TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 169

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 4, 200000007


Dear Benignities,

	Was I supposed to turn my clock forward?  Is it this week, or 
next week?  Whatever it is, I haven't altered my clocks, and here I 
am at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday, with the sun more or less up out the 
windows, and me more or less tired and wanting to go back to bed.

	But I can't.  Because I have taken my Fosomax.  Fosomax is a 
miracle drug that keeps skinny women of a certain age from getting 
osteoporosis.  You have to take it under rigorous instructions.  Do 
not lie down again after taking Fosomax.  Drink a full glass of water 
with your pill.  Do no eat anything at all with your Fosomax.  You 
must wait at least a half hour before taking your other medications 
or taking anything to drink or eat.  Fosomax is your friend.  It says 
so right here on the package.  Take as directed.  Take heed.  No evil 
eye.

	Last night, I took part in a reading at Black Oak Books.  It 
was mostly for our writing teacher, Andy Couturier.  Ten people from 
his classes read briefly.  My mother was going to come, but she was 
suffering from a bad bout of constipation and needed to stay near the 
facilities at home.  She apologized profusely.  But Meyshe and Feyna 
came with me.  I figured Meyshe might not last too long at a reading 
where he had to remain still and quiet for any length of time, even 
if his mother was going to read.  So I asked Andy if I could go early 
in the program.  I went second.  The audience laughed a lot during my 
reading.  I checked my clothing.  I was presentable, so they must 
have been laughing at what I was reading.  That's a good sign.  After 
I got done, Meyshe abruptly got up and wandered off to the rest of 
the bookstore, finally winding up in the children's room.  About a 
half an hour later, he emerged looking fidgety, and Feyna and I 
decided it was time to exit.  So we did.  Then we went to a Korean 
restaurant.  That was the plan.  This was an experiment and we didn't 
know what was authentic and what was for us honkies.  Does anyone 
know anything about Korean food here?  Tell me what's the real stuff. 
Spicy, weird, down home, no white people allowed Korean food.  Then I 
can make an informed decision when we go to another Korean restaurant 
maybe next week.  This one was okay, but I think it erred on the side 
of Americanization.

	I await your wisdom.




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SNAP!  THWAK!


	If I had to shoot the animal or catch the fish, I'd be a 
vegetarian.  I just can't bear the idea of slaughtering any other 
living being, yes, even a fish, even a shrimp or a guppy.  Not that 
guppies are that good eating.  I have plenty of appetite for meat, 
and I'll eat practically any part of the animal, gizzards and 
spleens, gefilte lungen and tripe (Oh! Tripe!).  Everyone draws the 
line somewhere, and I draw it at French Fried Asshole Rings.  Won't 
touch 'em, even with copious amounts of ranch dressing for dipping. 
I'd take on a new exotic food like a happy challenge.  I can learn to 
like this!  Bitter melon gave me a hard time.  On first eating it, I 
nearly felt like spitting it out.  That would have been rude in the 
restaurant.  When they named it, "Bitter Melon," they did it for a 
reason.  But there, right in front of me, was Harry Lum, his 
chopsticks glinting in the fluorescent lighting, popping pieces of 
this evil vegetable into his mouth, smiling, saying, "Yummy".  So I 
was determined to learn to like it.  The second time I ate it, it 
didn't gag me.  My swallowing mechanism was doing well, and I had no 
urge to spit it out.  The third time I ate it, I actually ate it, 
voluntarily.  I was not thrilled, but I enjoyed it.  I found it 
refreshing.  The fourth time, I loved it.  Yummy!  My chopsticks 
glinting in the fluorescent lighting.

	And I love fish, even very fishy fish.  Oysters, raw, baked, 
grilled, steamed or fried.  But if I had to hook that fish or snuff 
out that oyster's life, I couldn't do it.  I'm just not made like 
that.  I found this out the hard way, when I was quite young.  Up in 
Tilden Park, in back of Berkeley, to the east and in the hills, was a 
pond that the Park kept stocked with fish.  I don't remember what 
kind of fish, except that they were definitely the biting kind.  The 
water was silver with fishies, undulating, shimmering, trying to swim 
in the midst of the mob.

