TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 201

[Tobie Shapiro]

April 17, 2000007


Oh dear,

	So I met with the 78/79 year old suitor 
from Jdate.  He doesn't look his age.  He looks 
much younger (just in case you thought I meant he 
looked 96).  He's an interesting character.  We 
talked for about an hour, sitting with our cups 
of handcrafted coffee on a bench outside of 
Peet's.  He told me he was rescued by 
Kindertransport during the lead up to WWII.  He 
was born in Germany, and his parents saved his 
life by having him shipped outside the country 
for his safety.  He made no mention of the 
parents and family left behind.  I didn't ask. 
He is going back to Frankfurt to take part in a 
meeting of other Kindertransport participants 
with good Germans who survived the war on the 
other side of the holocaust.  They are going to 
try to come to understandings.  I thought the 
whole event sounded very brave.  He is also 
taking a three year course in Shamanism.  He 
works full time, gets up at 5:00, has a class in 
the city on Tuesday nights.  He's busy all week. 
He's more active than I am.  That's for sure.  I 
just sit here at my computer being advocate for 
my kids and springing new sentences upon the 
earth.  We agreed that the next meeting, we would 
go to some concert or musical event together.  He 
thanked me for being open to this.  He must have 
met with refusals because of his age.




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A Yeshivabucher at Bat


	I was not good at sports.  Very early on, 
in nursery school and kindergarten, there was a 
lot of running around, but it was not organized 
play with teams, competitors or a set of rules. 
I do remember in nursery school when a lot of us 
sat in a circle and played, "Hot Potato," then in 
the first grade being sophisticated enough to 
play, "Telephone," that paean to the mysteries of 
communication.  But neither of those counts.  Not 
enough running or flapping of the arms.  I don't 
remember any time in the first three grades 
devoted to physical education.  We just ran 
around a lot at recess.

	Somehow, we all learned the rules of 
certain games and played them, dutifully standing 
in line to take our turns at baseball, forming a 
human wall of joined arms to play, "Red Rover". 
And there were the standard games that are really 
better described as behaviours, where you have 
your body do strange tricks.  The first, most 
basic, of these games was twirling around in 
circles until you couldn't stand up, then 
staggering around, falling on your fanny, 
laughing at the dizziness.  I used to wonder why 
the grown ups didn't want to spin in circles with 
us, or roll down the hill in the front yard. 
Now, being an official grown up, I see the 
reasoning.  It's simple.  At a certain age, it 
starts making you sick.  Another trick is to 
stand next to a wall and press your arm up 
against it, without using the rest of your body. 
You count to thirty and then step away from the 
wall.  Magically, your arm rises in the air of 
its own accord.  Some of the kids in elementary 
school, in the higher grades, the obviously more 
mature group, knew how to force themselves to 
faint.  They'd be standing around the playground 
at recess, hyperventilating, then holding their 
breath.  Everyone else would stand by to catch 
them if they fell.  I never did that.  Losing 
consciousness would have left me wide open to 
harm, and I had a father to worry about.  Must 
never lose control.

	One morning at recess in the fourth 
grade, we were playing baseball.  I was not good 
at this.  I rarely hit the ball.  It was so 
small, and the bat was so thin.  I'd watch 
everyone else get up to bat and produce perfect 
pop flies, which of course no one could catch, so 
they were home runs.  I'd get to bat and strike 
out or walk.  It just depended if I were brazen 
enough to swing.  All the pitches were pretty 
much outside of the strike zone.  There were some 
kids who were so insane to hit the ball that 
they'd leap away from home plate and swing 
wildly, like swatting at a fly, just to have a 
chance for a hit.  But I knew my place.

	I let the ball approach me and fall short 
of the plate, or zing wide of the mark, and I 
found myself on first base.  The next kid up at 
bat accomplished a drizzle of a hit along the 
first base line.  The ball rolled past the first 
baseman, and the outfielder was unable to stop it 
as it wobbled past.  So I wound up on third. 
There seemed to be a problem out there in the 
field.  This unremarkable little hit created a 
chain reaction of errors.  No one could get hands 
on the ball.  The kids at home plate yelled at me 
to come in and score.  I hesitated.  Then, I saw 
the ball being thrown to the plate, and I ran 
like mad to get myself to home.  I succeeded in 
scoring.  There were cheers, but I couldn't stop 
my momentum.  I kept on running and slammed into 
the bench behind home plate.  I flew up in the 
air and landed flat on my chest.  It knocked the 
wind out of me and when I opened my eyes, a crowd 
had gathered.  They were all peering at me, 
thrilled.

	"Your eyes rolled back in your head!"

	"Wow!  You should have seen your eyes.  We could only see the whites!"

	"You were out cold!  Neat!"

	I was helped up off the cement and 
escorted to the nurse who bandaged my bloody knee 
and told me to sit it out for the day.  I nobly 
obeyed, wounded sublimely in action.

	Naturally, this was big news at home. 
The culprit, as far as my family was concerned, 
was sports itself.  It's dangerous.  It was a 
philosophical thing, almost religious.  We didn't 
engage in sports.  It was somehow beneath us. 
Our sport was sitting and thinking, reading, 
studying, expounding, debating.  No running 
around chasing balls.  Jews don't do that.  We 
leave it to the goyim.

	By junior high school, the philosophy had 
become an ethical imperative.  I reflexively 
dreaded P.E.  Going to my locker and changing 
into my gym outfit was loathsome: the dark blue 
shorts with the elastic waist, the white short 
sleeved blouse, the socks and tennis shoes.  It 
was like putting on a prison uniform, or the 
broad striped terrifying issue of the 
concentration camps.

	There I would go, out to the yard, 
showing way too much of my legs, and being told 
to move them around quickly.  It was humiliating. 
I didn't want to exert myself, not physically, 
anyway  -  psychologically, intellectually, 
emotionally, yes.  But acceding to sports was 
disloyal.  It was apart from my core identity.  I 
didn't like the feeling of running, jumping, 
hopping, aiming.  I didn't even throw like a 
girl.  I threw like a Jew.  And I was proud of 
that.  I was descended from a long line of 
Yeshivabuchers, pale skinned, ogle eyed scholars 
of the book.  I thought of myself as a brain with 
a body dangling from it.  In any other subject, a 
B was an embarrassment.  But a C in P.E. was a 
badge of honour.  It kind of balanced out all the 
As in the other classes.

	When I got to high school, I had finally 
acquired a weapon against P.E.  I had my 
menstrual periods.  When you are bleeding from 
your personal hole, you are not required to 
participate in gym.  And I was lucky.  My periods 
were extremely irregular.  I could have a period 
every two weeks.  That put a dent in my 
participation: one week off and one week on.  But 
irregular also meant that sometimes the periods 
were eight weeks apart.  This was arduous.  Run 
those little short legs off!  Nature is ignoring 
you.  Of course, I could have lied, told the 
teacher I was on my period when I was blood free. 
But that would be immoral.  I never tried it, 
even though I knew no one was going to demand 
proof.

	"Show me your sanitary napkin!  Hey!  I 
don't see a drop!  It's into your uniform, 
Shapiro.  Step lively!"



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net