TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 101

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 26, 200000006


Dear Trees,

	I woke up early again.  Damn!  When I 
wake up, there's no going back to sleep.  I just 
rouse myself and get on with it.  There are times 
not to argue with things as they are.  They just 
are.  Deal with it.  Today we meet my best friend 
and a few of her other friends for a dim sum 
feast.  It is her birthday.  She is 60 today. 
I'll be 60 in July.  I know it looks like a big 
number, but it isn't really.  Or is this one of 
those, "deal with it," moments?


 
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Pin Cushion

	My first long term cello teacher was Ruth 
Saphir in Berkeley.  I'd taken lessons before 
from a member of the Washington, D.C. Symphony, 
the same teacher who gave my mother cello lessons 
until she was too pregnant to reach the 
fingerboard.  But he was often on tour or doing a 
job elsewhere, and there were more cancelled 
lessons than lessons.  So when we came back to 
the west coast, Ruth Saphir was almost my first 
cello teacher.  She was about my mother's age, 
had two daughters, Genevieve who played the 
violin, and Theresa who played the cello.

	Ruth's husband, Severin, was a holocaust 
survivor, and had reacted to the experience by 
abandoning his Jewishness and converting to 
Christianity.  There were paintings of angels all 
over the house.  Severin was an ostensibly quiet, 
timid man, who taught violin in the living room 
while Ruth taught cello upstairs, in one of the 
bedrooms given over to lessons.  From being 
friends with both Genny, who was a year older 
than I was, and Theresa, who was a year younger, 
I was privy to all the family secrets, and knew 
all about Severin's real persona.  In fact, in 
private, he was the terror of the household.  He 
beat the girls and struck his wife.  He accused 
them all of trying to poison him, so he started 
stashing cheeses and other semi-non perishable 
foods in closets and in corners of his room so he 
would have a supply of safe food.  Several times, 
Ruth had had to call the police to pull him off 
of Genny or Theresa, or to calm him down from a 
psychotic episode.

	All this went on behind the cheerful 
veneer that Ruth exuded.  Not just cheerful, 
garrulous and buoyant.  She was full of energy. 
She made their kitchen cabinets, remodeled the 
upstairs to build in a better studio for 
teaching.  She sewed all their clothing and each 
year around Easter, she painted the most 
exquisite pyansky, detailed obligatos of floral 
patterns over geometric designs over dark 
backgrounds.  As she finished them, she would 
mount them on little stands where they could be 
examined at close hand without touching them. 
They would appear all over the house in rows and 
on my way upstairs to my lesson, I'd gaze at them 
with wonder.

	Ruth was a good teacher for me.  She was 
very patient which meant patience was how she put 
up with my moodiness and obstinacy.  Once I came 
to my lesson and announced that my mother's 
friend, Pearl, had come up from Los Angeles 
bringing her two kids, Kerry and Stuart.  I 
introduced Ruth to Kerry and said that people 
thought we were twins.  After Kerry ducked out of 
the room to go off with her brother and our 
mothers, Ruth said she didn't see the 
resemblance.  Well, this was a myth that had been 
grafted onto my psyche from ages before, maybe 
when we were three years old, both golden haired 
toddlers with round faces.  My honour was at 
stake, and I refused to play until she took it 
back and said we did, indeed, look like twins. 
She remained true to her statement and sat there 
with her baton pointing at the place in the etude 
book where we were supposed to start.  She sat 
there, and I sat there, for the whole half hour, 
staring at the page.  My bow did not come up to 
the strings, and her baton did not leave the very 
note on the page where we were stuck.  That was 
my whole lesson.  She didn't tell my mother. 
That's how good she was.

	Severin's father was also a holocaust 
survivor, but he had kept his Judaism.  He lived 
in Berkeley, too, a densely white old man with a 
weakness to him that separated him from all the 
other adults.  He looked haunted, and he scared 
me, with the numbers on his arm and his intense 
unhappiness.  He only mumbled, even to his son.

	One day, we read in the local paper that 
for the first time, someone had jumped off the 
Campanile on the campus of the University of 
California.   The man had been killed instantly 
and they were considering putting up a thick 
glass wall to prevent a repetition.  If I 
remember correctly, the suicide had almost landed 
on somebody.  The suicide was Severin Saphir's 
father.

	The gloom around the house on Hillegass 
was palpable.  I took in the news with a grimness 
incomprehensible for a child of my nine years.  I 
went over and over the act in my mind.  The 
moment of decision, the moments in the elevator 
travelling up to the top where the carillon bells 
hung, the moment of stepping out into the spring 
air from the ledge on the tower, the moment of 
impact.  Did he reconsider  on his way down?  Did 
he try to avoid the innocent pedestrian below?  A 
lesson or two were cancelled for the funeral and 
burial, mourning and adjustment.

	I arrived early for my first lesson 
following the tragedy, and sat downstairs with my 
cello in its case.  There was plenty to look at 
and do at Ruth's house.  Severin was busy with a 
pupil in the living room.  Ruth was busy 
upstairs.  I walked around, looking at the 
pyansky and the chotchkas that peopled the 
shelves all around the dining room.  There was a 
sewing corner in the dining room, and I looked 
through all the materials and tools.  No one in 
our house sewed.  This was all new to me.  I 
found a pin cushion, a red ball flattened on the 
base so it could stand up.  Light green threads 
criss crossed it from the bottom, separating it 
into sections like an orange.  All around the 
sides about an inch from the top were little sewn 
dolls gripping the cushion, lined up next to each 
other.  They were simple abstractions: a head 
with a little black pig tail, a body of a 
different colour, two arms and two legs holding 
the sides of the cushion.  I felt them.  They 
were filled with sand.  They were satin.  I took 
the pins that were stuck in the pin cushion and I 
repositioned them so that each little person 
gripping the edge of the cushion had two pins, 
one inserted in each eye and pushed in as far as 
it would go before coming out the bottom of the 
doll.  I replaced the pin cushion where I'd found 
it.

	At my next lesson, Ruth asked me if I 
knew anything about the pin cushion with the 
mysterious pins in the eyes all around the rim. 
I said I didn't know a thing about it.

	"Did you do it?"

	"No," I lied.


 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net