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

“Sometimes the world seems like a fine place, don’t it?”
    Yes.
    Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself. Weiser’s still there. The festival still happens. They still don’t care what you look like. It’s the music that counts.

 
     
     

    B IBLE S TORY
    A S A FORMER HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, I’m often invited to reunions. Sometimes the reunions are very private—one-on-one—as happened last week. While a student was in town for a class gathering he called to ask: “Could we get together for a cup of coffee? I have something to get off my chest.”
    His confession cleared up a long-standing mystery. In his senior year he had called me at home on a Sunday afternoon to say that he knew I was a parish minister and he had an urgent religious question to ask. Serious possibilities passed through my mind—“Sure, go ahead.”
    “Mr. Fulghum, do you know how to clean puke out of a Bible?”
    “What?”
    “It’s awful—I just can’t tell you—but I’ve got to do something before my mother gets home tonight.” I couldn’t help him. There are some things not covered in seminary. I admit to being chickenhearted. A prudent man avoids a mess like this.
    On Monday I asked what was going on, but he said that I wouldn’t really want to know. Now, ten years later, comes the truth. His parents were away for the weekend. And he had done
exactly
what they told him
not to do
: had some friends over for a party. Of course. There was beer. A girl drank too much, lay down on the bed in his mom’s room, and tossed her cookies. Trying not to throw up in the bed, she aimed over the side and hosed the nightstand. On the nightstand lay the mother’s Bible. Open.
    All evidence of the party could be cleaned up. Except the mess on the Bible.
    Desperate, our tragic young hero wrapped the evidence in a plastic bag.
    He buried it in the back yard.
    He bought his Mom a new Bible, and told some terrible lie about borrowing hers for a school project and losing it on a bus. She was really mad, but not nearly as mad as she might have been if she knew the truth. He could handle his mom’s wrath. She would never know. But he knew God knew, and he was sure God was going to get him. The experience kept him out of trouble and in church for the rest of his senior year.
    Now, ten years later he still hasn’t told his mother the truth. He still thinks she would kill him if she knew. It wasn’t just any old Bible. It was the Family Bible—passed down from his grandmother to his mother. And the Bible is still out there in the yard somewhere. Of course, he’s forgotten
exactly
where by now, but if he knew he would sneak home sometime when his mother was away and dig it up. But, of course, he wouldn’t be able to explain why the backyard was full of small craters.
    “Well,” I said, after laughing myself limp, “the only thing I can do for you is to give you an example of the things adults and teachers and parents do that are just about as awful. At least you will know you have company.” I told him my tale.
    That same spring I had a very full teaching load. My classroom was on the third floor and the nearest men’s toilet was three floors down. In desperate circumstances one morning in the middle of a class, I excused myself, walked swiftly down the hall into a closet to use the janitor’s sink. But the sink had a sign on it, saying “Does Not Drain.” Panicked and about to explode I used a large plastic bucket that was handy. Snapping the lid on the bucket I moved it into an art supplies storage closet—I had the only key.
    Alas, the convenience of this solution to my problem was too easy not to use again another day. By the end of the week, however, I had a different problem: what to do with a bucket containing a rather amazing amount of urine?
    Late one afternoon, long after school was out, I tried sneaking down the stairs with the bucket to empty it in the toilet three floors down. I stumbled on the stairs. And let go of the bucket.