All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (10 page)

Y
ELLING

I
N THE
S
OLOMON
I
SLANDS
in the South Pacific some villagers practice a unique form of logging. If a tree is too large to be felled with an ax, the natives cut it down by yelling at it.
(Can’t lay my hands on the article, but I swear I read it.)
Woodsmen with special powers creep up on a tree just at dawn and suddenly scream at it at the top of their lungs. They continue this for thirty days. The tree dies and falls over. The theory is that the hollering kills the spirit of the tree. According to the villagers, it always works.

Ah, those poor naïve innocents. Such quaintly charming habits of the jungle. Screaming at trees, indeed. How primitive. Too bad they don’t have the advantages of modern technology and the scientific mind.

Me? I yell at my wife. And yell at the telephone and the lawn mower. And yell at the TV and the newspaper and my children. I’ve even been known to shake my fist and yell at the sky at times.

Man next door yells at his car a lot. And this summer I heard him yell at a stepladder for most of an afternoon. We modern, urban, educated folks yell at traffic and umpires and bills and banks and machines—especially machines. Machines and relatives get most of the yelling. But never trees.

Don’t know what good it does. Machines and things just sit there. Even kicking doesn’t always help. As for people, well, the Solomon Islanders may have a point. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them.

Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts. . . .

D
ONNIE

T
HE RAP ON THE DOOR
was sharp, urgent, insistent—a foreboding of crisis—rappity-rappityrappity
rap . . .
Me, rushing to the door, fumbling with the lock, pumping my adrenaline, preparing for an emergency. What? What? What?

Small boy. Odd expression. Hands me a scrawled note on much-folded paper: “My name is Donnie. I will rake your leaves. $1 a yard. I am deaf. You can write to me. I can read. I rake good.”

(Across the back of our house is a row of middle-aged matronly maple trees, extravagantly dressed in season in a million leaf-sequins. And in season the sequins detach. Not much wind in our sheltered yard, so the leaves lie about the ladies’ feet now like dressing gowns they’ve stepped out of in preparation for the bath of winter.

I like the way it looks. I like the way it looks
very
much. My wife does not. The gardening magazine does not like it, either. Leaves should be raked. There are rules. Leaves are not good for grass. Leaves are untidy. Leaves are moldyslimy. But I like leaves so much, I once filled my classroom at school ankle-deep with them.

There is a
reason
for leaves. There is
no
reason for mowed grass. So say I.

My wife does not see it this way. There is an unspoken accusation in the air of laziness. We have been through this before. But this year a bargain has been struck in the name of the Scientific Method. Half the yard will be properly raked, and the other half will be left in the care of nature. Come summer, we shall see. And so her part is raked and mine is not. Let it be.)

Like a pilot in a fog relying on limited instruments, the boy looks intently at my face for information. He knows I have leaves. He has seen them. Mine is the
only
yard in the neighborhood with leaves, in fact. He knows his price is right. Solemnly he holds out pencil and paper for my reply. How can I explain to him about the importance of the scientific experiment going on in my backyard?

(
In a way, the trees are there because of the leaves. With unbridled extravagance, zillions of seeds have helicoptered out of the sky to land like assault forces to green the earth. The leaves follow to cover, protect, warm, and nourish the next generation of trees. Stony ground, rot, mold, bacteria, birds, squirrels, bugs, and people—all intervene. But somehow, some make it. Some tenacious seeds take hold and hold on and hold on—for dear life. In the silence of winter’s dark they prevail and plant themselves and survive to become the next generation of trees. It has been thus for eons, and we mess with the process at our peril, say I.
This is important.)

“My name is Donnie. I will rake your leaves. $1 a yard. I am deaf. You can write to me. I can read. I rake good.” He holds out the pencil and paper with patience and hope and goodwill.

There are times when the simplest of events call all of one’s existential motives into question. What would I do if he weren’t deaf? What will it do for him if I say no? If I say yes? What difference? We stand in each other’s long silence, inarticulate for different reasons. In the same motion, he turns to go and I reach for the pencil and paper to write, solemnly: “Yes. Yes, I would like to have my leaves raked.” A grave nod from the attentive businessmanchild.

I write: “Do you do it when they are wet?”

“Yes,” he writes.

“Do you have your own rake?”

“No.”

“This is a big yard—there are lots of leaves.”

“Yes.”

“I think I should give you two dollars.”

A smile. “Three?” he writes.

A grin.

Done. We have a contract. The rake is produced, and Donnie the deaf leaf-raker goes to work in the fast-falling November twilight. In silence he rakes. In silence I watch—through the window of the dark house. Are there any sounds at all in his mind? I wonder. Or only the hollow, empty sea-sound I get when I put my fingers in my ears as tightly as I can.

Carefully he rakes the leaves into a large pile, as instructed.
(Yes, I am
thinking I will spread them out over the yard again after he is gone. I am stubborn about this.)
Carefully he goes back over the yard picking up missed leaves by hand and carrying them to the pile. He also is stubborn about
his
values. Raking leaves means
all
the leaves.

