TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 46

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 1, 20000000006


Dear,

	All the ghosts and fairy princesses  got 
out of their costumes and into their jammies. 
They've had a good night's rest.  They are up 
today not wanting to go to school, full of candy 
and dizzy with the aftermath of Halloween.  Down 
at my sister's house where the trick or treating 
is so thick they get hundreds of kids coming by 
all evening, they are sweeping up and sighing in 
relief.  Here we got not one.  What was I doing 
Halloween evening?  I was waiting for the 
novocaine to wear off.

	See, I bit into something at lunch time 
(the second bite) not knowing there was a bone in 
it.  And I felt this CRUNCH.  Then tooth number 
10 was loose and it hurt a lot.  The dentist is 
good.  He did some sleuth work to figure out what 
I'd done.  I'd broken the bone around the tooth, 
which is why it was loose.  He had to reposition 
it and splint it to the teeth on either side of 
it so that it would remain stationary while the 
bone heals.  Another piece of excitement, don't 
you know.  It's positively dazzling the little 
things that are happening to me.

	This happened to me.


 
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	Linda Langfeld was my best friend in the 
first, second, and third grades.  She lived in a 
house on the East West Highway in Silver Spring, 
Maryland.  Next to her house was a house with an 
interesting idea for landscape architecture. 
There were two wagon wheels, painted flat white, 
imbedded half way in the gentle hill that was the 
front lawn.  That is how I knew which house was 
Linda's.  Linda had an older brother, Stanley. 
Stanley was a pain in the ass for a brother.  He 
teased Linda, and teased me for being her friend. 
She was, "Lame-O", and, "Ugly", and, "Stupid". 
Those were his favourite names for her.

	I went to Linda's house after school a 
lot.  That is where my mother often found me when 
I didn't show up right after school was out. 
When I didn't come right home, my mother would 
get on the phone and call the parents of all my 
friends.  She'd go down the class list until she 
found me.  I never bothered making a play date. 
Things were different when I was a kid.  Parents 
didn't keep such close tabs on their children. 
People weren't afraid of the hillside strangler, 
or that there might be predators roaming the 
streets looking for young kids to murder.  So we 
were freer to run around, wander off, get a 
little lost.  It taught us a lot about life.

	Linda's father, Millard, had a model 
train set in the basement.  It was set up on a 
huge table and had tiny trees and houses, tiny 
street lights, tiny people at the tiny train 
stations, and tiny stores along the tracks.  The 
trains were Lionel, the only name I ever learned 
about with model trains.  The engines were exact 
duplicates of the real ones, and the machinery 
operated just like the big trains.  I'd never 
seen a big train, except on television in the 
wild west.  But somehow I knew this was the 
smaller version.  Mr. Langfeld never let Linda or 
Stanley play with the trains unsupervised.  It 
was his toy, even though, as I understand it, the 
train set had been given to Stanley for Channukah 
one year.

	From my mother, years after the fact, I 
learned that Mr. and Mrs. Langfeld were 
Republicans.  She quoted Mr. Langfeld as saying 
that they were never so happy as when Franklin 
Roosevelt died.  This made the Langfelds an alien 
species to our pinko liberal FDR loving family. 
My mother worshipped FDR, a whole concept that is 
foreign to me: worshipping a President.  Who 
could imagine?

	Once, when I was at Linda's house for an 
overnight, I borrowed one of her sweaters.  It 
was a long sleeved woolen sweater.  And this is 
when I discovered I was allergic to wool.  I 
began to complain to Mrs. Langfeld that I itched 
all over under the sweater.  After a while, she 
believed me, and she removed the sweater.  There, 
on my body, was a red imprint of the weave, every 
stitch a red welt on my skin.  You could have 
learned to knit studying me.

	I don't remember what mischief Linda and 
I got into, nor how we played, nor what we had in 
common besides detesting and fearing Stanley. 
Linda brought me into the bathroom while she was 
sitting on the toilet.  We were joking around and 
talking when Stanley burst in with a couple of 
his friends.  He introduced Linda to his friends 
and was awfully proud of himself for pulling this 
stunt.  Linda was humiliated, and I was incensed. 
The next time I came over, Linda told me we were 
going to get even.  We waited until Stanley went 
into the bathroom.  Then we gave him some time to 
get comfortable, and barged in.  He was sitting 
on the toilet with the clothes hamper in front of 
him.  On top of the clothes hamper was a 
typewriter with one crisp piece of white paper in 
it.  Stanley was typing something.  We both 
leaned against the wall watching him sit there 
being embarrassed and extremely angry.  But he 
was in the middle of some important business and 
couldn't act on his anger.

	Five years after we left Maryland, I 
received a letter from Linda Langfeld.  In it, 
she'd enclosed a picture of herself.  She had a 
pouffed up hair do with a flip at the ends.  She 
had her own personal letter head, but she'd 
crossed out the "i" in Linda and replaced it with 
a "y".  Lynda.  We all have to have our identity. 
I probably didn't write back, not because I 
wasn't interested, but because I was busy with my 
life in Berkeley, California, and I didn't know 
what to say to the grown up girl in the 
photograph.  When we left Maryland, I did some 
calculations in my head and figured that by the 
time I was 14, I would have spent half my life in 
Maryland and half my life on the west coast.  I 
dreaded that day.  It would feel disloyal to 
Maryland to go on with the scales tipped in 
favour of the west coast.  But by the time I was 
14, and got the letter from Lynda, I was 
satisfied with Berkeley, and quite at home on the 
west coast.  Years later, I wondered what 
happened to Lynda during the Vietnam war era, 
when hippies roamed the earth, and my whole 
generation was going wiggy.  It would have been 
an effective rebellion to have taken up with the 
long hair, grass smoking, war protesting, acid 
taking social revolution.  But I didn't know how 
much rebellion was instilled in Lynda.  We all do 
what we have to do to grow up and out.

 
**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**¡**
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net