Sigmund Wollman's
Reality Test
by Robert Fulghum
It was the summer of 1959. At a resort
inn in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California, I had a job
that combined being the night desk clerk in the lodge and helping with
the horse-wrangling at the
stables. The owner-manager was Swiss, with European notions about
conditions of employment. He
and I did not get along. I thought he was a fascist who wanted peasant
employees who knew their place.
I was 22, just out of college, and pretty free with my opinions.
One week the employees had been served the same thing for lunch every
single day. Two wieners, a
mound of sauerkraut and stale rolls. To compound insult with injury,
the cost of the meals was deducted
from our paychecks. I was outraged.
On Friday night of that awful week, I was at my desk job around 11
p.m., and the night auditor had just
come on duty. I went into the kitchen and saw a note to the chef to the
effect that wieners and sauerkraut
were on the employee menu for two more days.
That tore it. For lack of any better audience, I unloaded on the night
auditor, Sigmund Wollman.
I declared that I had had it up to here, that I was going to get a
plate of wieners and sauerkraut and
wake up the owner and throw it at him. Nobody was going to make me eat
wieners and sauerkraut for a
whole week and make me pay for it and this was un-American and I didn't
like wieners and sauerkraut
enough to eat them one day for God's sake and the whole hotel stunk and
I was packing my bags for
Montana where they never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut and
wouldn't feed that stuff to pigs.
Something like that.
I raved in this way for 20 minutes. My monologue was delivered at the
top of my lungs, punctuated
by blows on the front desk with a fly swatter, the kicking of chairs
and much profanity.
As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman sat quietly on his stool, watching
me with sorrowful eyes. Put
a bloodhound in a suit and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He had a
good reason to look
sorrowful. Survivor of Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin,
coughed a lot. He liked being alone
at the night job. It gave him intellectual space, peace and quiet, and,
even more, he could go into the
kitchen and have a snack whenever he wanted to - all the wieners and
sauerkraut he wished. To him, a
feast. More than that, there was nobody around to tell him what to do.
in Auschwitz he had dreamed of
such a time. The only person he saw at work was me, the nightly
disturber of his dream. Our shifts
overlapped an hour. And here I was, a one-man war party at full cry.
"Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You know what's wrong with you?
It's not wieners and 'kraut
and it's not the boss and it's not the chef and it's not the job."
"So what's wrong with me?"
"Fulchum, you think you know everything, but you don't know the
difference between and
inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have
nothing to eat, if your house is on fire
- then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. Life is
inconvenient. Life is lumpy.
"Learn to seperate the inconveniences from the real problems. You will
live longer. And will not
annoy people like me so much. Good night."
In a gesture combining dismissal and blessing, he waved me off to bed.
Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes so hard with truth.
There in that late-night
darkness of a Sierra Nevada inn, Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked
my butt and opened a
window in my mind.
For 30 years now, in times of stress and strain, when something has me
backed against the wall and
I'm ready to do something really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful face
appears in my mind and asks,
"Fulchum. Problem or inconvenience?"
I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a
lump in the oatmeal, and lump in
the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should
learn the difference. Good night, Sig.
