

  Alas, he only practiced. He never played. The team won without him.

  But it was enough for him to know that at any moment Coach might say, “Take off your glasses and go in and drive them crazy.” The Kid would have erupted off the bench like an arena gladiator. Coach knew the other team had never come up against a single-minded, cockeyed jackrabbit before. He must hav
e laughed whenever he thought about it.

  The team won the city championship, defeating the other three junior highs. At the team banquet Coach declared The Kid “Most Valuable Player.”

  “You never played, but you never let us down,” said Coach.

  And The Kid never forgot that affirmation.

  He was probably not the first or the last weird kid for whom a place was found during the career of Coach Price. The man had a gift for turning a loser into a winner. He had a gift for getting a team to appreciate oddball players. And he had a sense of humor.

  With these strengths, I’m sure that many stories like this one could be told of Coach Price, but it’s the only one I know.

  This story is not about basketball.

  This story is about great teaching.

  It’s about the imagination it takes to respect kids and find a place on the team, even for the least of them. This story belongs to Coach Price, and I’ve often wondered how he might have told it.

  But I am certain of the long-lasting effects of the story.

  I was The Kid.

  I remember.

  68

  The Learning Curve

  The Great Law of Unanticipated Consequences remains in force in human affairs, without amendment. It applies to all wars, past and present, for example. And things like DDT, free love, Play-Doh, Viagra, Super Glue, fertilizer, nuclear energy, and spray paint.

  My first encounter with this dictum was memorable. As an eight-year-old Cub Scout on my first overnight outing. A Senior Scout had advised me to bring cans of pork-and-beans. No cooking pot needed. Just set the can on the fire. What do you mean I should have opened the can first? Who knew?

  The explosion scattered the fire and the pork-and-beans and ten Boy Scouts over an astonishingly large area. And a night spent in a sleeping bag made sooty and sticky from the fallout tended to bring home the relevance of the phrase, “It seemed like such a good idea at the time.”

  (Of course we did it again. For years we did it again. Until a kid got hurt. The learning curve is not always steep.)

  We often know what we’re doing and even why we’re doing it.

  But we don’t always anticipate what we do does or will do.

  69

  Headline Stories

  Thoughts I wrote in my journal over one weekend, provoked by the headline stories shouting out about disasters from newspaper vending machines.

  Stoic wisdom about death and destruction is always proportionate to your distance from the scene of the accident.

  Sometimes somebody is to blame. Not everybody must be excused.

  If you imagine that what you fear in the future is already part of your past, the present looks pretty good.

  ________

  The question is not, “Is what you have sufficient?” but “Are you sufficient for what you have?”

  There are many ways to lose your life. Death is only one of them.

  “The body count is expected to rise,” they always say. Yes. I already knew that. Everywhere. Every day. Forever. The body count will rise.

  Reflection: How much better I would feel if I knew exactly how many avoided death and injury by an inch or a second, and then got up and pressed on. That’s what I want to know. Who was lucky? Give me a count of those who dodged the bullet or walked through the fires of hell and lived to tell the tale. Remind me that it’s possible to be one of those.

  I know it, but remind me.

  Whenever I’m in a European city like Munich or Athens or Rouen, I look carefully at all the older people—the ones over seventy. The survivors. And I think about what they’ve been through since they were young: repression, and occupation, starvation, brutality, bombs, disease, the death and dismemberment of friends and family, lost love, and the loss of everything but life itself. And they got up and went on with it. What difference did counting the dead make?

  Count the living, I say.

  The unbowed, the unbroken, and the determined.

  And the lucky.

  And count me in.

  70

  Orange

  This story belongs to Gussie Brock. We called her Gussie the Viking.

  Long ago her Norse ancestors migrated west in open wooden longboats across the North Atlantic to settle in Iceland—ninth century. The restless gene in Viking blood must have remained potent because, when Canada opened its western prairies to homesteaders after World War I, Gussie’s family left Reykjavik and immigrated to the province of Alberta to settle near the town of Medicine Hat on the South Saskatchewan River.

  They dug in on raw land, built a sod house, and went to work farming. Harsh country. Mean winters. Hot summers. Relentless winds. Drought. Tough life. Hard times. Matched by strong people. Somehow they hung on. But just barely.

