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About once a month, I scan the best-seller lists the way some people are alleged to read the obituaries. If I were to see my name, I'd figure something important had happened; when I don't, I just go on about my life.
But for at least a year -- time enough for a brace of Clancy techno-thrillers, three sizzling epics from various of the Collins sisters, at least four Stephen King contributions to the enduring heritage of Western Civilization -- one book has been sitting way up there. It's called All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.
Did it explain why we need not be troubled by the soaring drop-out rate in secondary schools, since a year of kindergarten is sufficient preparation to understand modern life, especially when you're watching campaign commercials? Or, more likely, was it a farrago of heart-warming Reader's Digest homilies, so saccharine that diabetics should avoid even being in the same room?
Despite the book's long-time best-seller status, nobody I knew owned a copy, and I was even tempted to purchase one to assuage my curiosity. Then I remembered the Guilt Box, right under my desk, next to my left foot.
Among my literary pursuits is sporadic service as a book reviewer for the Bloomsbury Review, a Denver-based book magazine. The Guilt Box holds about two dozen books that Tom Auer, the publisher, handed to me sometime in the indeterminate past -- December, I think -- and asked me to review real soon.
Various other things keep popping up, and every time I look at the box of unreviewed books, I feel as guilty as Ollie North should feel but obviously doesn't. I have read that guilt is not good for you, so that may be why I shove the box under my desk, instead of leaving it out where it would serve as a daily reminder of promises unfulfilled.
Anyway, the Guilt Box held a copy of All I Really
Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.
It wasn't
nearly as treacly as I expected it to be, although nothing
this side of Harold Bell Wright could have been. In fact, I
thought the author might be interesting to hoist a few cold
ones with.
However, the Evans, Colo., of my youth had a school
district which was too poor to support a kindergarten, and
so I missed learning how to share everything,
play fair
and put things back where you found
them.
What I did learn later has occasionally come in useful, though:
· Don't ever stand in line. Anybody who makes you
stand in line is indicating his absolute contempt for you.
He's saying I'm important, and you're such a nobody that
it doesn't matter how much of your life you waste waiting
for me.
Institutions which demand that you stand in line -- elementary schools, military training camps, prisons -- are always authoritarian and thus an affront to the citizens of a free society. Besides that, when was the last time anything you had to stand in line for was worth the humiliating wait?
· The easiest way to tell whether a foodstuff is
reasonably wholesome is to try pronouncing the ingredients.
It is easy to say wheat flour
or dried onion.
It is often difficult to get the accent right on
propylynated diglycerine exothenide stereate.
>· Whenever you want to find the best saloon in a strange town -- the place that has cheap beer, a good jukebox and interesting conversation -- just ask for the local biker bar. I have no idea why this is so, but it works every time.
Conversely, to be certain of finding a place that is
overpriced and pretentious (useful when someone is buying
your dinner), look for those whose name is of this form:
The Common Noun at Proper Noun,
as with The Inn
at Waterford Heights
or The Tavern at Summit
Square.
· Never eat in a rib joint if the people coming out have clean shirts.
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