Read Online All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum - Free Book Online

man. Like I say, town’s locked up—like somebody spilled glue on a cockroach convention. Weather’s bad but not bad enough—too many people walking. The cab is running rough and my boyfriend has run off with two other women—not one, but
two
. And my rent’s way overdue. God is definitely not on my side. But, hey, rain’s over—you gonna talk or ride?”
    “I should pay you just to drive me around and talk to me. But I’ve go to go uptown to a meeting, so I’ll get out.” Standing by her door, I make an offer: “Here’s twenty dollars—a gift—to balance out a bad day.”
    “Twenty dollars? It’s not enough.”
    “Not enough?”
    “If you think twenty dollars will pull me even with the craziness of New York City and the wrath of Almighty God, then you’re weirder than you look and you need the money more than I do. Here, take it.”
    “How much would pull you even?”
    She thinks in amused silence, laughs, holds out her hand.
    “There’s not enough money in the universe. Here, gimme that twenty. If I don’t take what I
can
get, I’ll never get
nothing.
I’m grateful, my man.” Honking and waving and laughing, she charged off into the impossible traffic more like the driver of a tank than a taxi—just possibly working her way uptown or beyond. Somehow. Someday. Onward.
    Attitude. It’s all attitude.
    Another mermaid.

 
     
     

    S UMMER J OB
    T WO DESPERATE YOUNG MEN were at my door one night last week. “We’re desperate,” they said. They didn’t look desperate. Neat and clean—tennis shoes, jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps on the right way. “We’re fifteen years old,” which is why they were desperate. They needed summer jobs and nobody was hiring unless you were sixteen. “Being fifteen isn’t good enough,” said one. I remember. Being fifteen is being in-between—a transitional phase.
    “Just how desperate are you?” I asked.
    “Really desperate—we’ll do anything for money.”
    Wonderful. Actually I had been looking for a couple of guys in this condition. See, a neighbor has been needling me about my excessive firewood. He thinks it weighs too much and is maybe bending the timbers of the decking on the dock in front of our houseboats, and since the dock decking is common property, it’s his business. Furthermore, he thinks that burning wood in a stove contributes to serious air pollution problems and I am therefore irresponsible for not heating my house some other way. Right. I agree. That’s exactly why I have so much firewood: I don’t burn it anymore. But this guy keeps yawping at me and I’m steamed.
    Suddenly I have a genius solution for the firewood fracas.
    “Gentlemen,” I say to the young men at my door, “I have a job for you.” They are excited. “You see all this firewood along the dock?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I want you to haul it all up onto the street where you will find my neighbor’s very large four-door green Buick sedan. And I want you to fill that Buick with this firewood.”
    “There’s too much to go in the trunk, sir.”
    “Exactly. So, I want you to fill the whole inside of the Buick completely with firewood—door to door and floor to ceiling. And if you have any left over I want you to stack it on the hood and roof. Doing it carefully, of course.”
    “We couldn’t do that sir—we might get in trouble.”
    “How about if I pay you ten dollars each and you do it at night?”
    “We could do that, sir. But what if we get caught?”
    “For an extra five dollars apiece you will not get caught.”
    “Right, sir.”
    “And besides,” I tell them, “at fifteen you’re still juveniles—they won’t give you the electric chair for misplacing a pile of firewood. Do it.”
    I am tired of being patient and reasonable and fussing around with the minutiae of life. Direct-and-swift action is my mode these days. A one-man SWAT team am I. Don’t mess with me. My neighbor is lucky I didn’t pile up the wood on his front porch and set