Signing that he must go because it is dark and he must go home to eat, he leaves the work unfinished. Having paid in advance, I wonder if he will return. At my age, I am cynical. Too cynical.

Come morning, he has returned to his task, first checking the previously raked yard for latecomers. He takes pride in his work. The yard is leaf-free. I note his picking up several of the brightest yellow leaves and putting them into the pocket of his sweat shirt. Along with a whole handful of helicoptered seeds.

Rappity-rappity-rappity-rap! He reports to the door, signing that the work is done. As he walks away up the street I see him tossing one helicoptered seed into the air at a time. Fringe benefits. I stand in my own door in my own silence, smiling at his grace. Fringe benefits.

Tomorrow I will go out and push the pile of leaves over the bank into the compost heap at the bottom of the ravine behind our house. I will do it in silence. The leaves and seeds will have to work out their destiny there this year. I could not feel right about undoing his work. My experiment with science will have to stand aside for something more human. The leaves let go, the seeds let go, and I must let go sometimes, too, and cast my lot with another of nature’s imperfect but tenacious survivors.

Hold on, Donnie, hold on.

I’m often asked about Donnie. People want to know what happened to him. Is he OK?

Respecting his privacy, it’s enough to say that Donnie did hold on. Graduated from college in horticulture, married, and runs a wholesale nursery business. Specializing in trees.

C
LUCKY
-L
UCKY

“HELP PREVENT TECTONIC PLATE MOVEMENT.”

Message on the T-shirt worn by the man standing beside me in line waiting for the Powell Street cable car in San Francisco. A tourist. He’s wearing the required silly shirt. His wife’s shirt says, “Hello, I’m an idiot from Wisconsin, Please Help Me.” This I could comprehend. But her husband’s stand on tectonic plates was jabberwocky.

“OK,” say I, “Tell me about your shirt.”

Driving west from Wisconsin, he had tried to explain the landscape to his children. But they wouldn’t buy the theory of tectonic plate movement. No way was a huge chunk of the continent floating around on lava and pushing up against the United States and making volcanoes, earthquakes, and mountains as it slid under us. Dad was hooted into silence by the children’s razzberries of disbelief.

His wife discovered the T-shirt in a kitschy souvenir shop in Reno. He wore it as a hair shirt of humility. The determined skepticism of the young makes fierce and uncompromising adversaries. His kids don’t believe half of what he says, anyway.

He and I reflected on science and fatherhood. We concurred that it is the burdensome duty of adults to profess knowledge unconfirmed by direct experience. All that deep stuff you learn while growing up—you learn it, but you don’t really believe it. We swapped examples:

For openers you’re told how babies are made. Unbelievable. No way.

Almost as incredible as learning the earth will fall into the sun someday.

How about being told that algebra has a use in the real world outside school? Ha. And the Ice Age has to be a hoax. Half of North America covered with glaciers? A thousand feet of ice over Wisconsin? Never!

Split-brain theory is another lulu. Words in one half your head and music in another? Come on. And how about black holes in space? Quasars? And quarks?

Oh sure, you go around pretending that you are up to date on this theoretical stuff, but in your heart you know a lot of it must be dreamed up by scientists bent upon upsetting us civilians.

Based on personal experience, some of this ooh-wah information does compute. Combining several theories already mentioned, I am certain that the two halves of my brain have slid apart, leaving a black hole in the middle caused by the algebra quark. Believe it.

The all-time wonko idea is that birds are dinosaurs. Direct descendants right out of the Jurassic jungle. Oh, sure. However, fossil evidence of feathered dinosaurs really exists. And furthermore, I know of a fowl that is living proof of this hypothesis: Clucky-Lucky, the cannibal chicken of San Louis Obispo, California.

One Easter weekend, somebody’s present of a baby chicken got loose and wound up in the backyard of a pet-crazy family—friends of friends of mine. They raised her as Clucky-Lucky, the nomad chickette that grew up to be a substantial lady chicken of the Rhode Island variety. Cute. As chickens go.

But in her mature years Clucky-Lucky had grown unusually large for her breed and began to wander the neighborhood. She terrorized cats and ate their food. She assaulted dogs and chased people who annoyed her. When she began laying rancid-smelling eggs and began coming home in what was a distinctly inebriated condition, a veterinarian was consulted. Investigation proved the chicken had been eating cat food made out of
chicken parts
. And she was drinking beer out of traps set to kill slugs. Alas, Clucky-Lucky had become an alcoholic cannibal.

I have seen photographs of this chicken. Scaly legs with clawed feet. Razor sharp black beak. And yellow eyes that seem to shine with an ancient fierceness. Blow this bird up to the size of a water buffalo and you’ve got a dinosaur.

It’s logical, too. If birds are dinosaurs, and chickens are birds, then chickens are dinosaurs. Or, if B = D and C = B, then C = D. Finally, a use for algebra.

I explained all this to my colleague as we rattled along on the cable car. When he and his family dismounted, I heard his wife say as she walked away, “Not all the idiots are from Wisconsin.” Never mind, lady, I know what I know. And I’ll never turn my back on a chicken again.