`Uh-Oh'

In an excerpt from his latest collection of home-spun observations, Robert Fulghum meditates on an ancient vexation: hiccups

Robert Fulghum is a living definition of the word "popular." Consider that his first and second books, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" and "It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It," were at one time No. 1 and 2 on The New York Times' nonfiction bestseller list, the first time that has ever happened. The first book remained on the list for nearly two years.

Now Fulghum, who lives on a houseboat on Lake Union, has more meditations on life's fundamentals in his new book, "Uh-Oh: Some Observations From Both Sides of the Refrigerator" (Villard). Beginning today, The Times is running five excerpts from the book.

Fulghum was born in 1937 and grew up in Waco, Texas. He has worked as a newspaper boy, a ditch digger, a bartender, a singing cowboy, a ranch hand, a rodeo rider, an IBM salesman and a folk-music teacher. Fulghum, as he is most comfortably addressed, also taught drawing, painting and philosophy for 20 years at Seattle's Lakeside School. A painter and sculptor in his own right, he has exhibited his work in several galleries. Fulghum is also an ordained minister who was affiliated with the Unitarian Church for 20 years.

When not traveling the world, Fulghum spends his time backpacking, sailing and sea kayaking. He lives in Seattle with his wife, a physician.

In the first of five excerpts running this week, he ruminates on the subject of, urp, excuse us, hiccups.

Hiccup, or hiccough, if you want to be stylish. "Hikke" is what the Danes write. In Spanish, "hipo." "Hoquet" in French. "Shihuk" is Hebrew. And the Russians say "iknutz." "Singhiozzo" in Italian. And "singultus" is the term doctors use - it's Latin, of course, nicely avoiding the whole problem of getting the sound right. But, like sneezes, yawns, burps and farts, hiccups are usually benign, self-limiting events of more concern to amateur therapists than the serious medical community.

"A contraction of the abdominal and thoracic respiratory musculature, particularly the diaphragm." "A diaphragmatic spasm causing a sudden inhalation which is interrupted by the spasmodic closure of the glottis." That pretty well sums up the technical description of hiccups. I haven't found any good hiccup stories in joke books. No quotations in Bartlett's either. The medical literature is comparatively thin, as well - dealing mostly with chronic cases and desperate measure of cure, including surgery. Seems odd that such a common and socially powerful phenomenon is so overlooked in literature.

Hiccups have been recognized as a medical concern since Hippocrates' time, and though they are associated with an almost unlimited number of diseases, conditions and circumstances, nobody knows what causes them. There are as many cures as there are apparent causes. Everybody hiccups. Even infants still in the womb hiccup. The reason most cures work at some time on some people is that hiccups usually last from between seven and 63 hics before stopping of their own accord. Whatever you do to pass the time while the episode runs its course seems to qualify as a "cure," so the more entertaining the cure is, the better. It's a self-limiting condition. Like the common cold, which will usually run its course in seven days if you do nothing and which will also clear up in about a week if you follow medical advice.

However, if you don't stop around 60 hics, then you have a chronic case and have moved into the major leagues of hiccup history. "The Guinness Book of World Records" reports the case of Charles Osborn of Anthon, Iowa, who has hiccuped every 12 minutes since 1922. It started when he was slaughtering a pig. He's led an ordinary life otherwise. Got married and had children and so on. Mostly the hiccups bother him now because he has trouble keeping his false teeth firmly in place when he hics. Despite the best efforts of the medical community, no cause or cure has been found for Mr. Osborn's hiccups. He has received tens of thousands of letters offering an astonishing range of cures. Other than the equally vexing common cold, no medical problem has as many prescriptions for treatment.

My own interest in hiccups lies in their social context. Hiccup power. The capacity of hiccups for changing the dynamics in any gathering of people. I am fascinated by what happens in a room full of people when this phenomenon occurs. Hiccups are an instant attention-getting device. Just hiccup a couple of times and those around you will rush to your aid, offering cures and interventions. A case of hiccups will alter a cocktail party from a bus-stop mood of lethargic small talk to an emergency-room atmosphere. People will offer to pound on your back, bring you water or put a paper bag over your head, among other things. "Stand on your head," "Hold your breath," "Jump up and down," and all the rest. People will start telling hiccup stories and sharing remedies. The hiccupper will be treated with great solicitation while in the throes of these miniconvulsions, and the shaman who has come up with the winning cure will be looked upon with respect accorded witch doctors and faith healers. A new vitality will have come upon the group, energizing it. Above all, people will laugh. Hiccups are funny.

