TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 21

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 6, 20000000000006


Dearly Beloved,

	Writing about Arthur (Life Stories 20, Broken Heart) took a 
lot out of me.  I remember at the time that I was sobbing on my 
sister's couch and the crazy nasty old lady next door was holding me 
that I promised to myself I would never ever love anyone like that, 
so completely, again, never trust anyone so completely again.  And I 
never have.  That is neither good nor bad, really, just fact.  The 
pain was so searing, so whole, so devastating that I didn't want to 
open myself up to that again.  I thought it would kill me.  It 
doesn't mean I can't love a lot.  I can.  But not crazy in love.  The 
trust has never returned.  I don't trust easily.  I trust my 
children, and I trust my best friend, Yvonne.


 
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Twenty Thousand Turkeys

	My Aunt Anne and Uncle Kuo were revered in my mother's 
family.  Actually, it was my great Aunt Anne and Great Uncle Kuo. 
Anne was the youngest of the five  Brodofsky siblings, born in1898. 
My grandmother, Fannie, or Fega Dverah, was the eldest, born in 1890. 
Anne was the only one to go to college.  She graduated in 1919, then 
travelled the world for ten years living in China for nine of them. 
When she returned, she went back to UC Berkeley and got a masters 
degree in economics.  This made her the family scholar.  The 
educational credentials of the other four Brodofsky kids was not 
auspicious.  My grandmother had to leave school at age thirteen and 
worked in a hat factory to help support the family.  Al was next in 
line.  Al had no fondness for school.  He is rumoured to have jumped 
out the classroom window in the 4th grade and never to have come 
back.  Max retired from school when he was 16 and worked as an 
apprentice to a blacksmith.  Belle found a job working in a produce 
market when she was 16.  That made Anne, the baby, not only the 
scholar, but the luminary, the wise woman, the celebrity.

	While Anne was living in China, she met Kuo who had just 
returned from Harvard where he'd gotten his doctorate in history. 
So, think of this illustrious couple among the sharp but unschooled. 
My mother worshipped Aunt Anne and was dazzled by everything she 
said.  From Aunt Anne, my mother got her socialistic leanings, her 
thirst for learning, and her drive to achieve at the University, the 
same one Anne had graduated from in 1919.

	By the time I came in on the scene, Anne and Kuo were turkey 
farmers.  Their plan had originally been to return to China together 
after they got married, but the revolution nixed those plans soundly. 
So, they did what any learned couple would do; they bought a turkey 
farm outside Sebastopol.  Kuo was going to be a gentleman farmer and 
Anne would be the gentlewoman shovelling beside him.  Of course, it 
didn't work out that way.  It worked out to about twenty parts farmer 
to one part gentleman.  The farm was huge.  We went up there 
frequently when I was little.  The whole family gathered up there, 
uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, grandchildren.  It took about 
two hours of a drive from Berkeley to get there.  I remember sitting 
in the back seat of the car, watching the city scape gradually become 
rural, until a fog of dust was accompanying us where we drove.

	The turkeys made a loud constant noise which composed the 
score to everything that happened up at the farm.  From the bottom of 
the long driveway up through the groves of gravenstein apple trees, 
you could hear them yodelling, 20,000 of them, trampling each other 
as they panicked en masse to get out of the rain, or out of the 
baking sun, or away from a dog barking, or inspired by an hysterical 
reaction to nothing in particular, just some errant dust mote falling 
at the wrong angle from the sweet California sky.  The fences kept 
them from wandering off into the infinite universe.  And the fences 
protected us kids from being mauled by 20,000 addled stampeding 
turkeys.

	There was plenty for all us cousins to do up at the farm. 
There was a feed house, just a long rectangle of a building with a 
door at either end.  Inside, the one hundred sacks of turkey chow 
were piled six feet high on either side of the walkway, going 
straight down the middle from one door to the other.  My cousin 
Donnie would play the part of Tarzan, my sister the part of Jane, and 
I was relegated to playing boy, who had no part really at all.  But 
all the parts were essentially the same, that is, to leap back and 
forth from the tops of the stacks of feed, all the way from one end 
of the feed house to the other.

	Inside the farmhouse, all the men would busy themselves 
swatting the swarms of fat juicy flies who came in regardless of the 
screen doors.  The big strong men, armed with their fly swatters 
would sally forth from their chairs and pursue the enemy, each 
keeping count to tally his own kill.  The winner's only prize was the 
entitlement to gloat, and repeat his score to the others, in their 
shameful defeat.  My uncle Kuo had a dog, Bumpy, and he would rub 
Bumpy's floppy ears as he sang to him in Chinese.  My Aunt Anne would 
join all the women in the kitchen and they would cook dinner for the 
crowd of visitors.

	What the turkey farm taught me was how to imitate turkeys. 
Yes, I can gobble like a turkey.  But I can also sing the Star 
Spangled Banner in Turkey.  And the secret favourite of all, though 
they don't like to admit it, is the ever popular -- turkey vomiting. 
Those Sunday trips to Sebastopol were not wasted.  Nobody can do a 
turkey, a turkey singing the Star Spangled Banner, and a turkey 
vomiting, like Tobie Helene Shapiro.  There ought to be a way I could 
earn a living at this.

 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net