  The family moved west to begin again—into the far northwest corner of the state of Washington where the land was better, the winters softer, the land richer, and water more abundant. Gussie grew up, married, had a family of her own, and moved to Edmonds, Washington. She was an active member of the church where I was the minister. When I first met her she was in her late sixties. Tall, slender, fair complexion, reddish-blonde hair. Energetic and strong. Viking woman, but not the barbarian kind. There was an air of good-humored dignity about her. We all thought she was the classiest lady in the congregation. As lovingly graceful a woman as ever we knew. So it was no surprise when she became an archangel.

  Explanation:

  One year, when someone noted that Unitarians don’t have any saints, we decided to see if we had a candidate in our congregation. We did. And one Sunday, more as a piece of lighthearted foolishness than liturgical propriety, we elevated a member of our congregation into sainthood, because everybody recognized that Wilbur Saxton was a saint if anybody was. The best. (He died while I was finishing this book. The church was packed—standing room only. His halo was retired.)

  One thing led to another, and before long we had installed another member of the parish as a deacon, because Marion Lewis clearly was one. And that led to the naming of Joan Anderson as an angel, because she was that.

  And when the idea of having an archangel arose, there was no contest: Gussie the Viking, who was eighty that year. In solemn ceremony we declared her virtues, gave her a white robe, magnificent white feather wings, and a halo. The Archangel Gussie. She was very pleased. As were we, since not many people can say they know an archangel personally.

  Now I well tell you her story.

  But first, how I came to know it:

  One year I asked members of the congregation to tell me Christmas stories from their lives. I would compile them into a Christmas Eve sermon. Many stories were offered. But one was so inspiring that it was the only story I told that Christmas Eve.

  (I paraphrase Gussie’s words:)

  Well, you know, life was so desperate out there on the prairies, and we were so poor that the most we could ever expect for Christmas was to be alive, warm, and have something to eat. The worst Christmas of all came after a week of heavy snow. Firewood was scarce. We were burning dried cow pies for heat and huddling together in a heap under all our blankets in all our clothes to keep from freezing to death. We were living off boiled potatoes and turnips, and there might not be enough to last until spring . . .

  On that Christmas morning my father got up and made a fire as usual. He was a solemn, stubborn, hard-working man. We knew he loved us, but like most Icelanders he didn’t express his feelings openly. It took all he had just to keep us alive. But he did that with all this heart and soul and strength.

  My mother was ill—too sick to get up or eat. When father called us kids to the fire, we didn’t expect much—least of all any presents. As we crawled sleepy-eyed and shivering out of bed, we stopped, astonished. For there in the dim light we saw on the table—an orange. A single orange on a white napkin. We were dumbstruck. An orange. An ORANGE! Out here in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter. An honest-to-God orange, glowing in the dim ligh
t like a golden ball.

  “Merry Christmas,” my father said, “the orange is for you.”

  How on earth did he get that orange? Where? When? How long had he had it? It was two days’ ride on horseback to the railroad line. Three days to the nearest village. He was capable of doing something like that, but we wanted to know the exact details. We begged him to tell us. But all he would say was, “It’s a miracle.”

  And we might as well believe that, because there it was.

  We sat still as he so carefully peeled the orange and divided the sections to give each child an equal share, along with pieces of the peel. The smell filled the room. Our mouths watered in anticipation. We were almost afraid to touch the miracle in front of us. And then, oh my, what a moment, we began to eat the orange, the juice dripping on our fingers and down our chins. I can still taste it. The sweetest thing I ever ate.

  My oldest brother suddenly said, “Wait.”

  He pointed at Dad.

  We saw that Dad had given all of the orange to us, the children. Every bit. None for him. So my brother took a knife and cut a piece of his orange and placed it in front of my father. And the rest of us did the same.

  My father divided his share in two parts. “These are for your mother when she’s better,” he said, and then we watched as, slowly, like a man taking holy communion, he ate his share of the orange.

  It was the only time I ever saw my father cry.

  As the years went by, the story of the orange became a family legend, told by generations of the family. We kids always said it was the finest gift we ever got. My father said it was not the same for him.

  He said his best Christmas present ever was the moment when his children noticed he was without and gave back to him part of what he had given to them.

  You know, he was a stubborn man, and he took his secret with him to his grave. We knew he had gone to a lot of risky trouble to surprise us. There was nothing supernatural about it. Our dad had done it. But no matter how hard we pled to know how he’d got that orange, he’d would only say, “It was a miracle.” And I guess it was and will always be.