All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Read Free

put on a whole new outfit to make certain she is not inhabited.
    The spider? Well, if she survives all this, she will
really
have something to talk about—the one that got away that was THIS BIG. “And you should have seen the JAWS on the thing!”
    Spiders. Amazing creatures. Been around maybe 350 million years, so they can cope with about anything. Lots of them, too—sixty or seventy thousand per suburban acre. Yes. It’s the web thing that I envy. Imagine what it would be like if people were equipped like spiders. If we had this little six-nozzled aperture right at the base of our spine and we could make yards of something like glass fiber with it. Wrapping packages would be a cinch! Mountain climbing would never be the same. Think of the Olympic events. And mating and child rearing would take on new dimensions. Well, you take it from there. It boggles the mind. Cleaning up human-sized webs would be a mess, on the other hand.
    All this reminds me of a song I know. And you know, too. And your parents and your children, they know. About the itsy-bitsy spider. Went up the waterspout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun and dried up all the rain. And the itsy-bitsy spider went up the spout again. You probably know the motions, too.
    What’s the deal here? Why do we all know that song? Why do we keep passing it on to our kids? Especially when it puts spiders in such a favorable light? Nobody goes “AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!” when they sing it. Maybe because it puts the life adventure in such clear and simple terms. The small creature is alive and looks for adventure. Here’s the drainpipe—a long tunnel going up toward some light. The spider doesn’t even think about it—just goes. Disaster befalls it—rain, flood, powerful forces. And the spider is knocked down and out beyond where it started. Does the spider say, “To hell with that”? No. Sun comes out—clears things up—dries off the spider. And the small creature goes over to the drainpipe and looks up and thinks it
really
wants to know what is up there. It’s a little wiser now—checks the sky first, looks for better toeholds, says a spider prayer, and heads up through mystery toward the light and wherever.
    Living things have been doing just that for a long, long time. Through every kind of disaster and setback and catastrophe. We are survivors. And we teach our kids about that. And maybe spiders tell their kids about it, too, in their spider way.
    So the neighbor lady will survive and be a little wiser coming out the door on her way to work. And the spider, if it lives, will do likewise. And if not, well, there are lots more spiders, and the word gets around. Especially when the word is “AAAAAAA GGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!”
     
     
    Often, when speaking in public, I begin by saying I will silently sing. As a clue to what’s going on in my mind, I explain, I will make some motions with my hands. I ask the audience to help me out by doing the same thing when they understand what’s going on. It’s the spider song, of course. I have great memories of rooms full of people silently singing the itsy-bitsy spider, while doing the motions, and grinning. They always grin. They always applaud themselves at the end.
    Did you know that you can sing the words to the itsy bitsy spider to the tune of the “Ode to Joy” portion of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony? With some minor adjustments it works. You might call the combination the fight song of the human race. I once got a thousand people to do it, motions and all.
    Both pieces of music are about the same thing: the capacity of life to triumph over adversity—about perseverance in adventure, for spiders and people.

 
     
     

    P UDDLES
    I T’S M AY IN C ENTRAL P ARK in New York City. An afternoon shower followed by seductive spring sunshine lures busy people off sidewalks and onto park benches. At 80th Street and Fifth Avenue there’s a path into the park, on which the rain has