Maybe (Maybe Not) Read online

  “Beaver Bob,” by my running mates in the “Jolly Boys Club” in junior high—before the orthodontist had a go at my teeth.

  “Goodtime Bobby Fulghum.” After orthodontia, in high school.

  “Number 36,” my lucky number when I was in rodeos.

  “Big Bunny,” by Marilyn, my first love. Think what you want.

  “Fulghy.” In college, and even now by men friends at poker games.

  “Daddy.” Children.

  “Ensign Fulghum.” As a navy chaplain trainee.

  “The Reverend Mr. Fulghum.” After ordination.

  “Uncle Bob.” By my art students.

  “Ano Ne.” Second wife. (Japanese familiar for “Hey, you.”)

  “Zulu Delta Ground.” Radio code name when I was ground crew at a glider contest.

  “Captain Kindergarten.” After the book, by acquaintances.

  “Dr. Feelgood.” How the critics refer to me sometimes.

  “Dear.” As in “Dear Mr. Fulghum.” Also by my wife, on tense days, as in “Are you going to walk through here again with muddy feet, dear?”

  “Granddaddy” and “Poppa.” By Sarah, Max, and Brie.

  “Robert-Not-Bob.” What I used to tell people my name was, but it never worked. They’d just say, “Well, sure, Bob, whatever you want.”

  There are even more—about thirty names in all, but that’s enough to make the point. All of these are names given me by other people. But not names I would have given myself. My name is not mine, it’s theirs. It’s a series of costumes put on my life by other people.

  I remember reading in some anthropology book about cultures in which your original name is given you by your family until you are old enough to choose a name for yourself. I would have liked that.

  In high school, I wanted to be called “Doak” or “Buck” or “Ace.”

  Later, when I was in seminary in Berkeley, I went to foreign movies and always stayed for the credits at the end to see if I could find some elegant, mysterious, strong name from another country that I could use. “Miloslav” or “Czabt” or “Jean-Pierre.”

  In the sixties, when the hippies reached for more expressive names and I considered myself at least semi-hip, I briefly considered “Nigel Seven Morningstar” as a name tag connecting me to the Age of Aquarius.

  But now I guess it’s too late or too much trouble. The name is not that important anymore—it’s the tone that counts. I feel like an old dog I know. He will come to any name you call him, just so long as your demeanor carries with it the promise of affection or food.

  An actor I met in Roanoke, Virginia, solved a name problem for me. He’s my age and has grandchildren. We talked about the hidden disappointment of names that get stuck on you when your children have children. This happens at a time when you have reached seniority in the ranks. You feel experienced and wise. Some respect is due. You deserve it. And then some slobbering little bundle of joy who can’t speak the language starts calling you “Boppa” or “Nungnung” or “Moomaw.” And everybody thinks it’s so damned cute. Not only does the child call you that, but everybody else in the family starts calling you that. There’s nothing you can do about it. You feel for sure like the old family dog.

  How can you have a dignified role in the life of the family when everybody thinks of you as good old “Moomaw” or “Gandy Bippy”?

  But this guy I met in Roanoke beat the system.

  Actually, his wife had the idea.

  Her name was plain old “Mary.” She hated it all her life. She saw this “Gandy Bippy” thing coming and was determined to head it off. When her first grandchild reached the age of semiconscious intelligence, she carefully explained to the child that Grandmother was to be called “Delilah” and nothing else. “Delilah”—after that sexpot in the Bible who did a number on old Samson.

  Her husband didn’t much care to be called “Samson,” but since he had been “Fred” all his life and didn’t much care for that either, he opted for the German nickname “Fritz.” He’s not German, but “Fritz” had a certain lively, foreign sound.

  It took the family a while to get used to the fact that Granny and Grandpa were usually unavailable for child-care duty. However, Delilah and Fritz would be glad to take the children to the zoo or anywhere else, anytime, just call their names.

  PLACE OF BIRTH:____________________

  How many times have you filled in that blank? All our official records bear it. Our obituaries will carry it. “Where were you born?” The question always comes up.

  And from me always gets a reply of “It’s not really very important.” My family and I lived there about six weeks and have never returned.

  Ask me instead where I spent my childhood, where I spent those years of grade school and junior high school and high school. Ask me what it was like one mile in any direction from my house at age nine. Ask me where I grew up. Ask me, “Where do you come from?”

  There’s yet another question in this vein—one never asked in official forms. It exists only in the secret biographical records of my mind.

  CONCEPTION:_________________________

  Where was I conceived—and under what circumstances?

  Since both my parents are dead, I’ll never know.

  But I’d like to know. I’d really like to know.

  They spent the years I can remember sleeping in separate beds in separate rooms. Never once did I see them embrace or kiss one another. At times they fought, but most of the time they were politely civil. They led lives apart.

  I wonder how was it for them at the beginning. How were they feeling when I was conceived? As best I can figure, it must have been in early September. Where? Was it planned or an accident? A matter of love and passion or a matter of course? Was I wanted? Did they at least love each other then?

