Free All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum Page A

number of living things we have identified and named is far outnumbered by those we don’t even know about. Most of what we have named is dead and gone, actually. There may have been a Naked Broomrape once, but it may be extinct by now. Something else will take its place. And we get to name that one. Better job next time.
    And sometimes we actually do a better job. My favorites from the field guides are the Rosy Pussytoes, the Enchanter’s Nightshade, and the Chocolate Lily. Progress.
    I wonder what flowers would call us? Creeping Fat Farm Fungus? Deadly Sucker Bush? Night-Screaming Doodlebugs? Weeping Wooky Weeds?
    Almost every living species has been here far longer than ours—the fossil evidence is clear. And many will likely be here long after we’ve wandered off into the doomsday dustbin ourselves, still sticking names on things as we went. Scientists tell us the Earth has been around 4.5 billion years and has another 5.7 billion to go.
    What does a flower care about what label we apply in passing?
    The labels only stick to us.

 
     
     

    W ATER
    “W HAT KIND OF WATER WILL YOU HAVE?” A question asked by my hostess at a dinner party. She offered fizzy or flat, French or Italian, mountain glacial or deep artesian. I could also choose natural or flavored, iced or room temperature, with lime wedge or lemon twist.
    Actually, I was surprised at the somewhat limited choices offered by my hostess. Our corner grocery store alone carries thirty-one brands of bottled water—from sources in France, Canada, Wales, Germany, Italy, and Norway, as well as the USA. Even the island of Fiji. The water comes from ancient springs, high mountain streams, and mineralized deposits. Three colors of bottles—clear, sea green, and deep blue—and all with elegant labeling.
    This so-called “designer water” has taken its fair share of abuse for appearing to be a pretentious extravagance. But the same criticism could be made of the marketing of beer, wine, and hard liquor. Or even films and novels and music. The appeal is to the imagination—to the romantic side of human nature.
    I like fancy water.
    I’m delighted to drink a glass of liquid that began as snow in the French Alps hundreds of years before I was born, then became ice in a glacier, melted into deep underground springs, and finally was bottled and hauled all the way across sea and land to sit available on my grocer’s shelf.
    For a very small price, I can have a reflective reverie in a glass—an ordinary glass that reveals the wonders of nature, the inventiveness of the industrial revolution and the pleasures of a poetic view of life.
    Moreover, this liquid is good for me. It is me, as a matter of fact—90 percent of my body is water. I’m please to have my essential juices get an occasional transfusion of fanciful pizzazz.
    There is a high end of the water market as yet untouched: rare and historic water. I’m thinking beyond natural purity—of water that has value because of its age or its association with special events or because there simply is no more of it ever to be had. This is the fine-wine division of bottled water.
    A few examples: Several years ago, a former student brought me a liter of water all the way from the spring at Delphi in Greece—a source from which the noble Greeks of the fourth century drank when they went to consult the oracles of fate. I drink a little on April Fool’s Day.
    One Christmas my wife gave me a bottle of water from the creek we hike alongside in summer. She had carefully filtered the water and filled the bottle on my birthday. I’ve great memories of fine days in that valley. We drank a toast with the water during our Christmas dinner—a toast to past happiness and present joy.
    I know a man who saved a bottle of Colorado River water from the days when the river ran free—before the Glen Canyon Dam turned it into a silty lake. That bottle sits on a shelf in his office in a place of honor—marking both his younger days