Robert Fulghum: Good Cheer - And A Lot Of Books Sold

Here are some good things to say about Robert Fulghum, the man who has sold an astounding 15 million books on the basis of a sappy 16-point essay called "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten."

He gives a lot of his money away to very worthwhile causes.

He has figured out how to live a pretty nice life, with a house on Crete and a houseboat in Seattle.

He reads a lot of good books, and doesn't have a television.

He has never allowed the makers of tacky T-shirts and coffee mugs to exploit the "Kindergarten" essay.

He seems to really love his wife and kids and grandchildren, and he has good friends.

He wears beautiful Nehru jackets made of fine wool, and funny convention-be-damned sandals.

He carries a really neat art pen that he will lend you if you forgot yours.

He seems to have thrown off the mantle of philosopher and settled instead on "storyteller."

Now the problem: If we were to judge our civilization by the way it is drawn to Fulghum's stories, homilies, epigrams and aphorisms as spiritual guidance, we might as well blow ourselves up before we gag to death.

It's not his fault - he didn't even try to become a bestselling author. The story of how Fulghum, now 60, wrote the "Kindergarten" thing for a church bulletin (he is, among other occupations, a Unitarian minister) has become part of his mystique. The essay got passed around and eventually landed in the lunch box of the child of a literary agent.

A publishing phenom

These things happen. Then suddenly it's 10 years later and you've got seven books in print in 93 countries and you're a publishing phenomenon. You build a house on the island of Crete, and a library there for a local school. People listen to your advice on how to live their lives.

"I am not a great writer," he said softly the other day. "I will never win the Nobel Prize. But I win the refrigerator door prize, and that's fine with me."

One of his books, in fact, is called "Uh-Oh: Some Observations From Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door."

An excerpt: "A question with several possible answers comes to mind: If one man lives as though he would never die and another man lives as though he might die tomorrow, would either one wear a wristwatch?"

The "Kindergarten" rules were even reprinted in the Congressional Record. They range from "Share everything" to "Flush" to "Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you." One that is particularly relevant to Congress - although it is hard to pick just one - is "Clean up your own mess."

Neither cynic nor sourpuss

His best reviews seem to come from outside the large metropolitan areas where cynics and sourpusses tend to reside. He is neither, and people seem to respond to that.

"My books have run up against the fashion of the (literary) world," he says. "If you say anything positive you get labeled as naive or a Pollyanna. That's just not a fight I want to get into."

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., a friend since before either of them was famous, says Fulghum's work is not anti-intellectual.

"He has a way of writing in a short pithy way that makes you think. And a lot of America is not into reading Vikram Seth's `A Suitable Boy' with 1,500 pages about an Indian family's search for a good husband for their daughter. He's much more about seeing a scene and turning it a little bit to get a different perspective, and it's usually about a common situation we all are faced with."

Asked if Fulghum thinks of himself as some kind of 20th-century seer, handing down wisdom to the masses, McDermott just laughs. And laughs and laughs.

"He's way more practical than that," says McDermott. "He doesn't know why this started or when it will end, but it's been a fantastic growth experience."

It's not that Fulghum hasn't had his share of woe. He was the only son of older parents, with an alcoholic father and a dour fundamentalist mother.

"I left home with a great sense of bitterness and rage," he told an interviewer in 1989.

He married young and spent years torn between being a responsible corporate type and a bohemian evening bartender, ultimately finding his place as a Unitarian minister in the state of Washington. His first marriage broke up, and his four kids went through the kinds of things most kids do.

Seeing the glass half-full

Fulghum says his mother was a racist, and hated his support of civil rights, the fact that he adopted a mixed-race child and that his second wife is of mixed race (Lynn Edwards, a pediatrician). But somewhere along the way he decided to see the glass half-full and not half-empty, to live each day to the fullest, smell the roses and embrace joy.

He became the kind of guy who countered the blues by wearing his grandchild's propeller-top beanie as he walked to work, eating Cheerios with jelly beans, and listening to Beethoven's Ninth through earphones. His work as a minister and as a writer has been to provoke and invoke some sense that life can be lived with a moral purpose, and that it is worth living.

In his new book, "Words I Wish I Wrote: A Collection of Writing That Inspired My Ideas" (Cliff Street/HarperCollins, $20), Fulghum collects thoughts and paragraphs and epigrams by other writers, from Albert Camus to Lao Tzu. His own words are few in this slim $20 volume, which also includes quite a lot of white space and even a racy excerpt from the movie "Bull Durham." All the royalties will go to Human Rights Watch.

Never one to sit still, Fulghum has already embarked on a new enterprise: a three-volume novel. "It will either be three volumes or one very long one," he says. "It got wonderfully out of hand."

In his second book, "It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It," he had some second thoughts about the applicability of the "Kindergarten" rules: "It's hard to share everything and play fair if you don't have anything to share and life is itself unjust. I think of the children of this earth who see the world through barbed wire, who live in a filthy rubbled mess not of their own making, and that they can never clean up."

With one of his books, "Maybe, Maybe Not," he raised $650,000 for different charities on his book tour. He donates all his speaking fees to groups like the ACLU and Habitat for Humanity. On Crete, he says, his wife the doctor functions as a kind of unofficial medical liaison and lectures about women's health problems.

"She does something useful!" he says.