  For reasons I cannot articulate, it would settle my mind to know.

  Over the last year, I’ve asked many people these two questions: “Where were you conceived?” or “Where were your children conceived?”

  A surprising number of people seem to have come into being as a consequence of passion and laughter. Not a bad mix for a beginning. Sites and occasions that stand out so far in my poll: in an elevator, on a windowsill, in a boat, in a closet, in the backseat of a car, in an outhouse, in a bathroom during a reception after a funeral, in a church office, in an airplane, and in front of the TV while watching Nixon make a speech.

  A young friend told me what she knew about her conception and birth.

  For reasons she will never comprehend, she was placed for adoption the week she was born, even though her parents were married at the time. Years later, when she was thirty, she was reunited with her biological parents. She asked many questions, especially about the “why” of the adoption. The answers were difficult and confusing to her, because her biological parents were equally confused about it—then, and now.

  Her father told her it might make some difference to her to know that when she was conceived, he was in love with her mother and she with him; that they were engaged to be married in late summer. They were young—not yet twenty-one. It was April. And that on a lovely, warm Saturday afternoon in the spring in Texas, they went on a hike along a remote and secluded section of a river. They waded in the water, played, splashed one another until they were soaking wet. They took their clothes off and made love in great passion, in the hot sunshine, on a sand-bank in the middle of the river. The Spanish had named that river “Los Brazos de Dios”—the arms of God.

  In a way, this story answers the question of my own conception.

  Wherever and however any one of us may be conceived, it is the same.

  We come into being in the arms of God.

  After the blanks for name and place of birth on official forms, we come to

  ADDRESS:_____________________________________________

  Where do you live? For many of us, the answer changes often in a lifetime.

  Nearly one in five Americans moves every year
. About half the population has moved in the past five years, according to the most recent census. More than 19 million people will move between Memorial Day and Labor Day this year.

  Not surprising. We’ve always been a nation of migrants. We think the earliest arrivals came across a land bridge from Asia, and 65 million more people sailed from Europe to North America between the seventeenth century and the Second World War. Even after we got to the edge of this continent, we kept on moving.

  The genealogists in my clan say I can follow my own genes by starting with a Danish sea raider, who rowed off to what became Normandy in the eighth century. From there the gene strain invaded England, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington State.

  Still there’s no settling down. I’ve moved my domicile twenty-seven times in fifty-five years. And that’s not counting short-term addresses connected to college dorms, summer jobs, and military training.

  I moved again this year.

  Here’s my change-of-address notice:

  I have been living aboard a houseboat in Seattle. Now, for part of the year I live in another neighborhood—San Juan County, Utah.

  You may not realize it, but you’ve seen this Utah landscape. It’s high desert, red-rock canyon-lands country. John Wayne filmed some of his most famous cowboy pictures hereabouts. And every now and then, there is an ad on TV showing a beautiful woman in an evening gown marooned alone with a late-model pickup truck on top of a thousand-foot sandstone spire out in the middle of nowhere. These places are in my new neighborhood.

  I’ve never figured out how that ad would make me want to buy a truck, but I do know why I would want to spend time in a place that seems so open and empty and far from civilization. Because it is open and empty and seems so far from civilization.

  My wife and I lived in a small house in this landscape last year. Twenty miles from town. No telephone, no television or radio, no newspaper delivery. The daily news is what time the sun comes up and the phases of the moon, whether or not there is firewood, and the effect the seasons have on living things, including me.

  If you fly over it, the landscape seems rugged, dry, and barren. Not so. Its best parts are just spread out over time and space. You have to look. Within an hour of my house, I’ve stood in dinosaur tracks more than 140 million years old and picked pine nuts for lunch; watched wild horses run and slept in an Indian ruin abandoned nine hundred years ago. I’ve been where it was so quiet and still I could hear the sounds made by the wings of ravens as they flew overhead.

  It’s not as remote as I had expected. Maybe nowhere is remote anymore. The interstate highway is thirty miles away. In the nearest little town, most people have satellite-TV dishes that pull in more stations than you’d get in a city. USA Today is on the newsstands early every morning. UPS and Federal Express deliver “second day.” And the kids in the local high school look and dress and think like their peers in Seattle or L.A.

  There’s been a lot of human traffic through this countryside. At one time or another, during the last thousand years, the culture of the area has been shaped by Anasazi, Ute, and Navajo Indians, Spanish explorers, Mormon settlers, cattle ranchers, sheepherders, pinto-bean farmers, uranium miners, mountain bikers, river runners, Jeepers, big-game hunters, and drive-through tourists. Everybody passing through leaves a mark.

  It’s not paradise. The once-charming little centers of civilization have died off or become motel strips. The weather contrasts are extreme. Drought and downpour, 105 degrees in August and 10 below in January. A week of dust storm followed by a week of icy gale is not uncommon. It’s not hard to die of thirst if you get lost in the back country. The fear of rattlesnakes, black-widow spiders, scorpions, and biting flies is barely counterbalanced by the anticipation of wild-flowers in spring and aspen trees in the fall.

