All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (6 page)

J
UMPER
C
ABLES AND THE
G
OOD
S
AMARITAN

“H
EY, YOU GOT JUMPER CABLES,
buddy?” “Yeah, sure. I got jumper cables.”

English teacher and his nice sweet wife, from Nampa, Idaho (as I found out later). In their funny little foreign car. Drove around Seattle with their lights on in the morning fog, and left the lights on when they went for coffee, and so forth and so on. Dead meat now. Need jumper cables. Need Good Samaritan. Need a friendly hand from someone who looks like he knows what to do with jumper cables. And the Good Fairy of Fate placed them in my hands.

Men are supposed to know about jumper cables. It’s supposed to be in the genetic code, right? But some of us men are mental mutants, and if it’s under the hood of a car, well it’s voodoo, Jack, and that’s the end of it.

Besides, this guy only asked me if I
had
jumper cables. He didn’t ask me if I knew how to
use
them. I thought by the way he asked that he knew what he was doing. After all, he had an Idaho license plate and was wearing a baseball cap and cowboy boots. All
those
people know about jumper cables when they’re born, don’t they? Guess he thought a white-bearded old man wearing hiking boots and driving a twenty-year-old VW van was bound to use jumper cables often and with authority.

So I get out my cables, and we swaggered around being all macho and cool and talking automobile talk. We look under the hood of his rig, and there’s no battery.

“Hell,” I said, “there’s your problem right there. Somebody stole your battery.”

“Dang,” he said.

“The battery is under the backseat, dear,” said his nice sweet wife.

“Oh.”

So we took all the luggage and travel-junk out of the backseat and hauled the seat out into the parking lot and, sure enough, there it was. A battery. Right there. Just asking for jumper cables to be laid on it. I began to get worried when the guy smirked at his wife and said under his breath that he took auto mechanics and sex education at the same time in high school and they had been confused in his mind ever since, when it came to where things were and what you did to get any action out of them. We laughed. His wife didn’t laugh at all. She just pulled out a manual and started thumbing through it.

Anyway, the sum of our knowledge was that positive poles and negative poles were involved, and either one or both cars ought to be running, and six-volt and twelve-volt batteries and other-volt batteries did or did not work out. I thought he knew what he was doing, and kind of went along with it. Guess he did the same. And we hooked it all up real tight and turned the ignition key in both cars at the same time. And there was this electrical arc between the cars that not only fried his ignition system, it welded the jumper cables to my battery and knocked the baseball cap off his head. The sound was like that of the world’s largest fly hitting one of those electric killer screens.
ZISH.
Accompanied by an
awesome
blue flash and some smoke. Power is an amazing thing.

We just sat down right there in the backseat of his car, which was still sitting out in the parking lot. Awed by what we had accomplished. And his wife went off with the manual to find some semi-intelligent help. We talked as coolly and wisely as we could in the face of circumstances. He said, “Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know.” English teachers talk like that.

“Sure are,” I said. “Like matches in the hands of a three-year-old. Or automobiles in the hands of a sixteen-year-old. Or faith in God in the mind of a saint or a maniac. Or a nuclear arsenal in the hands of a movie character. Or even jumper cables and batteries in the hands of fools.”
(We were trying to get something cosmic and serious out of our own invocation of power, you see. Humbled as we were.)

Some time later I got a present in the mail from Nampa, Idaho. From the guy’s nice sweet wife. As a gesture of grace—forgiveness combined with instruction and admonition to go and sin no more. What she sent was a set of electronic, true-start, foolproof, tangle-free jumper cables. Complete with instructions that tell you everything and more than you ever wanted to know about jumper cables in English and Spanish. The set is designed so that when you get everything all hooked up, a little solid-state switch control box tells you if you’ve done it right or not, before any juice flows. Gives you time to
think
if you really want to go ahead.

We could all use a device like that between us and power, I guess. It’s nice to know that progress in such things is possible—in the face of ignorance and pride. Progress is possible. Next time he’ll ask his wife first. Good Samaritans may be handy and enthusiastic, but if they are dumb, they aren’t much help.

B
AD
S
AMARITAN

A
RE YOU INTERESTED
in humility avoidance and escaping a dumb death?

I can help.

Every time I do the same dimwit thing again, I mutter, “
I’ll never learn.”
As if acknowledging ignorance takes care of the problem. Yet, sometimes I get it straight—learn something by heart so firmly I’ll take the knowledge with me to my grave. My most recent triumph:

If you woke me up out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and shouted, “Battery Cables!” I’d sit up in bed and rap out my mantra:

“Separate and off. Red to good red. Red to bad red.

Black to good black. Black to engine block.

Start good car. Start bad car. Wait and reverse.”

Be impressed. I’ve got this thing down. Nailed. Internalized. Never again will you find me standing by at a dead battery scene red-faced and ashamed of both my stupidity and what I’m about to go ahead and do anyhow.

