All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Read Online Free PDF Page A

the person I call my wife and friend and companion. And I understand why Charles Boyer did what he did. It really is possible to love someone that much. I know. I’m certain of it.

 
     
     

    R ACCOONS
    T HIS IS ABOUT LOVE and a house I once lived in. An elderly lakeside cottage built at the end of the road at the end of the nineteenth century. A summer place for a family who traveled by horse and buggy out from Seattle through deep woods and over steep hills on logging trails. It was wild there, then, and it is wild there still.
    The house sat off the ground on bricks, surrounded by thickets of blackberry bushes and morning-glory vines bent on a struggle to the death. And even though it is only minutes, now, from downtown, squirrels, rabbits, feral pussycats, and “things” I never saw but only heard had long established squatters’ rights on the property.
    And raccoons. We had raccoons. Big ones. Several.
    For reasons known only to God and the hormones of raccoons, they chose to mate underneath my house. Every spring. And for reasons known only to God and the hormones of raccoons, they chose to mate underneath my house at three A.M.
    Until you have experienced raccoons mating underneath your bedroom at three in the morning, you have missed one of life’s more sensational moments. It is an uncommon event, to say the least. If you’ve ever heard cats fighting in the night, you have a clue. Magnify the volume and the intensity by ten. It’s not what you’d call a sensual and erotic sound. More like a three-alarm fire is what it is.
    I remember the first time it happened. Since conditions were not really conducive to sleep, I got up. When I say I got up, I mean
I GOT UP.
About three feet. Straight up. Covers and all.
    When I had recovered my aplomb and adjusted to the new adrenaline level, I got a flashlight and went outside and peered up under the house. This lady raccoon and her suitor were squared off in a corner, fangs bared, covered with mud and blood, and not looking very sexy at all.
    Neither my presence nor the beam of light could override what drove them on. With snarls and barks and screams, the passionate encounter raged on. While I watched, the matter was finally consummated and resolved. They had no shame. What had to be done was done. And they wandered off, in a kind of glazy-eyed stupor, to groom themselves for whatever might come next in the life of a raccoon.
    I sat there in the rain, my light still shining into the trysting chamber. And I pondered. Why is it that love and life so often have to be carried forth with so much pain and strain and mess? I ask you, why is that?
    I was thinking of my own sweet wife in the bed right above me, and our own noises of conflict mixed with affection. I wondered what the raccoons must conclude from the sounds a husband and wife make at night—the ones that sound like “If-you-really-loved-me-you-would-not-keep-making-such-a-mess-in-the-bathroom,” followed by “OH, YEAH? WELL, LET ME TELL YOU A FEW THINGS . . .”
    Why isn’t love easy?
    I don’t know.
    And the raccoons don’t say.

 
     
     

    L ARRY W ALTERS
    N OW LET ME TELL YOU about Larry Walters, my hero. Walters is a truck driver, thirty-three years old. He is sitting in his lawn chair in his backyard, wishing he could fly. For as long as he could remember, he wanted to go up. To be able to just rise right up in the air and see for a long way. The time, money, education, and opportunity to be a pilot were not his. Hang gliding was too dangerous, and any good place for gliding was too far away. So he spent a lot of summer afternoons sitting in his backyard in his ordinary old aluminum lawn chair—the kind with the webbing and rivets. Just like the one you’ve got in your backyard.
    The next chapter in this story is carried by the newspapers and television. There’s old Larry Walters up in the air over Los Angeles. Flying at last. Really getting UP there. Still sitting in his aluminum lawn chair,