TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 153

Fri Feb 16 07:57:33 PST 2007

February 16, 200000000007

Dear Nuts to You,

	Feyna may have found herself a job.  And 
even though I don't particularly like it, it's 
her choice and I'll stand by it.  She's going to 
be working for an outfit called, "Clean Water 
Action".  They want Feyna to take the 4:30 to 
9:30 p.m. shift and hit the residential streets 
knocking on doors in San Francisco, telling 
people about Clean Water Action and asking for 
donations, memberships, renewal memberships, etc. 
She'll be interrupting people's dinners, of 
course.  The door to door telemarketter.  It 
would be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which 
means she'll miss Shabbos dinner, and have to be 
working on the Sabbath.  She desperately needs 
this job, and so she's going to try it.  She has 
to show up for work today for the first time, and 
will have a trial run.  Then they huddle to see 
if she should be hired on a more permanent basis.

	Well, first of all, the streets of San 
Francisco are not always the safest streets in 
the world, and I worry about her, even though 
she'll have a partner working with her.  It will 
be night time, and some of the streets aren't 
very well lit.  Her safety will depend upon what 
sector of the city they send her to, of course. 
There are very safe neighborhoods.  But there are 
hell holes, too.  Maybe these people don't get 
sent to a hell hole because hell hole residents 
don't usually give to environmental causes.  I 
could be wrong.

	Then there's the queasy making fact that 
no one I know has ever heard of this 
organization.  They have a web page, naturally, 
and the web page looks official enough, but 
anyone can front a web page.  Who are Clean Water 
Action?  Why don't I know about them?  I give to 
environmental causes.  They've never contacted 
me.  I called the Sierra Club to see if they knew 
anything about them.  But the Sierra Club 
referred me to the better business bureau, and 
the BBB just had a recording, an interactive 
service.  If you want to know about a company and 
whether complaints have been lodged against them, 
you have to punch in the phone number of the 
organization in question, and I didn't have a 
phone number for them.  There was one on the 
flyer that Feyna brought home, but she swiped 
that away to study it, and I don't know where it 
is.  So I hit empty on both tries.

	Then there is the matter of her 
transportation.  She will be coming home on BART 
late at night, maybe 10:15 or so, and no one from 
our house will be able to pick her up at the 
station.  I asked her about this, and she 
casually neutralized the question by saying that 
she'd take a taxi from BART to home.  That's 
three times a week, at probably $6.00 a pop, 
including tip.  That's eighteen bucks added to 
the BART fare which is probably $3.00 each way. 
She's going to lose a lot of her paycheck in 
transportation.

	My mother is poo pooing the whole thing. 
She gets this disgruntled look on her face and 
points out yet another thing that is wrong with 
this whole set up.  She favours educating Feyna 
about all of it, drumming our concerns into her 
head, and pressuring her.  But I don't.  Feyna is 
a bright young woman.  She will find out about 
her safety and the taxi fare and about the 
organization, and if she finds out about it on 
her own, she can take steps to correct it, but if 
I should set myself up as the anti-job, I'm just 
distancing myself from her.  I told her about my 
concerns, but in mild terms, and I'm leaving it 
up to her to pursue those questions.  She just 
has to figure these things out for herself if 
she's going to be independent at any point.

	In March, on the 13th, both my children 
will be 20 years old.  That calls for a special 
celebration.  What do you think it should be? 
I've asked them what they want.  So far they 
haven't suggested anything.  That's two decades! 
Out of their teens.  Into their twenties.

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Flying up into a Girl Scout

	In the fourth grade, I was going to John 
Muir Elementary School in Berkeley.  School took 
up my days and in the afternoon and weekends 
there would be those extra curricular activities 
that are supposed to look so good on a resume. 
When we'd lived on Hopkins Street for six months 
right after returning from Silver Spring, 
Maryland, there was a ballet school next door to 
us.  The woman who owned the house had converted 
her living and dining rooms into one large studio 
with one whole wall of mirrors and a bar running 
the length of the wall.  All day she gave ballet 
lessons.  All day, ballerinas tramped in and out 
of the side door.  With their air of femininity 
and hopes for toe shoes, they came and went in 
leotards and ballet slippers.

	Both Dana and I were enrolled there. 
Dana, I think, hated it because she was convinced 
that she was clumsy.  It was part of her 
identity.  We will never know how clumsy or 
graceful she really was.  This is the trouble 
with ingrained identity.  Once you've taken on 
that image of yourself as a victim, or a failure, 
or a bully, or the class clown, it's hard to 
break it and train yourself into a new identity. 
So Dana was supposed to be clumsy, while I was 
convinced I was graceful.  I stood at the bar in 
my little ballet slippers, wearing my leotard and 
I stood up straight.  In fact I stood up so 
straight that I was arching over backwards, 
distorting my posture and giving myself back 
aches.  At nine years old, back aches.

	When we moved from Hopkins to the eternal 
family estate on Domingo, we dropped ballet with 
absolutely no regrets.  But something had to be 
put in its place.  The idea of a young person 
existing without outside lessons was unthinkable. 
So we went to Sunday school at Temple Beth El, 
and my mother joined me up for the Brownies.

