The Um Guy--A bedtime story for my 8 year old

The Um Guy


There was a guy who could not decide what he wanted or didn’t want, or who he really wanted to be. Everyone started calling him the “Um” Man because when he walked into a store or a restaurant and they asked him what he wanted, he always answered, “Um.., er, um..” and never got much farther. When they made suggestions, he said, “um, ok, er, um, OK”. On account of his inability to make a decision, he said yes to everything. Every thing he saw to eat; ice cream, fudge, fried chicken, steak, gumbo, etc.. he would have for breakfast. Then even more things for lunch, snack, afternoon snack and dinner. Then, of course, between meals he said yes to everything as well. Chicken a la King, Roast Leg of Lamb, cotton candy, and more. For snack. Needless to say, he got bigger and bigger from eating so much. Over time, he grew rounder and rounder until, finally, he was a big ball with a small head and arms and legs sticking out like the stems on a strange cherry.

The Um Guy had the same difficultly when he went to the store. If he needed toothpaste, he would go to the convenience store and end up walking out with batteries, toilet paper, gum, headache medicine, an iron, Tickle Me Elmo, hair color, shampoo and sometimes, he would remember the toothpaste. Most of these things are all good and necessary, but he would buy all that and more every day.

His house became more and more crowded. To enter in the front door he had to walk around piles of unopened boxes of things, climb over molehills of things that had been delivered and were still in unopened brown boxes, squeeze up hallways with shelves of multicolored matchbox cars, plastic flowers, pens, bottles of Tums, Pez dispensers for each of the Simpson characters, beginning with Bart and ending with Homer, nuts and bolts from his fan that fell apart, sticky Snickers bar, 1/2 a Power Ranger (the other half is somewhere in the house) and much much much much more.

His bathroom has 3 toilet plungers, (he couldn’t decide which style he liked best), magazines about cars, business, Teen People, Fitness, The New Yorker, Mad Magazine, Popular Mechanic, Psychology Today, National Geographic’s and much more. As a result of his inability to decide between one type of magazine and another, he read them all. He became incredibly well informed and was already quiet intelligent. He knew a lot about every subject. But, back to his bathroom. He had 5 kinds of shampoo, cream rinse, bar soap and squirt soap, scented and unscented, and so on and so on.

All of his rooms were so cluttered, after a while he could not even enter many of them. His house began to bulge. The walls of his house began to bend with the pressure, and to round out until the house itself looked round, with stuff pressing against the closed windows and sticking out the open ones. Finally, in order to get around the house, the Um Guy had to kind of roll/climb along the top, in the open space between the top of all of the “stuff” and the ceiling. It was almost like swimming through the house except that the “water” was hard and full of edges. He would “swim” from his room to the bedroom or bathroom and the neighbors, who were already watching, could hear, “ouch, oof, ow, eeek!, oouch!” and he would swim/rolled along the top.

The neighbors did not know what to do. Everyone liked the “Um guy” although he didn’t talk much. It was hard for him to lift his vast hand, which was like the whole back end of a pig, to make a gesture. Or to speak, he needed to move his enormous jaw, which weighed as much as a heavy chair. So he kept his words and gestures to a minimum. But when he did speak, since he knew a lot about everything, his comments were always right on target and usually correct. If it had been easier people may have visited him more often. If someone rang his bell and he figured out it was the bell and not a number of other ringing, clanging, donging things, by the time he “swam” his way to the front door, they had long gone. He would have dinner alone and go to bed. Occasionally if he was near an open window, a neighbor would call out hello and ask a pointed, long awaited question, and he always knew the answer. He would have been a great Blogger on the Internet, talking about all kinds of interesting subjects and communicating with people all around the world, but he had no idea where his computer was. Plus, if he found it, his large, Knockwurst-like fingers could never fit on the tiny keypad.

One day the Um Man went out to pick something up at the store. He needed a few items from a few different stores, but he could not decide which to go to first. He could not decide whether to go right or left or if he should sit and figure it out or keep walking. He simply kept walking. He didn’t know why, but based on all the information he had gathered in his magazines and books, he decided he would walk until he was forced to stop. And so he did.

He walked for hours, straight ahead. He walked along the town road. He walked into the sunset. He was so big and round that some people thought there had been an eclipse as he blocked out the setting sun on the road in front of him. He walked along the highway. The highway split and he took the straightest path ahead. After a few days he exited that highway for a different one. Some people thought he was a Volkswagen Bug going slowing down the road and honked at him, but he ignored them and continued on his way. Kids pressed their faces to the windows of their parent’s back seats. Some smiled. Some stuck their tongues out at him and he did the same back. He was feeling better then he had in years. He was loving this nice long walk with no decisions to be made. He walked through the tollbooth and tossed his $2.00 into the toll basket. The toll person looked at him quizzically and he smiled. His chin was actually a little lighter as this long walk was actually making him lose a little weight.

