TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 90

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 15, 2000000000000000000000000000006


Dear Assembled Throng,

	Channukah starts tonight.  We have our 
menorahs and candles at the ready.  I have 
purchased little presents to give the kids after 
each lighting.  We will  have a little bit of a 
hard time with my mother over the candles.  She 
is nervous about leaving something lit after she 
goes to bed, or if she leaves the house.  The 
candles are supposed to burn until they burn 
themselves out.  She will blow them out if we're 
leaving the house, especially during the last 
days when each menorah has seven, eight, nine 
candles burning.  She'll want me to put them in 
the sink, or blow them out.  So we'll wait until 
they burn out before we go anywhere.  It is I 
whose house burned down in the fire of 1991 who 
should be so nervous around flames.  And I am, 
but not like this.  My mother is a Brodofsky, and 
the Brodofskys worry;  they worry; they worry 
professionally.  Happy Channukah to those who 
celebrate it, and to those who don't, Merry 
Christmas, and to those who don't, best of the 
season, or Happy Kwanza, or happy whatever you 
celebrate if at all.  And if you don't celebrate 
a thing, think of celebrating something, just to 
celebrate life.  Life in the middle of the winter.



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No Ice

	My father's mother, Lena, was an odd 
bird.  She was also remarkable.  However weird 
she was, and she was weird, to be illustrated 
soon, she was also admirable.  She came over from 
the old country, Lithuania, as a young girl, and 
as she grew up, she decided she wanted to be a 
teacher.  This was a lofty goal for a greenhorn, 
speaking no English when she arrived, coming from 
an orthodox Jewish family.  Her father didn't 
approve of Lena's intentions to go to school and 
study to become a teacher.  He said, "Vos villst 
a Maidel in schule?" (What does a girl want in 
school?)  He forbade it, wanted her to stay home 
and cook, clean and sew for her six brothers. 
This did not extinguish her ambitions.  She went 
to school anyway, and pinned her lessons to her 
apron strings so that she could study while she 
did her house chores (homework).  She got through 
school, graduated, got her teaching certificate, 
and became an English teacher.  She was the first 
woman in the family to achieve any degree of 
schooling.

	This said, we must now emphasize that she 
was an odd bird.  First of all, she spoke in a 
slow deliberate whisper.  It was spooky.  Then, 
she moved in slow deliberate ways.  It was agony 
watching her locomote across the room to do a 
simple task, the task could be like, well, 
walking across the room, and it seemed to occupy 
all eight cylinders.  The mighty engine worked at 
full throttle to get her legs moving at a 
lethargic pace.  One leg first, and then the next 
leg, and then the first one again, and in this 
way, alternating legs, she finally made her way 
from one end of the room to the other.  There was 
no apparent reason for her sloth.  She was sharp 
as a whip and fully capable of faster tempos, but 
she chose to take on this glacial pace.  That is 
the way she spoke, and the way she moved.  And 
her speech was affected with a new England 
accent, even though she was from Lithuania.  How 
did she get that accent?  What's more, her 
behaviour was off.  Just off.  My father 
worshipped her, told my mother that she was 
perfect.  And it did seem that that's what she 
aspired to.  She aimed for sainthood, 
selflessness, generosity, martyrdom.  But she 
gave herself away all the time.  She invited my 
mother to an Hadassah luncheon, for which she had 
to earn my mother's ticket.  And my mother tells 
this story with a little bit of a shudder.  This 
was one of my mother's first occasions with Lena, 
and, according to my father's pronouncements, my 
mother was expecting a saint.  All afternoon, 
when any of Lena's acquaintances approached her, 
she pinned them down and introduced them to my 
mother saying,  "Darling, this is my new 
daughter-in-law, Mickey.  Do you know what I did 
to earn her ticket today?  I grated seventeen 
jars of horseradish.  Seventeen jars!"  My mother 
heard this same speech repeated countless times 
that afternoon, and by the time the event was 
over, and she'd been introduced in that fashion 
to the countless acquaintances, my mother felt 
that the gleaming shine coming off of Lena 
Shapiro was a bit tarnished.

	When she came to visit us, she would 
insist on making herself useful, as she put it. 
She would offer to mend clothing or make blintzes 
or kreplach.  She was an execrable cook. 
Everything came  out blander than bland.  While 
she wasn't looking, we'd shake pepper and salt 
into whatever she was making just so we could 
taste it.  Her cookies, when she dared to make 
them, came out hard, because she saved on the 
butter.  Once, when my cousin Joell was at 
college, she received a package from Lena in the 
mail.  She was excited about what it could be, 
maybe a sweater?  When she opened it up, it was a 
box of cookies, and she was so disappointed that 
she hurled one against the wall.  It exploded 
into a million crumbs and fell to the floor, 
leaving a dent in the plaster.  And then there 
was the mysterious package that never arrived at 
the homestead in Portland, Oregon.  She called 
enquiring whether they had received a box full of 
honey cakes, and Joell, overhearing the 
conversation, burst out laughing.  She'd read in 
the local paper that there was a package in the 
dead letter office, a heavy soggy thing, dripping 
honey, whose address had been smeared off by the 
contents of the box.  There were many letters 
stuck to it, and it was just sitting there 
undeliverable, collecting flies.

	Lena had a strange way of doing a favour 
for us.  She would mend the clothing, but leave 
the sewing kit, the spools of thread, the sewing 
machine, the scissors, scraps of material, out 
all over the place for my mother to clean up. 
When she insisted on making blintzes, she would 
introduce it in this fashion:

	"Mickey, darling, you will go to the 
store for me and buy one pound of farmer's 
cheese, one pound of cottage cheese, and one 
pound of sour cream, so that I can make blintzes 
for you."

	Farmer's cheese was a difficult 
ingredient to find.  It often took an entire 
afternoon of shopping to locate some.  Then the 
kitchen would be left in a shambles just like the 
table she chose to do the sewing on.  It sounds 
like little stuff, but added up, it made for an 
off balance martyr.

	One evening, during one of her visits 
from Portland, Oregon, she was sitting at the 
kitchen island, on a high stool, talking with my 
mother.  She turned slowly to me and asked me, 
"Tobie, darling, would you be so kind as to get 
me a glass of water?"  She said it in her sicky 
sweet voice that curled my toes.  I was a young 
teenager, and wanting to do good.  I got a glass, 
a sparkling clean glass, and went to special 
trouble putting a small pile of ice cubes in the 
glass.  Then I filled the glass with cold water 
and waited for the bubbles to settle.  I did this 
all quickly so as not to keep Gramma waiting.  I 
set the glass of water down, carefully, in front 
of her, and said, "Here you are, Gramma."  I was 
proud of my effort to do a good job, even on a 
humble glass of water.

	The moment I set the glass down before 
her, she picked it up, rose out of her chair, and 
started the slow journey across the room.  Where 
was she going?  She'd said nothing.  Her placid 
face showed nothing, just a blank expression. 
One foot after the other, she walked toward the 
sink, and as she passed by it, she gave a quick, 
sudden flip of her wrist, and tossed most of the 
contents of the glass into the sink with its ice 
cubes clanking on the enamel.  She said, simply, 
and firmly, "No ice!" and circled back to her 
chair.

	If I could only act this out for you, you 
would roll on the floor laughing.  "No ice!" has 
been a standard expression used for any similar 
circumstance, when someone has gone to great 
lengths to please another human being, and the 
efforts have been soundly and unceremoniously 
trashed.

	"No ice!"


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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net