All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (12 page)

G
UMMY
L
UMP

W
ATCHED A MAN
setting up a Valentine’s Day display in a store window. It’s the middle of January, but the merchants need to get a jump on love, I guess. Don’t get me wrong—merchants are fine folks. They give us choices and keep us informed on the important holidays. How would you know it was Halloween or Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day early enough to do something about it if merchants didn’t stay on the job?

The other group I count on is kindergarten teachers. They always know about holidays, and when it comes to valentines and other evidence of love, no merchant can compete with them. What the kindergarten teachers set in motion, no merchant could sell—it’s beyond price—you can’t get it at the store.

What I’m talking about here is something I think of as the
gummy lump.
Once it was a shoebox, decorated and given to me by the oldest child. Then it became a repository of other relics of childhood given to me by the younger children. The shoebox became my treasure chest in time. Its components are standard: Three colors of construction paper—pink and red and white—faded now, aluminum foil, orange tissue paper, several paper doilies, three kinds of macaroni, gumdrops, jelly beans, some little white hearts (the kind that taste like Tums) with words on them, and the whole thing held together with a whole big lot of white library paste, which also tastes like Tums.

Anyhow, this shoebox isn’t looking too very good now. It’s a little shriveled and kind of moldy where the jellybeans and gumdrops have run together. It’s still sticky in places, and most of it is more beige than red and white. If you lift the lid, however, you will begin to know what makes me keep it. On folded and faded and fragile pieces of large-lined school paper, there are words: “Hi daddi” and “Hoppy valimtime” and “I lov you.” A whole big lot of “ I lov you.” Glued to the bottom of the box are twenty-three X’s and O’s made out of macaroni. I’ve counted them more than once. Also scrawled in several places are the names of three children.

The treasures of King Tut are nothing in the face of this.

Have you got something around the house like a gummy lump? Evidence of love in its most uncomplicated and most trustworthy state? You may live a long, long time. You may receive gifts of great value and beauty. You may experience much love. But you will never believe in it quite as much as you believe in the gummy lump. It makes your world go round and the ride worth the trouble.

The three children are grown up now. They still love me, though it’s harder sometimes to get direct evidence. And it’s love that’s complicated by age and knowledge and confusing values. Love, to be sure. But not simple. Not something you could put in a shoebox.

This sticky icon sits on a shelf at the top of my closet. Nobody else knows it’s there. But I do. It is a talisman, a kind of cairn to memory, and I think about it every morning as I dress. Once in a while I take it down from the shelf and open it. It is something I can touch and hold and believe in, especially when love gets difficult and there are no small arms around my neck anymore.

Oh, sure, this is the worst kind of simpleminded, heartrending Daddy-drivel imaginable. I’ve probably embarrassed us both by telling you. But its beats hell out of a mood ring or a mantra or a rabbit’s foot when it comes to comfort.

I have no apology. The gummy lump stands for my kind of love. Bury it with me.

I want to take it with me as far as I go.

M
OTHER
T
ERESA

She died in 1997.

And this essay was written twenty years ago.

I removed it from the new manuscript, thinking the sentiments were shop-worn, the events out of date, and Mother Teresa a fading memory. So, you may well ask, why is the essay included here?

Seeing it in the reject pile troubled me. I read it several times again. And I realized the essay was not about Mother Teresa so much as it was about me and all those who try to resolve the inner conflict between self-interest and self-sacrifice. Trying to care about Me and care about Them and care about Us at the same time is an ongoing bewilderment.

T
HERE WAS A PERSON
who profoundly disturbed my peace of mind for a long time. She didn’t know me, but she went around minding my business. We had very little in common. She was an old woman, an Albanian who grew up in Yugoslavia; she was a Roman Catholic nun who lived in poverty in India. I disagreed with her on fundamental issues of population control, the place of women in the world and in the church, and I was turned off by her naïve statements about “what God wants.” People who claim to speak for God do more harm than good, if you ask me. She and her followers drove me crazy. They seemed so pious and self-righteous. I got upset every time I heard her name or read her words or saw her face. I didn’t even want to talk about her. Who the hell did she think she was, anyhow?

However. In the studio where I used to work, there was a sink. Above the sink was a mirror. I stopped at this place several times each day to tidy up and look at myself in the mirror. Alongside the mirror was a photograph of the troublesome old woman. Each time I looked in the mirror at myself, I also looked at her face. In it I have seen more than I can tell; and from what I saw, I understood more than I can say. I could not get her out of my mind or life.

