TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 45

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 31, 200000006


Dear dear me,

	Feyna decided she wanted to be a punk 
witch for Halloween.  She had to earn the money 
to buy the parts of the costume.  She bought a 
pink wig, orange and black striped stockings, and 
a witch's hat at the Halloween Headquarters near 
campus.  She got a short black skirt at Goodwill. 
Then she was given a black long sleeved top by my 
mother.  She cut up the shirt and pinned it back 
together with safety pins.  She's going to paint 
a stylized skull onto the blouse, and she got 
some chains to hang off herself.  But what she 
couldn't do was get face piercings.  All she 
could find were the real thing, and she's not 
about to punch holes in herself for one tawdry 
evening.  It doesn't look quite right without the 
piercings.  Still, she can draw some impressive 
tattoos on herself.  I could help.  She'll go 
down to my sister's house tonight and hand out 
toys to the thousands of kids who travel from 
other parts of the city to go just there for 
Halloween night.  I opt out.  I'll be home 
waiting for little groups of trick or treaters to 
make it up the stairs to my mother's front door. 
We don't generally get a lot of them.

	Meyshe doesn't care about Halloween one 
way or the other.  He'll be perfectly happy to 
spend the evening at his computer playing chess, 
or studying in his Tibetan dictionary and copying 
out words in coloured pencil.  He is currently 
boycotting Chinese goods (hard to do) because of 
the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet. 
There's a Tibetan restaurant in town, and we'll 
go there one time this week, so he can show the 
owner his progress.  Meyshe has a fascination for 
foreign languages, especially those with 
different alphabets and systems of writing.  He's 
studied hieroglyphics and used  to write me notes 
with all the pictures perfectly drawn.  He's 
studied Hebrew, of course, and his calligraphy is 
excellent.  He took up with a book of Chinese 
characters and knows quite a bit about it, and 
can draw characters perfectly, according to the 
waiters and waitresses at our favourite Chinese 
restaurant.  He learned some Korean from one of 
his teachers at school.  And now it's Tibetan. 
He retains all this information, and invents 
combinations of languages that he documents and 
explains to me.  What he likes best is the 
combination of Hebrew and Tibetan.

	He wanted to get a set of CDs and books 
that would teach him Tibetan.  It's impossible to 
get the correct pronunciation from a book, but 
when I looked it up on the internet, the set was 
in excess of $250.00.  I just can't do it.  Maybe 
we've got a philologist in the works.  But I just 
can't do the two hundred fifty plus clams.  Maybe 
for Channukah I can scrape something together, 
sell something and use the profits.  What do I 
have to sell?  I could do handwriting analyses! 
Yes, just send me your samples of writing and 
I'll call you on the phone and analyze your 
writing for $100.00 a pop.  Maybe 20 minutes or 
more on the phone.  Anyone interested?


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	Yvonne and I both had a crush on the same 
lousy guy when we were in high school together. 
He was one of five brothers born to the Duckles 
family.  End to end these Duckles boys would 
reach halfway to the moon.  The shortest of them 
was six foot four, a mere pip-squeak.  The 
tallest was six foot eight and three quarters. 
Lee Duckles was a cellist.  In fact, all the 
Duckles boys were musicians.  Their father, 
Vincent Duckles, was the librarian at the 
University of California Music Library, and every 
single boy got music lessons and showed some 
talent.  Larry, the tallest, was a flute player, 
and when he played the piccolo it was comic to 
see  this giant hunched over a tiny stick, his 
big fingers twiddling.  Lee was a good cellist, 
but he had no soul.  Why Yvonne and I didn't see 
that is beyond me.  Someone without a soul stands 
out.  It makes the heart sore.

	Lee Duckles was how Yvonne and I met.  I 
was coming out of the practise rooms and she was 
going in.  We bumped into each other, and she 
said to me, in a whisper, "Do you like Lee 
Duckles?"  I said, "How did you know?"  We have 
survived Lee Duckles and every other man who came 
our way.  We two remain.  Yvonne had a head start 
on liking Lee.  She had a crush on him for six 
years.  I only had a crush on him for three. 
What wasted years.  We could have been gathering 
wild flowers and doing Mitzvot.

	One day, I was walking to the music 
building and Lee Duckles was walking in front of 
me with Benji Borson, the first flutist.  I 
overheard their conversation.  Benji told Lee 
that Yvonne Bernklau liked him.  And Lee said, 
"What?  That homely bitch?!"  Besides the fact 
that I found Yvonne beautiful, the comment 
outraged me.  It outraged me enough that I dared, 
for the only time in my entire life, to get even. 
I didn't know how or when, but the opportunity 
would surely present itself and I would honour 
that opportunity.

	The opportunity came the next day.  Lee 
caught up with me and asked, "What's shmuck?" 
Note that he did not ask, "What is A shmuck?"  He 
asked, "What's shmuck," as if it were a 
collective noun.  He'd at least gotten the ethnic 
origin right.  He asked a Jew.  So I told him, 
"It's a kind of candy that you can get at Yale's 
delicatessen.  It comes in chocolate and vanilla. 
You buy it by the pound."   Yale, of Yale's 
Delicatessen, up on Shattuck Avenue, was a 
holocaust survivor.  He had the numbers on his 
arm, and was not afraid to display them.  He was 
surly, ill tempered, and gave the high school 
kids who came around a hard time.  But he was 
always nice to me.  I have no idea why.  So we 
left it at that, Lee and I.  Shmuck was a kind of 
candy that came in chocolate and vanilla.  You 
bought it by the pound, and you got it at Yale's 
Delicatessen.

	The next day, Lee approached me with a 
sour expression on his mug.  "That's not what 
shmuck is, is it?" he sneered.  I imagined in my 
best fantasies that he had gone in to Yale's and 
asked to see the shmuck and buy a half pound of 
it in chocolate.  Something had happened to clue 
him in to the fact that he'd been made a fool of. 
I envisioned Yale screaming at him, berating the 
goy and cursing his people.  It was fine in my 
mind.  It was revenge, and contrary to what I'd 
heard about revenge, it was actually sweet.  I 
could taste it.

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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net