"No apology then. No
regrets. My convictions have validity for me because I have
experimented with the compounds of ideas of others in the
laboratory of my mind. And I've tested the results in the
living out of my life. At twenty-one, I had drawn an
abstract map based on the evidence of others. At sixty, I
have accumulated a practical guide grounded in my own
experience. At twenty-one, I could discuss transportation
theory with authority. At sixty, I know which bus to catch
to go where, what the fare is, and how to get back home
again. It is not my bus, but I know how to use
it."
-- Robert Fulghum in
Words I Wish I Wrote
Buy it
online
He is being hailed as the philosopher
king of this generation. "Bullshit!" he explodes
good-naturedly. "I don't pay any attention to it. What's
important is what you think of yourself, not what gets typed
in the paper. They're always saying, 'he's the reincarnation
of' or 'the next whatever' and I say no: I'm still Robert
Fulghum."
The author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in
Kindergarten, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It, Maybe
(Maybe Not), Uh-Oh, From Beginning to End, True Love
and -- most recently -- Words I Wish I Wrote
is widely recognized internationally. Collectively his books
have sold more than fifteen million copies in 93 countries
and been translated into 27 languages.
Fulghum says that on his way to selling literally millions
of books, he's learned a thing or two about humility: things
that he sees focused in a couple of experiences. "I was in
Miami," he begins. The storyteller comfortably ready to spin
his yarn. He leans back in his chair as he begins, the light
dancing in his eyes as he recalls the day.
"I play in a rock and roll band called The Rock Bottom
Remainders. It's other authors. It's Stephen King
and Amy Tan and Dave Barry and a bunch of others of us. We
play to raise money for charities, because we're kind of a
freak show, but we're not bad. I play a guitar and a mando
cello," he pauses for effect. Will I bite? I don't know
enough about obscure instruments to take the bait, but he's
ready for that eventuality. "And since you don't know what a
mando cello sounds like or how it should be played, you can
say with some authority I'm the most interesting mando cello
player you've ever heard.
"Anyhow, we're in this hotel and this maid comes in and she
keeps looking at me and she smiled and she said, 'I know who
you are.' And I said, 'No you don't. Who am I?' And said,
'You're Kenny Rogers.' And I of course said, 'No, no, no.'
And she said, 'If you were Kenny Rogers you wouldn't say you
were Kenny Rogers would you? So you must be Kenny
Rogers.'"
It's a bit of a reach, but the resemblance is there. Both
Fulghum and Rogers are mature men with silvery gray hair and
full beards. Perhaps more importantly, both are men with
presence. You get the feeling that when Robert Fulghum walks
into a room people pay attention. Possibly Rogers gets that
as well. He continues.
"So that evening I'm walking along with my guitars going to
the elevator and she went up like a skyrocket, 'See! I knew
you were Kenny Rogers!' So I signed her card, 'Love and
kisses, Kenny Rogers.'"
The other experience that he feels taught him humility
happened in Europe and actually became two humble pies in
one road trip.
"My books have done extraordinarily well in the Czech
language. Like the all time best English language sales in
Czech. So I'm thinking, 'Why is this true?' So I went to
Prague and I was going to do a book signing and there was
this incredible line. And it looked like it was going on
forever. So I stopped at the end of the line and I thought,
these people always have to line up for bread or sausages or
whatever. So I asked this woman why she was standing in
line. And she said, 'Oh: Robert Fulghum.' And I said,
'That's me!' And she picked up the book and she looked at
the back and she said, 'No. He's much better looking than
you are.'"
The Czech Republic experience was not over yet. "So that
night we're at a big banquet that the publisher threw. And I
said to her, 'Why are my books so well received in the Czech
Republic?' And she asked if I wanted to know the truth. And
I told her I did. And she said, 'It's because your
translator is a much better writer than you are.' And how
would I know? I don't read Czech."
Fulghum does not see himself as a great writer. Perhaps, in
some ways, he barely sees himself as a writer at all. Rather
he is someone who had thoughts to share that people happened
to want to hear.
"I did not set out to be a writer. It's something that came
to me after I was 50 years of age. And I already had the
life that I wanted and the wife I wanted and at that age I
was fairly clear about what was important. The success that
my writing is enjoying is like finding out your rich uncle
has left you a train full of hammers. I mean, how many
hammers can you use? It's chocolate syrup. It's an extra. So
I take it very lightly. And if I were to fall off the charts
tomorrow, I've already had more fame than I deserve and more
money than I've ever had in my life. The thought that I
could finally pay off my Visa bill! That's rich."
A train full of hammers it might be, but it's the same
hammers that he's using to help change the world: or at
least the part of it he can get to. For example, all the
royalties earned by Words I Wish I Wrote will
be given to Human Rights Watch <http://www.hrw.org>, a
cause he believes in deeply.
Fulghum reports that Words I Wish I Wrote is
doing very well. "But, more importantly, it's inspiring
other writers to want to do the same thing for the same
reason. That's my measure of success. I want it to inspire
other writers to give the proceeds of their books to the
Human Rights Watch. That's what I want to accomplish. I
don't care if it gets on the New York Times
bestsellers list or not, but people have a reason to care
about human rights."
Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in
Kindergarten was Fulghum's first book and the start
of the train of hammers.
"The kindergarten essay got into that underground press we
all belong to where something just sort of has a life of its
own and moves around and it gets on refrigerators and in the
work place and people copy it."
