“Does anyone else want private math tutoring after school and on weekends? No one wants that, right? I really think you’ll all be fine,” said the principal quickly. “I promise. I really do believe in this plan. I just needed to say that, full disclosure, etcetera. But it looks like you guys are on board, right? I think this is a good decision, I really do. An exciting one! So from this moment onward: I declare, no more math! This is a math-free school! Do you want that, Clark Street K–8? Do you want to say NO … MORE … MATH … EVER?!”
The auditorium shook with cheers. All the children got swept away in it, even the ones who had secretly liked math, their shy enthusiasms for the shapes of numbers and the comfort of order suddenly crushed to death forever by this unprecedented force of peer and authority pressure teaming up on them together, in a surprise attack, right in the middle of their auditorium, where nothing interesting had ever happened before.
“All right. Now, nobody can say anything,” said the principal. “Okay?”
The students nodded. Some waved a finger across their lips vertically to indicate shhhh, some waved a finger horizontally to indicate lips are sealed, and the rest of the students, most of them, waved their fingers in front of their faces in a vague, circular pattern that was their best attempt to copy what they could make out of the gestures around them.
“Nobody says anything.”
They nodded again.
Everybody said everything.
Soon the principal was fired.
The principal didn’t care. He was sick of it, sick of all of it. He figured something like this would probably happen. But he might as well go out this way, right? That’s what he figured. He had been at this job for a long time, and he was done. Whether the years had finally cracked his spirit, or had finally cracked the shell around his spirit—who was to say, and, really, who cared.
He retired to a house by the beach in Florida and spent the rest of his days reading and writing.
The Ambulance Driver
An extra minute could make the difference between life and death.
He always arrived at the hospital minutes before any other driver.
“Hey! Just so you know! It’s true what they say! You really are! The best! Ambulance driver! We’ve ever seen!” nurses would breathe at him as they swept his patients into the hospital and off to their surgeries.
“Thank you,” he always remembered to say. “Means a lot. Really, thank you.”
The ambulance driver knew he was the best ambulance driver. And he knew it was a great thing to be.
That wasn’t it.
One day the ambulance driver told his friend Dan, another ambulance driver, that he had a friend who wanted to be a singer.
“What should my friend do?” asked the ambulance driver.
“Is your friend good?” asked Dan.
“He’ll never know till he tries, right?” said the ambulance driver. “Or she?”
“That’s right,” said Dan.
“So? Should he or she go all out and quit and go for his dream?”
“I guess the only way your friend can find out is to go for it,” said Dan.
“Well, as you probably figured out, I’m the friend,” said the ambulance driver with the bright, wide grin that the truly happy share with the truly stupid. “I’m the friend! I want to be a singer. But not just a singer, Dan. A singer-songwriter.”
Dan’s face went as white as one of their passengers’.
“Hey,” said Dan. “Hey, let’s think about this.”
“I’ll never know till I try, right? You said that. When we were talking about my ‘friend’?”
“Look—okay—you want honesty?” said Dan. “People generally don’t make it. I mean, I’m sorry, but that’s just how it goes! And even—let’s say you did. What you do now is so, so important! You’re an ambulance driver, and you’re the best at it! In all of Grant County, and probably beyond. There are statistics—it’s not even close. I mean, come on! The most important thing in the world, and you’re the best at it! How does that feel?”
“That’s the thing, Dan. I know how it should feel—”
“Hey. This isn’t a joke,” said Dan with an intensity that surprised the ambulance driver. “The universe tells you what it wants from you. You just need to listen. And the universe is telling you to drive that ambulance.”
“Interesting, I’ll think about that,” said the ambulance driver.
Since when did Dan speak for the universe?
The next day the ambulance driver asked a different person what he should do. This woman was a friend who had gone to his high school and wasn’t an ambulance driver—he didn’t even know what she did, in fact—but for some reason she always gave the best advice. They met at a coffee shop.
“What does your heart tell you?” she asked as she sipped her hot chocolate.
He said he didn’t know: on one level, his heart believed that he should help as many people as possible, which was exactly what he was doing now. But another part of his heart really wanted to see where this music thing might go if he put everything he had into it. Couldn’t your heart tell you more than one thing? If you were truly confused about something, which he was right now, wouldn’t that mean your heart was, too?
The ambulance driver’s friend lowered her head thirty degrees and then tilted it back up after two and a half seconds.
“What does your gut tell you?” she asked.
“You give the best advice,” said the ambulance driver.