TheBanyanTree: more stories again again
Tobie Shapiro
tobie at shpilchas.net
Thu Sep 21 08:30:48 PDT 2006
September 21, 20000006
Dearests,
Here are more of what I sent more of yesterday.
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The Nose of a Lamb
When it came to picking a name for the Bedlington Terrier, we
were not stumped for long. I had a dream. I dreampt that I was
being courted by the keeper of the strawberries. He left poetry for
me in a hole in the floor under my shoes. There were strawberries
everywhere. Huge ones as large as a man's fist, small ones no bigger
than a grape. The name of the keeper of the strawberries was
Griffith. And that's what we called Nobles True to Form whose call
name, as far as the previous owners were concerned, was Caspar, as in
Caspar the ghost. So Caspar Nobles True to Form became Griffith.
He got used to his new name fairly quickly. I think he'd
never gotten so much attention. The breeders saw him as a failure in
shows, him with his rye or wry mouth, and probably never chucked him
under the chin. Certainly, with that ridiculous show cut, they must
have treated him carefully, at best, so as not to disturb the fluff.
At the dog show, all the Bedlington owners were primping and pouffing
their charges with special combs and hair dryers. Imagine that as
your life as a dog . . . Don't get that coat smooshed! Don't roll
over! Don't play! Don't lie down, you'll disturb your 'do.
We raised Griffith in a different way than the breeders would
have. First, we got rid of the show cut. We had him cut even all
over about an half inch. And we discovered that the Bedlington
Terrier doesn't naturally look like a sheep or a lamb; it looks like
a Whippet, the high roach back and pointy face, slender and an
efficient runner. Originally, they were a cross between a Whippet
and a Dandy Dinmont Terrier, a little tea cup pooch. I imagined the
breeders got roaring drunk one night and one of them hollered, "Shay!
We cood take yer Dandy Dinmont and put 'er on a chair, and take my
whippet, and shee what happens." And then, of course, when what
happened happened, they had to pretend it was a sentient act. Did it
with a cool head and intentions to found a new breed.
Second, we taught him useful tricks, but we gave them
different names. He learned to Blintz, Trutt, Plotz, Trindle and
Pompidou. Very impressive! We discovered early on that Griffith was
not the sharpest knife in the drawer, not the brightest bulb in the
lamp, not the cleanest shoe in the parade. But we loved him. He
attracted attention wherever we went. Once, when I'd brought him in
for a haircut, I explained to the groomer that he should be cut half
an inch, even all over, and when I came back to retrieve him, he was
shorn in the stupid show cut. I asked the groomer why, and he stood
fast and solidly to the book. "Bedlingtons have always been cut this
way. That's the only thing I'll do." There was no time to repair
the damage. Dweller and I were on our way to San Francisco where we
walked Griffith around Union Square. An elderly woman came up to us,
stopped dead in her tracks in front of Griffith, looked back and
forth between owners and mutt and said, "Why that dog has the nose of
a lamb! The nose of a lamb!" She walked past us, shaking her head,
"The nose of a lamb. Nose of a lamb."
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How to Get in Trouble at Camp
Bobby Suberi had knobby knees and skinny legs. His skin was
dark like cinnamon. His arms were like sticks, and his hair was cut
short so that it stood out, in all its intense blackness, from his
head. He was eleven years old and I was eleven years old and we
were both burning in the heat at Camp Na'ami, the labour zionist
youth camp, in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles, that served
all of California Habonim. Bobby's mother was the cook for the whole
camp, everything kosher, everything plentiful. It was like a
commune, this camp, and everyone had duties to perform, work to do.
When I was on kitchen duty, keeping the milk (milchik) silverware
from the meat (fleishik) silverware, and the milk plates from the
meat plates, I met Bobby. He was staff offspring, which gave him a
higher status than mine. It was as if he owned the camp, the big
dusty hot camp that gave me bronchitis every time I went there. You
signed up for one month or two months, or rather, your parents signed
you up for one or two months. It was a meshugeneh camp (crazy), and
all sorts of forbidden behaviours happened there. Just like on a
kibbutz.
The first summer I was there, Bobby Suberi and I became an
item. We were a young item, but an item, nonetheless. He hung
around my group's dormitory after lights out for a good night kiss.
All the girls in my cluster crowded the windows from on top of the
bunk beds to watch our nightly ritual. It was a vestigial dry kiss
on the mouth without turning heads, so our noses squished together.
I thought Bobby Suberi was the finest thing to happen to me since I
got a cello. He said he loved me. We were going to get married when
we grew up, even though he lived in southern California and I lived
all the way up north in Berkeley. Bobby had numerous siblings. I
couldn't even count them all. There were many staff offspring at the
camp, all with their divine birthright to rule, special status,
special privileges.
The directors had a little boy named Asophe (a SOF ee), a
four or five year old with huge black eyes and long lashes. He was a
stunningly beautiful child, and since he was staff offspring, he had
the run of the whole place. He was spoiled rotten. Even though he
was as gorgeous as perfection, he still packed nothing but annoyance
for all the campers, and we'd try to avoid him if we could. One day,
as I was hiking up one of the paths to the headquarters, I came
across Asophe who was holding my ukelele in his hand. He was stooped
over a pipe, filling it with water from the spigot that stuck
straight out of the ground. I grabbed the ukelele, poured the water
out of it and told him not to do that ever again. His mother
happened to come along and picked Asophe up, protectively, in her
arms. She scolded me for being hard on Asophe. He was only a baby.
How was he to know not to fill the musical instrument with water? I
was afraid I might get in trouble, but I didn't. No one got in
trouble at Camp Na'ami. In order to get in trouble, you'd have to
get pregnant, or get someone pregnant and have your parents come all
the way into the mountains to the camp, take you away from these
permissive socialists and bring you home to reality.
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--
Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California USA
tobie at shpilchas.net
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