	The Brownies are the farm team for the 
Girl Scouts.  As Brownies, we took all sorts of 
field trips, mostly to factories, or business 
establishments.  Bott's Ice Cream on College 
Avenue gave a decent tour and showed us tiny 
girls in our brown uniforms and brown berets how 
ice cream was made.  There were big vats.  That's 
what I remember.  And there were big stirring 
machines that turned the vats round and round. 
We all got a taste of ice cream.  That's a field 
trip.  We also went to a potato chip factory, but 
I missed that one.  I arrived at the wrong place 
because I'd forgotten about the field trip, and I 
spent the whole time sulking in the house of one 
of the mothers.  We chatted, but I was bent on 
sulking.  Aside from field trips, we sang songs, 
played games, said the pledge of allegiance and 
the Brownie Scout oath.

	"On my honor
	I will try
	To do my duty
	To God and my country,
	To help other people
	At all times,
	Especially those at home."

	We said this, saluting with two fingers 
to the forehead.  We learned how to imitate a 
steam calliope, giving parts to each girl.  One 
went, "Mmm, beep beep.  Mmm, beep beep".  Another 
went, "Mmm, bop bop.  Mmm, bop bop".  A third 
went, "Mmm, tweedle dee.  Mmm, tweedle dee," and 
then two were given the job of holding their 
noses while singing a melody that followed the 
tune of, "Did you ever see a lassie, go this way 
and that way?  Did you ever see a lassie, go this 
way and that. . . "  It was great fun.  Every 
Brownie all over the country who was any Brownie 
at all did that calliope imitation with her troop.

	We met in a small room that had its 
entrance on the side of the school.  We had our 
fun and our snacks, and followed the directions 
of the troop mother.  There was no sense of a 
mission or even a great sisterhood of Brownie 
Scouts everywhere.  We were just a handful of 
little girls in our brown uniforms and brown 
berets that we'd worn all day in school.  That 
was our badge of membership.  We had fun and took 
nothing too seriously.

	Now, the Girl Scouts: that is a different 
story altogether.  The Brownies are fun, but the 
Girl Scouts is all business.  There is a ceremony 
marking the transition from Brownie Scout to Girl 
Scout.  The terminology had it that we, "flew 
up," into Girl Scouts, which sounded like a mid 
air collision to me.  At the ceremony, we stood 
there giving the Brownie salute and the official 
mother of the troop went from girl to girl, 
rearranging the fingers of the salute from the 
two fingered Brownie salute to the three fingered 
Girl Scout salute.  It was less then inspiring 
and didn't hold a candle to the ceremonies that I 
was used to in my Jewish upbringing.  Two fingers 
to three fingers?  Pah!  We cooked for a week, 
and read the Haggadah for over an hour.  The Girl 
Scouts couldn't compete with that.

	The problem with Girl Scouts was that it 
wasn't fun anymore.  Suddenly, we were busy 
earning badges.  You had to accomplish a list of 
things in a given category to earn the badge. 
Then there was sewing the damn badge on the blue 
uniform.  When you'd earned one badge, you didn't 
cut back and wallow in your success.  You went on 
to earn more badges, and I didn't see the point 
in it.  Besides, the skills we were supposed to 
master were stupefyingly simple minded.  To earn 
a music badge, you had to recognize a treble 
clef, know what a piano was and tell the 
difference between that and a set of bagpipes. 
Not difficult.  If the other badges given for 
accomplishments in fields with which I was 
unfamiliar were as horribly difficult, a badge 
meant nothing.  So what happened when you earned 
a pile of badges?  A whole shit load of badges? 
Nothing happened.  You just got to sew more 
badges on to your uniform and step up a notch in 
your rank.  We were decorated veterans at age 
ten.  There was something military about being a 
Girl Scout: the rules and regulations, the snappy 
stiff salute, the fact that we were now living to 
obey the rules.  There were no more field trips 
to cookie factories; this was business.  Don't 
smile.

	"On my honour
	I will die
	To do my duty
	To someone else's God and my country,
	To kiss upwards, earn badges
	And obey the Girl Scout laws."

	I tired of it after the first worthless 
badge.  I wanted my fun back.  I had all day to 
earn brownie points in school.  After school 
should be silly and light.  I wanted out from the 
Girl Scouts, but I was afraid to tell my mother. 
I don't know why I thought she had such a stake 
in it.  I'm sure she didn't.  She probably 
regarded it as another chore, another annoyance, 
another thing to keep track of and maybe even to 
have to show up for a meeting.  But I thought she 
would be very disappointed in me if I begged out. 
So I did a highly unusual thing for me.  I lied. 
I chose a lie that would carry some weight and 
require no discussion.  I told her that I wanted 
to stop the Girl Scouts because they were 
anti-semitic.  I never heard a word about the 
Girl Scouts again.  The uniform was disposed of. 
The episode was history.

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-- 

Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net