As it happened, the piece got into the little hands of a New
York City kindergarten student whose mother was a literary
agent. "She came home from her kindergarten class with that
essay stuck in her knapsack." The agent tracked Fulghum down
by backtracking the course the piece had taken to get into
her daughter's knapsack.
"The kindergarten teacher had gotten it from her niece who
was a librarian in New Orleans and she'd gotten
it from the Kansas City Bugle. So when she
found me she called me up and asked if I had any more. And I
told her I did, but I didn't think it was commercially
viable." Aside from the viability, Fulghum had other things
on his mind.
"At the time my wife had decided she wanted to go to medical
school and once she was settled as a doctor I was going to
take some time to pursue my art, which I had never done. I
was a minister in the Unitarian church at the time and
teaching and I was ready to stop that and do the next phase
of my life. So I had quit both those jobs and I was all set
up with my studio in Seattle when this other horse came
riding by."
The other horse in question was the writing career that
Fulghum treats so lightly. It wasn't, after all, in the
plan. "I'm not a great writer and I'll never get the Nobel
Prize or a Pulitzer Prize but I've won the refrigerator door
award. And you don't see Faulkner on people's
refrigerator."
If he's not, I ask, the ranking American philosopher, who
is? "I haven't the slightest clue," Fulghum answers
candidly. "We've associated that word
philosophy with academic study that in its own
way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read
contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost
become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you
call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun'
attached to it," you get the feeling that Fulghum would
rather not be anyone's 'homespun' anything.
He offers Garrison Keillor and Dave Letterman as possible
candidates of modern philosophers. "Or Jay Leno? Sally Jesse
Rapheal? These are the gurus that people are turning to,
when you think about it. Oprah is perhaps the most powerful
woman on the North American continent."
If he's not a writer, what is he? I ask him what he says
when people asks what he does for a living. "Well, I ask
them almost invariably, what do you mean by that question?
Do you want to know where I get money from or what gives me
joy? What do you want to know? If you want to know where I
get my money from, I get money from the stock market.
Because I'm giving away all the money from these books. So I
guess you could say in that case, I'm a stock broker. But I
don't really have anything to do with stocks.
"If you ask me what I do that gives me real pleasure, well
right now I'm getting back to two things I've not been doing
because of travel. One is raising Bonsai trees. I used to
have a really large collection and then when I started
traveling a lot with writing my wife, who has a black thumb,
managed to kill about half of them and maim the rest of them
so I gave them away. And now I'm back raising them
again."
The question, then, is obviously one he's given much thought
to. Philosophized about, if you will. "And I'm
getting back into painting, which I haven't done in a long
time. So there's more time going into raising bonsai --
because I'm raising them from seed -- so it's a 25 year
project. So you could say, I'm a Bonsai-person."
Maybe, he suggests, doing what you have passion for to earn
a living isn't always the best scenario. "I think the
hardest thing for most people to figure out is that it's
really rare to be able to do what you really love and get
paid for it. It's almost better to not, because you end up
hating the thing you're doing because you have
to do it. A lot of people would be artists if they didn't
have to make a living. So you have to be careful about
making a living doing what you love."
At present, Fulghum and his wife live on a houseboat in Lake
Union in Seattle. The couple also keeps a place in Utah. "I
really like living on the water," he says. "I don't know why
I like it because I grew up in Texas and I really wasn't
around the water. But I like the open space that's connected
with water and I like living in the community of people,
rather than on land. It's like living in an adult summer
camp year round. It's a level of life that's very
pleasant."
The houseboat isn't huge -- about 900 square feet of living
space -- but, "for two of us it's quite comfortable. You
can't have a lot of stuff, but you don't have to mow grass
and you don't have to rake leaves. It's very sane."
It was perhaps the reality of the tight quarters of living
on the water that prompted Fulghum to downsize his personal
library during the course of writing Words I Wish I
Wrote. "I gave them to libraries and friends and
family. I tried to get my books down to a very small pile:
the ones that I really want to read again and again and
again. There haven't been that many of those.
"I realized that they've been sitting there on those shelves
forever and I think if you die with a lot of books like
that, I don't know what you've proved. But my kids took a
lot of them and my friends took a lot of them. They were
easy to get rid of because they were good books."
His concept of what's important to him in a book he wants to
keep around forever has changed, he says, as he's matured.
"I tend to keep books of art more than anything else now.
I'm interested in visual things. And astronomy books. Things
you can look at over and over and over again and see
something new."
Fulghum has a very strong and personal interest in
astronomy, or aspects of it. "Astronomy in the sense that
I'm really awed by two things. One: the pictures that come
from the Hubble Telescope. And the reverse, the photographs
that have been taken of the earth from up high. I really
enjoy just looking at them. Hardly a week goes by that the
Hubble telescope doesn't come up with something that bends
your mind in a way that you simply can not talk about."
This looking has, he reports, perhaps altered his views on
some of the larger issues in his life. "My notions of God
and the universe have always been too small. And limited by
language. So now I'm looking at picture books. My children
say I'm just beginning to enter my dotage: can't read, just
looks at picture books."
It seems laughable: to think of this man as nearing his
dotage. At 60 he seems just on the verge of his great
discoveries, but well on the way to attaining his goal, "I
don't think the thing is to be well known, but being worth
knowing." Those who bestow the refrigerator award would say
that he's just that.