By this time, people had begun to notice the big (but now already smaller) man walking along the highway. Truckers pulled their big trucks up beside him and offered him a ride but he said no. He made a big decision that he was going to keep walking until he had to stop. Then truckers spoke to one another through their walkie-talkies and all told about the man walking on the highway. Local news trucks drove up and asked him questions. He was extremely knowledgeable about everything because of all of his reading. Everything but himself. He didn’t really know anything about himself. Why he did one thing and not another. Each question they asked him met with the same answer, …”Um….” His town quickly recognized the “Um Man”. They asked the newscasters in their trucks to ask him the questions they had been waiting to ask him about life, science, geography, psychology, zoology, philanthropy, paleontology and more. The Um Man, of course knew all the answers. Marathons were set up and people on telephones brought in sponsors to follow the Um man in their trucks and ask him questions and broadcast them on the radio and the TV and even on the Internet. He was like a walking, human search engine. But unlike search engines on the Internet, his answers took all things into account. For example, if you asked him who discovered America, he did not simply answer Christopher Columbus, but instead spoke geographically about the United States, spoke about the Indians and different tribes and what they are doing today, spoke about Spain and their desire and need to travel the world and conquer and discover new countries, and so on. If you asked him about a sandwich, after he said “No thank you,” he would go on to tell you about the Earl of Sandwich and his card playing and how the sandwich was invented to keep him at the card table. His answers were information filled and heart felt. Nothing on the Internet was like that.

As for him, he enjoyed the company on his walk. He was quite focused on going forward. Never to the side. Never backward of course. He exited the highway about 3 weeks later and walked onto a road, which turned to a smaller road and then an even smaller road. He had lost much of his weight now and looked sort of like everyone else except that his clothing was much too big. He was holding his pants up with his hands and his shirt now hung way below where his big belly used to hold it up like a tent. Also, as he had not stopped in weeks, he had not shaved. His beard had started to grow in and his hair was unbrushed. He didn’t mind though because he was so happy about having made this decision to go forward.

As the road narrowed, the news trucks began to disappear, but people were still interested. They placed, with him permission, a GPS locater on him so they could follow him in the police station (in case of emergency) and on a website where millions of fans checked in every day. People were giving his status on a website called Facebook and on Twitter. He had more people looking at his page then Miley Sirus, the Queen of England, and America’s Got Talent all combined.

The road he took now led to a dirt road. He followed it with great interest. He was curious what was going to be the thing to prevent him from going farther. He dreaded that it would be a huge department store in a mall or something like that, but now that he was on a quiet dirt road he felt better. Maybe it would be a cow. A tree. He walked and walked. In the distance he could see another sun beginning to set. This one was setting into a wide-open sky. He had never seen colors like this before. They sky was red and orange with ribbons of purple. He thought of his full house and decided he would never go back. He fell in love with the open sky and walked towards it. He wanted to jump up and live in the sky. He felt free and happy and now loved going forward. With each mile that he walked, all the clutter fell away from his imagination. With the distance he put between himself and his house, he felt better and clearer. With each step he asked himself questions. Do I like this sky? Yes! I love the sky. And I love red and orange and ribbons of purple. Do I like my cluttered house and all my things..? As a matter of fact, I don’t miss any of it at all. Do I miss my food? I am actually a little hungry. For what? Um…. So some things were still not clear yet.

He looked a head. This was it!! The End of The Road. His new address. The GPS locater dot that had been moving straight west for weeks and weeks suddenly came to a stop. Alerts went out all over the Internet. The news channel perked up. The red dot had stopped moving. The Um Man had come to the thing that would make him stop.

He was standing, looking happily, at the best sunset he had ever seen, over The Grand Canyon! He had walked to the very edge of the biggest cliff. All the mapping technologies went into effect to locate the suddenly stopped red dot of the Um Man. People all around the world, all at the same moment called out, “The Grand Canyon!” The Um Man was pleased. He sat down. His now thin legs were tired. His beard was reaching down a little from the bottom of his chin. He was a little hungry. He sat and watched the best sunset he had ever seen. And then he slept.

The next day, people started to arrive to ask questions. Some brought tents but he only chose 1. Some brought food but he decided on only nuts and berries and water. Everyone asked him all kinds of questions because they had heard that the Um Man knew all the answers. He answered one and then another, like a volley in tennis, he whacked each question back and waited for the next, whack, whack. Then all of them came to the same final question; What Next? He looked out at the Canyon. He looked into their eager faces. He looked all around. And said, “Um, er, ummmm..” and that was all he could say because that answer was not in any book he had read. He didn’t know. “Ummm, er, ummm”. He said it again and again. He said it until he was tired and closed his eyes. The people around thought that this WAS his answer. To say “Um”, sit on the ground and close your eyes. So they sat beside him. They closed their eyes. They said “Ummmm”.


Word spread. People from far and wide came to see the Um man. They asked questions about things and he answered. They asked him what next and then they sat with him and closed their eyes and repeated “Ummm”. They started to wonder what was next for them? They said “ummm” and funnily enough, without answers from him and with the view of the wide-open Canyon filled with emptiness and thus possibility, they found their own answers. The Um man became famous for this. Everyone wrote ‘um” as their status on the Facebook and other web pages. People started to look for their own answers.

As for the Um man. He finally changed cliffs because too many people were coming to see him and he rarely got to watch his sunsets. Now people go on long quests looking for him, climbing mountains and searching cliffs. Sometimes they find him. Ask questions. Say “Um” with him, and then move on.

If you have a big question, you can look in a book. Or maybe the internret. Or maybe you can go look for the Um Man and see if he knows. Or, maybe you can even go sit in a nice open place and ask. If you don’t know the answer, try what he did. Say “Um….”


SP