TheBanyanTree: stories, more

[Tobie Shapiro]

September 17, 2000000006


Dear the whole lot of you,

	I am forging ahead.  Thank you for your comments, you know 
who you are.  I need all the feedback I can get, and I appreciate it. 
Don't stop.


 
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	I was lying on my stomach on the living room carpet, looking 
out the window into the bushes, then the street beyond.  Daniel was 
just a small kid, maybe seven years old, not much older.  That makes 
me 14, not much older.  He was standing barefoot next to me.  I 
peered at his feet which were flat as saucers.  I tried to stick my 
finger under his non-existent arch.

	"Flat feet!" I said, matter of factly.

	"No I'm not," he said quickly, sure that I'd just said 
something bad about him.

	"No, that's not bad.  You probably won't have to go in the 
army with flat feet."

	"Why?" he asked, and then he put his mind to it.  "Is that 
because I'd make too m uch noise running?"

 
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	There was some business picnic that we all attended, not too 
long after we returned to Berkeley from Maryland.  So I was nine 
years old and my sister, Dana, was eleven.  The picnic was held in a 
huge meadow in Tilden Park, behind the Berkeley hills.  This must 
have been put on by the company that my father worked for when we 
first got back to the west coast.  I can't remember the name of the 
company.  But there was quite a crowd at the picnic.  There was Bar 
Be Qued chicken and ice cream, sodas, hot dogs, hamburgers and a 
crowd of people all having fun.

	Close to the front of the field was a table where they were 
selling raffle tickets.  The grand prize was a radio.  Wow!  Dana and 
I bought two tickets and proceeded to perform a magical ceremony to 
ensure that we won the prize.  She held one ticket while I held the 
other and we hit them together, alternating tilting to the right and 
to the left, while we changed, "Tick Tock, the game is locked and 
nobody else can win!"  The raffle was held late in the festivities. 
We stood there holding our tickets, sure that one of them would be 
the winning ticket.  They read off the numbers.  And there you had 
it!  One of our tickets had won the first prize.  They handed us a 
green plastic radio about as big as a bread box.  We were spooked 
that our chant had worked, and we named the radio, "Lucky".  That 
radio stayed working long after newer radios konked out.  It was a 
sturdy little thing.  I'm sure we had plenty of opportunities to have 
our magic spell disproved, because we're not chanting it any more.

 
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	When we were still very young and visited my Grama's and 
Grampa's in the city, we used to amuse ourselves endlessly with all 
the special qualities of their house.  First of all, they had a 
laundry chute that started out as a hole, a square hole in the bottom 
of the linen closet in the hallway.  We derived terrific 
entertainment from dropping things like toothbrushes, bars of soap, 
cannisters of Cashmere Bouquet down the chute while someone waited 
below for them to land.  The end of the chute was a burlap bag with a 
drawstring closure that hung in the basement at the end of the garage 
where the washer and dryer were.  After one of us dropped the mystery 
item down the chute, she would run down the stairs and open the 
burlap sphincter to let the treasures pour out.  Then we'd run them 
back upstairs again, to repeat the whole procedure.  We were giddy 
with delight.

	Then, outside the back door, which was half a flight of 
stairs down from the kitchen, was the triangular back yard.  It was 
criss crossed with cement pathways, and there was a concrete 
sculpture, probably another bird bath, in the center.  We played 
magic times in the back yard.  We got hold of a basket with a huge 
arched handle.  We'd step through the handle and expected to arrive 
in a world of enchantment, where humans could fly and all our wishes 
would come true.  When it turned out that we didn't arrive there, in 
fact, that no such world existed after passing through the basket 
handle several times, we were very upset, and went inside to the 
television room to sulk and pout for being dealt such a hard blow by 
life.  Why couldn't magic exist just this once?  Why was life such a 
dismal disappointment?

 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net