TheBanyanTree: How to celebrate. Your suggestions

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 22, 200000000000000005



Dear All of You Tree,

	Oh thank you thank you.  The suggestions poured in from North 
East South and West.  They came in from over the puddle and across 
the great divides.  I am humbled and grateful.

	My favourite suggestions were the ones that could be done, 
though I must compliment Cecil on his offer to dance various jigs and 
polkas with the graduate girl.  He said it would have to be virtual, 
and of course that would keep it virtuous, too.

	Here's a plan.  I give you Feyna's e-dress.  And from far and 
wide, she receives  congratulations for her hard work and 
accomplishments.  It was also suggested that the Tree people could 
allude to their own hard times in school, public or private, 
home-school or alternate method.  Anyone who also got a diploma by 
passing a state exam outside the auspices of an organized 
institutional place of learning (that's a school) could put in a 
special word of comraderie.  And include your trajectory, how you 
have fared and where your educational path took you, whether or not 
you are a magnate of business, mover shaker, owner of a hot dog stand 
in Boise Idaho.  These greetings, congratulations, anecdotes, stories 
and even confessions will be her celebration.  That's the first 
celebration anyway.  I personally love this idea.  For her to be 
swamped with congratulations and stories.  (You may say that her 
mother sent you.)

	For the second, after we find out that she officially passed 
the test, we invite her tutors, her friends, her relatives, and have 
a diploma framed and given to her while everyone hugs the living 
daylights out of her.  The venu and theme for this part of the 
celebration is yet to be figured out.  We are on a budget, so the 
suggestion of having the party at the Taj Mahal (you know who you 
are) is politely declined.  A fine idea came in for people sending in 
hats.  All manner of hats, big, small, weird, wooly, wiry, winsome 
and whatever, from all over.  But I'd have to hear from you all about 
how willing (another W) people are to do that.  If she got twenty 
hats from around the world, well then, it's a miracle.  If she got 
one hat from (you know where you are) then it would be anti-climactic.

	So that you know Feyna a bit better than a name and 
connection.  Here is a biography of sorts.  First, what she's up 
against, then who she is.

	About Feyna:  She's got ADD  --  a whopping case.  And she 
works through it, but it has made her life difficult, especially in 
school where it is a minus.  In her life, it could be a plus, because 
it makes her a dreamer, and she dreams well, good ideas come out of 
her, great ideas, but not when the Powers That Be (PTB) want them to 
come, and not about what they want them to come.  She has anxiety 
from hell.  Worry worry.  Not your usual worries, but the ones that 
cling to your ankles and twist you up and hurl you over.  Then they 
circle round your felled body and stomp on you.  She can become 
unreachable.  She works through the anxiety attacks, too.   And she 
has some OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), picks at her nails 
until they bleed, has to label everything, organize everything, put 
them in bags.  This makes her the most organized person in the world, 
but because of the ADD, she often loses things, and then the anxiety 
kicks in and she goes wiggy over losing something.  In addition to 
this, she has been tested (up the hoo hah) and she has slow slow 
processing.  This means that it takes her three times as long to do 
things as it takes the regular folks.  She does the things well and 
has over amazing comprehension, deep comprehension, fully engaged on 
conceptual issues, far deeper than the regular folks, but it just is 
going to take her longer to do it.  She works her way through that, 
too, doing three hours of work for every hour of work that the 
regular folk do.  You may imagine what her life was like in school.

	I describe all that to let you know how hard she worked and 
with what she was faced in order to achieve what she has achieved. 
In addition, most of the world, including, God bless them, the 
teachers and administrators who should know better, would look at 
this young woman and see a beautiful, bright, engaging soul, and 
would cancel out all the disabilities that I mentioned and come up 
with such helpful statements and attitudes as:  why doesn't she just 
work harder?  She can do it.  All she needs is a kick in the pants. 
I had to persuade the teachers, educate the administrators, be 
advocate and pal, and hire experts to say the same things I was 
saying, but to say them with a degree after their names, to command 
respect.  It's amazing what the PTB will discount when Mom tells them 
about it, and what they will stroke their beards over when a Ph.D. 
says the same thing.

	Who Feyna is:  Feyna composes music.  Feyna is a marvellous 
artist.  Feyna contemplates the every day world and then invents 
things that solve every day problems.  Feyna plays the cello.  Feyna 
sings beautifully.  Feyna is ethical and compassionate in nature. 
She has ethics so powerful that they direct her life.  Feyna has an 
autistic twin brother, and she is close to him.  It has been 
difficult for her to grow up with Meyshe, because he often got the 
lion's share of the immediate attention, but Feyna has been graceful 
about this, and Feyna is a good friend and protector of her brother. 
She is to be commended and regarded with awe.  Feyna is sweet, pure 
and silly.  Feyna was raised without television (imagine that, 
folks!)  Feyna is a very good actress, and is interested in acting, 
perhaps as a profession.   Feyna is also beautiful.  Feyna can also 
drive her mother crazy, but that is her job at this stage (not state) 
in her life.

	With all this knowledge about Feyna, do you think that you 
and your friends and nearest and dearests could write to Feyna, from 
all over the world, congratulating her on her achievement (surviving 
school, choosing to leave school, embarking on several months of 
solid study and then 7 hours with the CHSPE {California High School 
Proficiency Exam}) and tell her a little about your own travels, 
trials and achievements?  Would anyone be willing to do that?

	Please write in and let me know so that I could give you her 
e-dress and the go ahead.  If it seems like just too much, I 
understand completely.  I really do.  What do you say, oh Tree?

	Love,

	Tobie
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net