That photograph was taken in Oslo, Norway, on the tenth of December, in 1980. This is what happened there: The small, stooped woman in a faded blue and white sari and worn sandals received an award. From the hand of a king. An award funded from the will of the inventor of dynamite. In a great glittering hall of velvet and gold and crystal. Surrounded by the noble and famous in formal black-tie and elegant gowns. The rich, the powerful, the brilliant, the talented of the world in attendance. And there—at the center of it all—this little old lady in sari and sandals. Mother Teresa, of India. Servant of the poor and sick and dying. To her, the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was given the longest standing ovation in the history of the prize.

No president or king or general or scientist or pope or banker or merchant or cartel or oil company or ayatollah holds the key to as much power as she had. None is as rich. For hers was the invincible weapon against the evils of this earth: the caring heart. And hers were the everlasting riches of this life: the wealth of the compassionate spirit.

I would not do what she did or the way she did it. But her presence on the stage of the world dares me to explain just what the hell I
will
do, then, and
how
, and
when
.

Several years after she won the Nobel Prize, when I was attending a grand conference of quantum physicists and religious mystics at the Oberoi Towers Hotel in Bombay, I saw her in person. Standing by the door at the rear of the hall, I sensed a presence beside me. And there she was. Alone. This tiny woman had come to speak to the conference as its guest.

She strode to the rostrum and changed the agenda of the conference from intellectual inquiry to moral activism. She said, in a firm voice to the awed assembly: “We can do no great things; only small things with great love.”

The contradictions of her life and faith were nothing compared to my own. And while I wrestle with frustration about the impotence of the individual, she went right on affecting the world. While I
wish
for more power and resources, she
used
her power and resources to do what she could do at the moment. Gandhi would have approved. He had some strange ways and habits of his own. But he did what he did.

Mother Teresa disturbed me and inspired me. And still does.

What did she have that I do not?

If ever there is truly peace on earth, goodwill to men, it will be because of women like Mother Teresa. In watching the millions of women marching in the streets of the world this winter, I was reminded that peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away! You begin with what you have, where you are, and pass it on.

Mother Teresa is dead now, of course.

Would you have wanted me to omit this essay because she’s gone?

Or leave it out because I can’t settle my own mind about Me and Them and Us?

That’s the point, isn’t it?

What she was, stood for, is not out of date or worn out.

It lives on as a challenge.

Not in her. In me. In you. In us.

C
ENSUS

T
HERE IS A
clay tablet in the British Museum that’s dated about 3800
B.C.
It’s Babylonian—a census report—a people count—to determine tax revenues. The Egyptians and the Romans conducted census counts. And there’s William the Conqueror’s famous Domesday Book, compiled in England in 1085. This need to know how many of us there are is old.

In our own country, the census dates from 1790. Counting people tells some interesting things. Especially since computers enable us to extrapolate trends into the future. Take this, for example: If the population of the earth were to increase at the present rate indefinitely, by
A.D.
3530 the total mass of human flesh and blood would equal the mass of the earth; and by
A.D.
6826, the total mass of human flesh and blood would equal the mass of the known universe.

It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? That’s a lot of meat.

Or consider this one: The total population of the earth at the time of Julius Caesar was 150 million. The population
increase
in two years on earth today is 150 million.

Or bring it down into a smaller chunk: In the time it takes you to read this, about 500 people will die and about 680 people will be born. That’s about two minutes’ worth of life and death.

The statisticians figure that about 70 billion people have been born so far. And as I said, there’s no telling how many more there will be, but it looks like a lot. And yet—and here comes the statistic of statistics—with all the possibilities for variation among the sex cells produced by each person’s parents, it seems quite certain that each one of the billions of human beings who has ever existed has been distinctly different from every other human being, and that this will continue for the indefinite future.

In other words, if you were to line up on one side of the earth every human being who ever lived or ever will live, and you took a good look at the whole motley crowd, you
wouldn’t find anybody exactly like you.

Now wait, there’s more.

If you were to line up on the other side of the earth every
other
living thing that ever was or will be, you’d find that the creatures on the people side would be
more
like you than
anything
over on the other side.

Finally, this: There was a famous French criminologist named Emile Locard, and seventy years ago he came up with something called Locard’s Exchange Principle. It says something to the effect that any person passing through a room will unknowingly deposit something there and take something away. Modern technology proves it. Dandruff, a hair, a fingerprint—things like that—remain.

Fulghum’s Exchange Principle extends Locard’s thinking: Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this “something” cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.