(Note: Since there is no adequate written expression for the real sound each individual makes when hiccuping, I would like to ask your help in bringing life to the following story. As you read to yourself, please make the appropriate hiccup sound aloud in your own way whenever you encounter the word "hiccup" in the text. From experience, I can tell you it works out especially well if there is another person in the room with you while this is going on.)

It happened at a wedding. Serious wedding. A by-the-book wedding that was beginning to get long and tedious. The time came for the vows, and the bride turned her pale face toward me.

"Please repeat after me: I, Mary, do take you, Jack, to be my husband."

And the bride responded.

"I (hiccup), Mary, do take you (hiccup), John, to be my (hiccup) . . . "

Somebody in the back of the church giggled. A couple of sniggers were heard. I looked at the congregation and saw row after row of tight-upper-lip grins. A few had their hands locked onto their months. Uh-oh.

I paused. Took a deep breath. Composed my face and mind. Waited for things to settle down. The congregation reached deep down inside for control. The bride repressed her spasms, subtly twitching from time to time as if receiving a slight electric shock near her navel. Her life energy had shifted from the awesome experience of getting married to the simple matter of controlling her diaphragm and glottis.

A little voice in the back of my head warned me that we were sitting on a social time bomb here, and if the bride opened her mouth and laid one more hiccup on us, we were going over the falls. Time stood still.

I weighed my options. I could acknowledge her condition, call for some water, ask everyone else to take a deep breath. People would smile, chuckle politely, relax, and the wedding could go on by the book. Or I could cover up the problem and simply say the vows myself and ask the bride and groom to say "yes" or just give me an affirmative nod. I like to think that I surely must have considered these options before I decided to go ahead and "let 'er buck," as we used to say in the rodeo.

Looking straight at the bride, deadpan, I continued: "In good times, and in bad."

The bride, bless her heart, went for it: "In good times (hiccup), and in (hiccup) . . ."

Somebody in the front row tried to suppress a giggle and failed. Someone else let out one of those expelled-air sounds diesel locomotives make when they release their brakes. And a guy about 10 rows back lost it. No giggler, he, but a belly laugher. To his credit, he tried to exit before he blew, but he never made it. The fuse reached the dynamite, and the congregation came apart at the seams. Waves of laughter sloshed back and forth across the church. I laughed, the bride and groom laughed, and the attendants likewise. Up in the choir loft the organist was hysterical. People rose out of their pews to breathe - people wept, snorted, brayed, hooted, howled, honked and dabbed at their eyes with handkerchiefs. And every time some semblance of quiet and order seemed to be returning, the bride did it again. "Hiccup," and pandemonium would resume.

Finally, 15 minutes later, when the last ounce of laughter had been squeezed from us and the congregation looked more like survivors of a shipwreck than a wedding party, I held up my hand for silence and said that if weddings were supposed to be joyful human events, then we had exceeded all hopes and expectations for an acceptable level of joy. I said we all knew what the words were and what they meant, and in the spirit of those words I pronounced the couple man and wife and blessed their marriage.

In response, the bride blurted out, "Oh (hiccup), thank you." And the guy in the back lost it again, and the bride and groom raced down the aisle with the laughter that was their recessional music, since the organist was no longer functional.

Thank God for these real-life accidents that keep us from the boredom of perfection. I will never forget when a similar thing happed at an inappropriately grim funeral once. An old uncle of the deceased got the hiccups, and when he tried to repress them, he managed to both hiccup and fart at the same time. You can't really ignore these things, try as you might, even under funeral conditions. Uncle Jack saved the day. Great funeral.

(I hope, in carrying out your responsibilities to make the appropriate sounds as they appear in the text, that your capacities haven't been overtaxed here.)

(From the book "Uh-Oh," by Robert Fulghum. Copyright, 1991, Roert Fulghum. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Villard Books. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.)