Free Maybe (Maybe Not) by Robert Fulghum

vacuum-cleaner hose and some wide masking tape. That night I drove out in the plains for a couple of hundred miles, turned offon a dirt road, and drove farther. I parked. Tried taping the hose to the exhaust pipe and then in through a wing window of the car.”
    “What was going on in your mind then?”
    “It felt like a contest between three people.
    “One wanted to get it over with. Another seemed to think it was funny, and the third was obsessed with the taping problems, never mind the consequences. I remember the conversation, along the lines of—‘Can’t you hurry up,’ ‘He’ll never do it,’ and ‘The only problem is this tape you bought.’
    “The trouble was that the hose was round and the exhaust pipe was oval, and I had to make the connection by using lots of tape to span the difference in shape. When I ran the engine, the heat of the exhaust melted the adhesive on the tape, and the hose fell off.
    “It was funny. How absurd. Too dumb to do something so simple right. I was protected from myself by my own incompetence. I began to laugh. I couldn’t even kill myself. I laughed to the point of hysteria, which turned into sobbing grief, which turned into silence broken by renewed laughter. Maybe I could just sit here and die of stupidity. I could see the headlines. MAN MANAGES TO DUMB HIMSELF TO DEATH—SUCCUMBS TO EXHAUSTION BROUGHT ON BY TOO MANY FAILED ATTEMPTS TO DO AWAY WITH HIMSELF.
    “Man too dumb to live—that’s me.
    “But what if I had succeeded? I had this vision of my corpse sitting up at the wheel of this rented car out here in the bushes in the middle of nowhere—and theworld going on without me—and it seemed like such a meaningless thing to do.
    “And I began to think of my ancestors—considering that I was alive now because a lot of men and women before me had been able to take whatever life threw at them and go on. My genes had been through the Dark Ages, through the Black Death, across oceans to an unknown land, through wars and bad marriages and bankruptcy and all kinds of defeats that made my problems seem like a picnic. Toughness was permanently engraved on my genes. How could I give up here? How could I throw all that away?
    “I began to laugh again. Death isn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t
less
life I wanted, but
more
life—life with meaning. And if I wanted something to laugh about, I had found that, all right: me, forever me—no bigger fool than I.
    “And I never felt better in my life than at that moment. The best feeling in the world comes when you start feeling good again after you’ve been feeling awful.”
    “So then what happened?”
    “Returning home after running away to kill myself was really awkward. For one thing, I was in a great, exuberant, life-affirming mood. I felt like Lazarus after his resurrection.
    “On the other hand, I had upset my family and friends, and I expected a stormy scene with my wife.Oddly enough, she was calm. On reflection, I suspect she probably had wished at times that I would just disappear or drop dead. When it seemed like that’s exactly what I’d done, she went through a reality check of her own.
    “Her response was a complete surprise.
    “She had bought me a glad-you-came-back-alive gift.
    “A canary. A yellow, living, singing canary.
    “I’m not a pet person. Yet here was this beautiful bird hanging in a brass wire cage in the window of my room—singing as though the joy itself were distilled in its song. How absurd! How wonderfully right. I remember shouting at it, ‘SING, BIRD, SING!’
    “Within a year the marriage ended, and the bird escaped while its cage was being cleaned. But I’ll always love the mother of my children for the gift of empathetic grace in the form of that canary, which still sings in the sunniest window of my soul and welcomes me home from my ongoing bullfights.”
    “Bullfights? What bullfights? Tell me about the bullfights.”
    “When I was a young man, I accompanied my father on a