TheBanyanTree: more stories again again

[Tobie Shapiro]

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