The motivation? Humiliation. Again and again AND AGAIN, humiliation. Frying an ignition system or two. Getting zapped flat by jumping juice. Being laughed at by my grandchildren when I tried to help a stranded motorist. Finally, when I didn’t stop to help a lady holding a scrawled sign saying “Dead battery—need help,” and my wife gave me her what’s-wrong-with-you lecture. Enough. It was time to stop being the Bad Samaritan.

I consulted several experts: a clerk at an auto parts emporium, a woman at a battery store, a driver for a AAA rescue truck, my friend Fred at my local gas station, and a seventeen year old kid who builds hotrods. They all gave me the same instructions. So, this is high-end information. Attend carefully—I will elaborate:

First, always use battery cables. Speaker wire or metal clothesline won’t do.

Second, make sure the two cars are close, but not touching, with power off.

Third, attach red clamp to the good car battery on side of battery with 1.

Fourth, attach red clamp to 1 side of bad battery.

Fifth, attach black clamp to 2 side of good battery.

Sixth, attach black clamp to engine block of car with dead battery.

(Why not to the minus side of the bad battery, you ask? If there is a spark when attaching the last cable, and the old battery is emitting fumes, you might cause an explosion and damage parts of you. Grounding the cable away from the battery avoids this possibility.)

When everything is connected, pray. Start the engine of the car with the good battery, wait a little, then start the car with the dead battery. Wait a little again to give the dead battery some life.

At this point, you may want to jump up and down, shout for joy, and thank Almighty God that it worked and nobody is dead or humiliated, most of all you. Then reverse the order in which you made the connections: black block off, black minus off, red bad off. Red good off.

If this doesn’t work, call your mom. She probably knows more about what to do next than your dad does. He’ll just give you a lot of voodoo moves that used to work on his old truck back when he was in high school. She’ll tell you to call AAA or a tow truck.

Using modern memory techniques, I have reduced my mantra to even simpler information: “Aretha Franklin, the American Red Cross, and Death.”

I can reconstruct the battery procedure from these three concepts. Consider: Aretha is famous for a tune called R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and that’s the required mental attitude for this job—respect—electricity is dangerous. The American Red Cross, of course, is the place to begin—with the red cable at the positive plus sign. And death is what will happen if I don’t remember to put the last black cable on a grounded place.

With my luck, though, I’ll still panic. I can see me now, standing there in the rain on some dark and stormy night, trying to explain to some poor soul about how the battery cable deal depends on remembering “Lena Horne, the Salvation Army, and Severe Illness.”
“What?”

The Bad Samaritan strikes again.

B
AR
S
TORY

R
EAL EDUCATION
comes in unexpected places. Real teachers know that.

When I began graduate school I needed a job—a night job—one that paid good money for short hours. Not easy to find. In desperation I accepted employment as a bartender in a hotel. Sounds OK, doesn’t it? Any problem with being a bartender? Well, actually, yes. Or so I thought at the time.

Graduate school, in my case, was a theological seminary—a school for ministers. Working as a bartender could get me suspended from school. That’s what I thought after I took the job. That’s what my wife thought after I took the job. And my friends thought the same thing. Bad move.

In a defiant frame of mind I decided to turn myself in to the authorities at the school. Before the gossip got around I would just march into the dean’s office and put it on the line: “I’ve got a job as a bartender. What are you going to do about it?”

The dean gave me his shrewdest look. A look I would learn over time to respect as an early warning sign of an educational experience.

“Wonderful,” he exclaimed. “This is wonderful news.”

“What?”

He explained that he and the faculty thought of me as young, green, arrogant, wet-behind-the-ears, inexperienced, and gener-ally naïve about the real world. “Worse, you think you know everything.”

Well, I
was
twenty-one.

He went on to explain that what was wrong with me could be fixed. What I needed to know most to become a minister was not something the school could teach me in a classroom. It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.

As a bartender I would see many kinds of people with many kinds of needs. It would be a challenge to be useful and do my job and keep my values at the same time. Finally, the dean explained that being a minister was to be where you were really needed—not just safely yammering away in a pulpit on Sunday morning. Most bars could use a minister, he thought.

“Jesus,” he said, “did not spend much time in church. He was out in the world.”

The dean had a plan. He would consider my bartending job as a work-study program. A course in Life 101. Every Monday I would come in for an hour’s conversation with him. He would ask what I had learned behind the bar. As long as I was learning something meaningful, I could get course credit.

“Keep your eyes open. Suspend judgment. Be useful,” were his final instructions.

I tended bar for almost three years. The learning never ended. I discovered how willing people were to tell their life stories to a bartender. Not only did they have great problems, they sometimes had great solutions.

Not many ministers have Bartending 101, 102, and 103 as part of their education. When I graduated three years later, the dean gave me a fine evaluation. I had passed the bartending test. I knew a lot more about the world.

He did make one troubling comment: “Fulghum is not as good as he thinks he is.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “be patient. In time you may be
better
than you think you are. Keep your eyes open. Suspend judgment. Be useful.”