  Still, I like it. Something is there that sustains my spirit and lifts me up.

  It’s a matter of locale. I think everybody resonates to some specific landscape. I grew up in open country—hot and dry country—and spent the happiest days of my early life on horseback as a working cowboy and dude wrangler. I have photographs of my father and his father and his father and his father—all on horseback in work clothes.

  I’m not a cowboy now—don’t pretend to be, but I am most at ease in that raw country and feel comfortable in my own skin when I’m surrounded by that rough environment. It’s where I go when I get confused. It’s enough just to be for a while in a place where all I can hear is the wind blowing, and all I can see is a long way off in the distance on the earth around me in the daytime and a long way off in the distance in the night sky above me. It is there and then I know I am not lost.

  A telephone call last October. “Mr. Fulghum, our first-grade class would like to involve you in a field trip.” It’s the chairlady of the Outside Education Committee for the first-grade class in the only elementary school in our small nearby town in Utah.

  A field trip! Yes! Talk about magic words! Next to Show-and-Tell, I liked field trips best when I was in school. Actually, I’d been thinking about field trips quite recently. About a month before receiving this invitation, I stood on the sidewalk of the town and watched with envy as a fire truck rolled by very slowly with its sirens wailing. This was to please the first-graders who were sitting in back on top of the hoses, holding on for dear life, grinning from ear to ear, thrilled beyond words by a trip down Main Street with the firemen. A small voice in the back of my head said, “Take me, too.”

  I remember with astonishing clarity my own field-trip experiences of fifty years ago. To a fire station, a bakery, the Coca-Cola bottling plant, a dairy, the police station, the city dump, and a construction site. During second grade, we visited an automobile-repair garage, rode a city bus around and back to the place where the bus was kept at night, and toured the county museum. We walked up and down our main street going in and out of businesses to see what was going on behind the scenes where groceries and goods were being unloaded and unpacked. And, of course, the zoo—we went to the zoo several times. And when the circus came to town, we were there to watch them unload the animals from the train and set up the tent.

  Looking at a book in a classroom could not ever compete with a field trip.

  How sorry I was when education shifted to matters that could only be studied in school in the classroom. How glad I was to take geology in college and go out on field trips again—to walk on and touch what I was studying.

  When my children were young and the call came from school for parent volunteers to chaperon field trips, I was their man. Once a field-trip project involved building a fifteen-foot-high hot-air balloon out of paper—then flying it at a nearby park. The balloon caught fire up in the air and floated toward a landing on the roof of a nearby house. The fire department was called. Very exciting! When calm had been restored, the students wanted to do it again. Not just the balloon, but the whole catastrophe, launch, flaming balloon, fire department, and all.

  When I became a schoolteacher myself, of drawing and writing and philosophy, I learned to drive a school bus so I could take my students on field trips. At the heart of my drawing class was the notion that an artist begins by looking carefully at the real world. An artist never looks away or turns away. An artist’s job is to see. And to go out in the world and see it firsthand, just as it is; to report with line and words what is seen. To be in the world, not just study about the world, that is the artist’s task. So we got in the bus and sallied forth.

  Even as a parish minister, I held to this notion. When I was in seminary, I read about something called the French Catholic Worker-Priest Movement. These men had regular jobs during the week like everyone else—plumber, electrician, teacher—any useful job at all. On the weekends, they celebrated mass. They chose to be part of the world, not just work in the church.

  I decided to follow their example. During the years I was a parish minister, I usually had a full-time week-day job like everybody else. I had to be at work on Monda
y at seven-thirty. I made a clear choice. One could concentrate on being in the world, or one could spend time mostly in the church. One could address the world or one could do church workwork.

  Only now have I finally realized that my life has been an unending field trip.

  And I have tried hard not to be a tourist.

  But to be an adventurer, a traveler, an explorer, a learner, and a pilgrim.

  So you can understand my enthusiasm when I was asked if I would like to be involved in a first-grade field trip. This is not kid stuff. “Of course! Wonderful! Where are we going to go?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Fulghum, I guess I didn’t make myself clear. We want to come see you. You are our field trip.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  The ultimate turn of the wheel of life, I guess.

  I have become a field trip.

  “Well,” I sighed, “come on over—my zoo is open.”

  In 1991, two hikers found the mummified body of a man in the melting ice of a glacier on the Swiss-Italian border. The early scientific studies indicated the man had lived and died 5,300 years ago. In the Bronze Age.

  Out of all the fascinating conclusions reached by the examiners, one in particular lodged in my mind: The man’s hair showed clear evidence of having been deliberately shortened.

  In whatever passed for a Bronze Age barbershop, our man had a haircut.

  I read about this in the newspaper while sitting in a barber’s chair getting my own hair trimmed. Looking at the sketch of the “ice man” and looking at the crew sitting around in chairs waiting their turn, I figured if this ancient one walked in and sat down, nobody would pay him that much attention. He’d fit right in with the crowd that hangs out in my barbershop.