All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (13 page)

P
ASS
I
T
O
N

V. P. M
ENON
was a significant political figure in India during its struggle for independence from Britain after World War II. He was the highest-ranking Indian in the viceregal establishment, and it was to him that Lord Mountbatten turned for the final drafting of the charter plan for independence. Unlike most of the leaders of the independence movement, Menon was a rarity—a self-made man. No degree from Oxford or Cambridge graced his office walls, and he had no caste or family ties to support his ambitions.

Eldest son of twelve children, he quit school at thirteen and worked as a laborer, coal miner, factory hand, merchant, and schoolteacher. He talked his way into a job as a clerk in the Indian administration, and his rise was meteoric—largely because of his integrity and brilliant skills in working with both Indian and British officials in a productive way. Both Nehru and Mountbatten mentioned his name with highest praise as one who made practical freedom possible for his country.

Two characteristics stood out as particularly memorable—a kind of aloof, impersonal efficiency, and a reputation for personal charity. His daughter explained the background of this latter trait after he died. When Menon arrived in Delhi to seek a job in government, all his possessions, including his money and ID, were stolen at the railroad station. He would have to return home on foot, defeated. In desperation he turned to an elderly Sikh, explained his troubles, and asked for a temporary loan of fifteen rupees to tide him over until he could get a job. The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could repay the man, the Sikh said that Menon owed the debt to any stranger who came to him in need, as long as he lived. The help came from a stranger and was to be repaid to a stranger.

Menon never forgot that debt. Neither the gift of trust nor the fifteen rupees. His daughter said that the day before Menon died, a beggar came to the family home in Bangalore asking for help to buy new sandals, for his feet were covered with sores. Menon asked his daughter to take fifteen rupees out of his wallet to give to the man. It was Menon’s last conscious act.

This story was told to me by a man whose name I do not know. He was standing beside me in the Bombay airport at the left-baggage counter. I had come to reclaim my bags and had no Indian currency left. The agent would not take a traveler’s check, and I was uncertain about getting my luggage and making my plane. The man paid my claim-check fee—about eighty cents—and told me the story as a way of refusing my attempt to figure out how to repay him. His father had been Menon’s assistant and had learned Menon’s charitable ways and passed them on to his son. The son had continued the tradition of seeing himself in debt to strangers, whenever, however.

From a nameless Sikh to an Indian civil servant to his assistant to his son to me, a white foreigner in a moment of frustrating inconvenience. The gift was not large as money goes, and my need was not great, but the spirit of the gift is beyond price and leaves me blessed and in debt.

On several occasions when I have thought about the story of the Good Samaritan, I have wondered about the rest of the story. What effect did the charity have on the man who was robbed and beaten and taken care of by the Good Samaritan? Did he remember the cruelty of the robbers and shape his life with that memory? Or did he remember the nameless generosity of the Samaritan and shape his life with that debt? What did he pass on to the strangers in his life, those in need he met?

Readers have passed on many variations of this story to me. Some are autobiographical—it happened to them. And some give credit to many different famous personages. What’s true? Professional fact-checkers aren’t sure.

But at least these three things are certain: Our belief in the necessity of the generosity at the heart of the story; our shared capacity to be part of the chain of generosity; and our belief in the enduring power of the simple compassionate gesture. We want these things to be true. And they are.

S
TARGAZING

W
E HAVE BECOME
catalog junkies. My sweet wife and I. Once you are on one list, you get them all. Especially in autumn they choke the mailbox, and we dutifully leaf through them by the fire after supper, amazed at all the neat stuff we don’t have and never knew existed. It feels like the days of my childhood when the latest Sears Roebuck catalog showed up to fuel the flames of desire for more stuff.

My wife asked me what do I not have that I
really
want. I didn’t tell her everything that came to mind, but once I set aside the more ludicrous notions involving lust, gluttony, and wanton greed, the discussion turned in a more meaningful direction:

I’d like to be able to see the world through somebody else’s mind and eyes for just one day. To be inside and know what I know and see what they see and think.

There’s a morning in the summer of 1984 I’d like to live over just as it was.

I’d like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes.

I’d like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt
David.

I’d like to be able to tap dance really well.

I’d like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence.

And so on and so forth. You get the drift of the conversation. We talked well into the night. And none of what we wanted could be had from catalogs. These were desires made out of nostalgia and imagination, packed in the boxes that dreams come out of.

Most of all, most of all, I’d like to have a living grandfather. Both of mine are mysteries to me. My father’s father was shot to death in a saloon in Texas in 1919. In the same year, my mother’s father walked out of the house one morning on his way to work and never came back. I still don’t know why, and those who know don’t say. In the fairy-tale factory in my mind, I imagine that if I had a grandfather, he’d be old and wise and truly grand. A bit of the philosopher, a bit of the magician, and something of a shaman.

If I had a grandfather he would have called me up and asked me if I had heard the news about the photograph of the latest solar system. Existing around a star twice as big and ten times as bright as our own sun—a star named Beta Pictoris. And around that star is a vast swarm of solid particles in a disk forty billion miles in diameter. And some of those particles are probably planets. All of it about fifty light-years from earth. Way,
way
out there. My grandfather would say I should come get him, and we’d go out and look at the stars and stay up all night and talk.

