TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 47

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 2, 200000006


Hello Strangers,

	I broke a tooth the other day.  No, not quite right.  I broke 
the bone around the tooth.  I'd been eating lunch and bit into a 
piece of meat that had a bone attached.  Only I didn't see the bone, 
and bit down hard on it.  I felt a crunch.  And suddenly tooth number 
ten was loose.  I could wiggle it all around, but it wouldn't come 
out.  It's a tooth with a crown (King me), so my worry was that the 
little nubbin they build the crown on had fractured.  If that were 
the case, to what would they fasten a new crown?  I thought of false 
teeth.  Oy.  False teeth at 59.  Well, it's true that my grandmother 
had false uppers by the time she was 54, but that was more than sixty 
years ago, and dentists are more clever now.  As it turned out, 
through a number of tests and sleuth maneuvers, my estimable dentist, 
Dr. James Stone, figured out that it was the bone around the tooth 
that fractured.  It's a thin bone and it lost to the thick bone I bit 
into.  So he splinted the tooth in question (good ol' number ten) to 
the teeth on either side of it, and now I limp along, avoiding that 
major tooth, the one right next to the front left incisor.  These 
little things keep happening.  Bit by bit I'm being carried away.  To 
a better place?  Don't make me laugh.

	No laughing matter.


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Not Mozart

	I was at camp Na'ami, the labour Zionist youth camp of 
California when I had my eleventh birthday.  My parents drove down to 
see my sister and me in the middle of the summer.  My birthday is 
July fifteenth, which is pretty much the half way point in the school 
vacation.  Camp Na'ami had one month and two month stays.  We had 
signed up for one month.  When my parents showed up around my 
birthday, my mother presented me with a ukulele, a very good one, in 
fact, a Martin, made by the same makers of fine guitars.

	I began learning chords on the ukulele right away, and the 
next thing I did was start to write songs.  They were heavily 
influenced by the folk songs I'd been learning from other campers, 
and from the whole folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s: The 
Weavers, Pete Seeger, Theodor Bikel, a host of names and groups who 
sought out folk songs and performed and recorded them.  So the first 
song I ever wrote was for ukulele and voice.  I used the same chord 
trick that someone had taught me to play for a rendition of, "Summer 
Time".  You know -- "Summer Time, and the livin' is easy.  Fish are 
jumpin' and the cotton is high.  Your daddy's rich and your ma is 
good lookin' (and that pretty much wraps up what's important for each 
gender), so hush little baby, don't you cry."  I took those chords, 
an A minor chord that was played in first position and then shifted 
up two frets, back and forth.  I wrote a song with heavy symbolism in 
the lyrics, hyper neurotic and hyper emotional, and it gave me great 
satisfaction.

	From then on, I defined my life by when I'd last written a 
new song.  Each time, the music got more and more complicated, and 
the lyrics, more and more like free verse.  Since I was already a 
cellist and could write out the notation, I used to slave over the 
scores to these simple songs, getting every note right.  And each 
rhythmic structure literally written out.  If it were syncopated, 
then I wrote out the rhythm that way.  I was obsessive.

	For the next Channukah, I was given a guitar, and that meant 
two more strings to play around with.  I learned every folk song I 
could, so that the next time I went down to camp Na'ami, a group of 
us sat in the back of the bus playing and singing music the whole way 
from San Francisco to the mountains northeast of Los Angeles, and we 
never repeated a song.  I kept writing my songs, and got more serious 
about them with each one.  I kept them all in my head and memorized 
them.  I have a good memory for music, and never forgot a song. 
There they were, all stuffed inside my head, backed up by the score 
I'd laboured over.  A growing repertoire.

	Here are the lyrics to the first song I ever wrote.  I was 
eleven.  Do not be alarmed.

Down with the sun her spirits went
She tore the rose of night.
My father died two years ago
My mother died last night.

Down seven steps the water falls
The wind cools off and blows.
The baby cries to touch the path,
But takes, takes the rose, sacred rose.

Far from the rose a lily wilts,
And freezes in the breeze.
She turns her head to warmer skies
Away from all disease.

But all too soon, the fog rolls in,
And drowns her as it goes.
But still she looks to warmer skies,
And to a new rose, sacred rose.

	A translation would make the song ludicrous.  So let me do that.

	It was all about the family dynamics between my mother, my 
brother and myself.  By the time I was eleven, I had hated my father 
for two years.  That's where, "My father died two years ago," comes 
from.  And my mother had done something to disappoint me the night 
before I wrote the song.  She'd given in to my brother's whining and 
believed him over me, which was an injustice, so she, "...died last 
night".   My brother is seven years younger than I, hence, "down 
seven steps", and he had a habit of crying to get his way, hence, 
"the water falls".  The rose is my mother's love.  Guess who's the 
lily!  There, now it's demystified and made ridiculous.  But 
remember, I was eleven, and as neurotic as the day was long.  They 
were long days back then.  Pretty good for a first song for ukulele 
and voice.  Not Mozart, however.


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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net