TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 116

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 10, 200000000007


Dear Living Beings,

	Strange dreams of staying at a summer 
camp that had a huge mansion for its central 
building.  It reminded me of my elementary school 
in Berkeley: a big imitation Tudor thing with 
sweeping staircases.  There were two teenage 
girls who wanted me to go to the swimming pool 
with them, and bring my mother, so my mother and 
I could fend off some boys who'd been trailing 
them.  We were supposed to get in the pool with 
them.  But of course, I couldn't find my swim 
suit.  It had gotten packed up in my suit case 
which was in the car, and I didn't have the keys 
to the car.  I wound up having to ask villainman 
for the keys, only he wasn't a villain quite in 
this dream.  He was in a darkened room, with 
others who were used to the dim lighting, talking 
with parents of campers.  This was visiting day. 
I asked him for the keys to the car so I could 
get my suitcase and remove my swimsuit (I 
actually don't even have a swimsuit).  He made 
some comment to someone else still involved in 
the conversation they were having in the dim lit 
room, and he reached in his pocket, brought the 
key out, and handed it to me.  Then I remembered 
we were divorced and he was villainman.  I 
wondered how it was that he was so civil to me, 
and how my suitcase had wound up in his car.  But 
I ran off to fetch it.

	Then, I couldn't find my room in the 
mansion.  It was a communal room shared with 
about ten other campers.  Everything was boarded 
up.  Where was I going to change into my 
swimsuit?  The girls who had asked for my 
protection were all changed and ready to go to 
the pool.  I asked them, as we headed off there, 
if the protection they requested was just for 
show, and they really did want these offending 
boys to catch up with them, but wanted the 
appearance of distance.  So should I do my job 
well or poorly?

	This must have been the day that everyone 
goes home.  There were going to be performances 
for the parents, and then later on, campers would 
be taken away by their parents.  There were cooks 
in the kitchen slicing huge swaths of meat off of 
larger hunks of meat.  They were trimming, but 
there was more trim than hunk of meat.  I saw all 
that wasted protein that they were going to throw 
away, and I thought I should really rescue it and 
feed some people.  The cooks were also busy 
making desserts, little individual cakes with 
astounding decorations on them.  Everyone was to 
get three little cakes.  They were all lined up 
on trays and put in a huge freezer with a glass 
door.  There was condensation on the glass and 
someone had written into the frost:  "Impeach 
God. This is going on too long."

	And that was my night.




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The stores on Grub Road

	On Grub Road in Silver Spring, Maryland, 
just down the street from our house were a number 
of businesses.  There was a delicatessen, a five 
and dime, and a drug store with a soda fountain 
in it.  There were other stores, but these are 
the ones I remember.  The delicatessen had a long 
counter with stools standing up to it, tables and 
booths.  The booths had little jukeboxes in them, 
and you could flip through the pages by 
manipulating the metal tabs that poked up through 
the top of the jukebox and moved in an arc.  Each 
page had the songs printed out and each song was 
given a combination of a letter and numbers, like 
B15, or D 36.  You'd put your coin in the slot, 
then punch the letters and numbers in, and pretty 
soon your song came up on the jukebox, piped in 
all over the restaurant.  It was high tech back 
then, and very impressive to a little girl who 
had just ordered a pastrami sandwich that she 
couldn't possibly finish.

	From what I remember about the deli, 
there was never anyone in the place but we, my 
mother, my father, my sister and I; I don't even 
remember anyone behind the counter, nor anyone 
who came to bring us our food, but of course that 
can't be the case.  Still I remember the place 
empty.  We always sat in a booth, and I always 
begged to tell the jukebox to play a song, and it 
didn't much matter what song, as long as I got to 
put the coin in and depress the letter and 
numbers.  When you punched in D57, you could hear 
clicks and sliding of disks and little motors 
whirring.  That was if you stood near the big 
jukebox in the far end of the deli and put your 
ear to it.  I always liked doing that.  Run and 
get a seat in the booth.  Order a pastrami 
sandwich that I couldn't possibly finish.  Put 
the coins in the coin holes and press the code 
for a song, then jump up from, or crawl under the 
table and slap my ear to the jukebox.  Sometimes, 
if I looked very carefully into the jukebox's 
glass front, I could see the mechanism working: 
the metal arm scanning and fetching the record, 
lifting it and stealing it from its roost, then 
flipping it onto the turntable where the needle 
would settle down on it while the record spun 
round.  Then the sound would come out.  Who cared 
about the pastrami?  Well, maybe I cared about 
the coleslaw.

	The five and dime was a big barn of a 
place, and all the shelves were packed with 
products.  It was a hardware store, too, so there 
were always men in there, gazing at the walls 
full of nails, fittings, wires, tools, nuts and 
bolts, all the things my father coveted and would 
bring back to our house to fix something with, or 
just to fiddle with, making some new invention. 
He was inventive.  That's what my mother said.

	The floor in the five and dime was wood, 
dark old wood, rounded at the edges and uneven, 
maybe even splintery.  My mother would send me to 
the five and dime with some money and a note for 
the proprietor.  He'd receive the note from me, 
gather up the things that were on the list, take 
the money and give me the change which he'd put 
in the bag with the items my mother wanted.  I 
felt big and important going to the store all by 
myself with the auspicious note and the real live 
green money in my fist.  The owner recognized me 
and knew who I was.  He'd throw in an extra 
little toy or a stick of gum for me to thank me 
for my good work.  "You're a help to your 
mother," he'd say.  And I'd glow.

	The drug store had isles that were packed 
with bright coloured boxes and bottles.  There 
were band-aids, shampoo, milk of magnesia, 
Kaeopectate, eye wash, shower caps, soap, 
aspirin, cotton balls and rows of bottles of 
pills of every size and colour.  There was a 
window in the middle of one of the walls of 
shelves, on the perimeter of the room, and that's 
where prescriptions were handed in.  In the 
window in the front of the drugstore were big 
glass vases filled with coloured liquids. 
Somehow this was the sign that it was a drug 
store.  A mortar and pestle were displayed 
alongside the coloured liquids.  There were 
magazines, too, and comic books.

	But the big attraction was the soda 
fountain.  There were machines that made 
milkshakes, and handles that the soda jerk pulled 
to get different flavours of soda out of the 
spigot.  This I recall vaguely.  But what I 
remember clearly was the list overhead of 
flavours of milkshakes you could get.  A 
hamburger cost fifteen cents with all the 
trimmings.  Milk shakes were a dime.  My sister, 
a friend of hers and I were dispatched to the 
drugstore with a dollar bill, and we were allowed 
to get one milkshake each.  Dana ordered 
chocolate, and her friend ordered vanilla.  I 
asked the nice man behind the counter, who 
probably was sixteen years old, if he could mix 
strawberry and chocolate for my milkshake.  He 
said yes, he could.  But Dana made fun of me. 
This was an idiot's idea: strawberry and 
chocolate together?  How stupid.  This wasn't 
done, and it sounded disgusting to her.  She let 
me know and shamed me into ordering only 
chocolate, or only strawberry, delaying my 
entrance into the wonderful world of cooking for 
another fifteen years.



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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net