And I would go. We’d see Venus and Jupiter almost in conjunction with the bright star Lambda Sagittarii. The great winged horse of Pegasus riding high in the southwest sky. The misty patch of the Andromeda Galaxy almost overhead. And the Milky Way swung around since summer to run east and west. A shooting star would set my grandfather to talking about seeing Halley’s Comet in 1910, and how that night of May 18–19 he witnessed what was probably the largest simultaneously shared event in human history. And how the world was divided between those who celebrated and those who watched in fear and trembling. My grandfather would make me promise to watch the return of Halley’s Comet the next time around, on his behalf. And I would promise.

Along toward dawn we would talk of Orion, the Great Hunter, dominating the sky overhead. With the stars Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, the nebula in the belt, and Rigel and Saiph in the feet, pointing toward Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens. And we’d talk about how human beings have been looking at the very same stars and thinking the same things for so long. And how there must be life up there, same as here, and whatever it’s like, it’s looking at us. Do we shine? Are we part of some pattern in somebody else’s night sky—a projection of their imaginations and wonderings? My grandfather would say he was sure it was so. My grandfather would say we’re part of something incredibly wonderful—more marvelous than we imagine or can imagine. My grandfather would say we ought to go out and look at it once in a while so we don’t lose our place in it. And then my grandfather would go to bed.

You’d like my grandfather. And he’d like you, I think. Happy Grandfather’s Day to him, wherever he is. If you see him, let him take you out to see the stars.

And tell him I said I’d really like it if he came home for Christmas.

G
RANDFATHER IN
T
RAINING

I
’M A LITTLE UNCOMFORTABLE
telling you about my grandfather. And you might be a little confused. I certainly am. After reading the preceding story, you might well wonder if the grandfather I’m talking about is real or not. What about the grandfather that died long ago and the one who disappeared? Who is this other one?

And I must answer that he both does and does not exist. It depends on what “real” is. I suppose it’s harmless enough for a yearning to be so strong that what you need becomes very real in some corner of your heart. Picasso said, “Everything you can imagine is real.” And I understand that. My
other
grandfather is made of that cloth of yearning and imagination.

In a sense we make up all our relatives, though. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and the rest. Especially if they are dead or distant. We take what we know, which isn’t ever the whole story, and we add it to what we wish and need, and stitch it together into some kind of family quilt to wrap up in on our mental couch. I recently spoke separately with seven members of the same family about the same relative, and the stories did not agree. Memories are creative. There is always the conflicting truth of many witnesses. Always.

We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become. I’m not sure why it must be so, but it is. It helps to know this. Here’s the good part: Thinking about the grandfather I
wish I had
prepared me for the grandfather I
wish to be and am becoming.
It is a way of using what I am to shape the best that I might be. It is a preparation.

When I first wrote these grandfather stories, I was not a grandfather.

Now I am. Seven times over.

And the reality of my grandfather stories has shifted from the grandfather I wanted to have to the grandfather I have become.

I have lived my way into the truth of my stories.

G
RANDFATHER

T
HE GRANDFATHER IN THIS STORY
is the one I want to be. My grandfather called me up last Tuesday to ask me if I’d take him to a football game. Grandfather likes small-town high school football—and even better is the eight-man ball played by crossroads teams. Grandfather is a fan of amateurs and small scale. Some people are concerned about how it is that
good
things happen to
bad
people, and there are those concerned about how
bad
things happen to
good
people. But my grandfather is interested in those times when
miracles
happen to
ordinary
people. Here again, he likes small scale.

When a nothing team full of nothing kids from a nothing town rises up with nothing to lose against some up-market suburban outfit with new uniforms, and starts chunking Hail-Mary bombs from their own goal line, and their scrawny freshman tight end catches three in a row to win the game—well, it does your heart good. Miracles
do
happen.

“Murphy’s Law does not always hold,” says Grandfather. Every once in a while the fundamental laws of the universe seem to be momentarily suspended, and not only does everything go right, nothing seems to be able to keep it from going right. It’s not always something as dramatic as the long bomb or the slam-dunk that wins ball games. There are smaller playing fields. For example:

Ever drop a glass in the sink when you’re washing dishes and have it bounce nine times and not even chip? Ever come out after work to find your lights have been on all day and your battery’s dead but you’re parked on a hill and you let your old hoopy roll and it fires the first time you pop the clutch and off you roar with a high heart? Ever pull out that drawer in your desk that has a ten-year accumulation of junk in it—pull it too far and too fast—and just as it’s about to vomit its contents all over the room, you get a knee under it and stagger back hopping on one foot doing a balancing act like the Great Zucchini and you don’t lose it? A near-miss at an intersection; the glass of knocked-over milk that waltzes across the table but doesn’t spill; the deposit that beat your rubber check to the bank because there was a holiday you forgot about; the lump in your breast that turned out to be benign; the heart attack that turned out to be gas; picking the right lane for once in a traffic jam; opening the door of your car with a coat hanger through the wing window on the first try. And on and on and on and on. You’ve got your own list.

When small miracles occur for ordinary people, day by ordinary day. When not only did the worst not happen, but you got the gift of what-could-never-happen-but-did. How grand to beat the odds for a change.

My grandfather says he blesses God each day when he takes himself off to bed having
eaten
and not having
been eaten
once again.

I know the prayer. “Now I lay me down to sleep. In the peace of amateurs, for whom so many blessings flow. I thank you, God, for what went right! Amen.”