	Our father took us there to get the fishing experience.  You 
bought a cup of bait and rented a fishing pole at the little house on 
the premises.  Then you took your pole and your bait to the edge of 
the pool and mucked around with the hook and worms.  This was too 
much for me.  My father tried to instruct me in the ways of worms. 
You grab the writhing entity and skewer it on the hook, right down 
the middle; he showed me.  He seemed to enjoy the act, which gave me 
the willies.  My sister had no trouble with torturing the worms 
either.  But then again, she used to pour salt on slugs just to watch 
them foam.  I was not in their league.  I shrank from the worms and 
eschewed the nasty hook with its sharp barb, and wicked intent.  It 
meant to do lethal harm to the worm and then the fish.  I regarded it 
with ethical dread.

	"Look, I'll show you." He threaded the unhappy worm onto the 
hook, leaving an inch or so hanging off the end.

	"See?  It's easy.  Cut off a piece of a worm."  He pinched 
one out of the little plastic cup, halved it by squeezing it in the 
middle, getting worm goo on his fingers, and not caring.  My sister 
was already waiting to go, dead, or dying worm on her hook, her pole 
at the ready.  But there was trouble with Tobie.  Tobie didn't want 
to shove the worm on the hook.  She didn't even want to fish the worm 
out of the little plastic cup.  The whole thing was distressing her. 
This made my father impatient.  He didn't want to wait for me to 
decide to kill.  So he did it quickly for me, letting me know I'd let 
him down.  He handed me the pole with the dead worm (this one was 
definitely dead) snared and dangling in the air.

	"Now just put the pole in the water."

	Dana and I lowered our offerings into the water.

	SNAP!  SNAP!  Right away, there were tugs on both our lines, 
an insistent drag by hungry fish.  We lifted our lines out of the 
pool and there were fish hanging on the ends of them.  It hadn't been 
hard work at all.  Effortless really.  My father took hold of the 
lines in one hand and the fish in the other.  He extracted the hooks 
from the fish's mouths, and they flopped around madly, dancing their 
last number, swimming wildly on the grass.  He left them there to 
choke in the air.  Then he pinched off another worm for me and 
repeated the baiting procedure, handed me the pole again and urged me 
to put it back in the water.  I was looking at my fish flopping 
around on the grass.

	"It's dying," I said, remorsefully.

	"It's just a fish.  They don't have feelings," he said, 
offhand.  He was sure of this.  "Put your line back in."

	Dana had already threaded a new expiring worm onto her hook, 
and had plunged the goods into the pool.  Not a second later, she 
shouted gleefully, "I've got another bite!" and yanked the sorry fish 
out of the pool.  She watched what my father had done with the last 
one and she said, eagerly, "Let me do it!"  She held the fish behind 
the gills and tore the hook through the side of its mouth, then 
spread the panicking fish out onto the grass.  My father held my 
hands and guided me while he lowered the worm into the water.

	SNAP!  A fish bit again.  These fish were throwing themselves 
on the worms just to get out of the crowd of fish.  It was gill to 
gill in there.  If we'd stood at the side of the pond and held up a 
pail, they would have leapt out into the bucket to save themselves. 
We caught the absolute limit of fish at the Tilden Park fish pond. 
They were brought home proudly for my mother to gut, clean and cook. 
I don't remember the meal.

	The next weekend, my father was in a fishing mood again.  He 
bought us some fishing rods at Sears and Roebuck, bought some bait at 
the tackle shop and took us out to the end of the Berkeley pier. 
This time, we waited for bites.  We waited quite a while.  Then Dana 
got a bite.  He showed her how to reel it in, and there rising up 
from the dank waves of the San Francisco bay was a wiggling fish at 
the end of her line.  It was about six inches long.  My father pried 
the hook out of its mouth and proceeded to smack the fish over the 
head with the pliers he'd used to remove the hook.  THWAK! THWAK! 
Dead fish.  Murdered fish.  Then as the little battered body lay on 
the pier, a strange thing happened.  The fish's belly was swollen and 
when Dana pressed on it, tiny little fish came out of a hole at the 
base of the belly.  They were still born.  Maybe five of them.  I was 
horrified and reeled in my line before getting a bite.

	"Watch!" Dana said.  "Look!  This is fascinating!"  My father 
agreed.  She pressed on the belly again, and another little fish came 
out.  Again, another.  I was ready to turn us in to the police for 
murder and infanticide.  I was sullen all the way home.

	If the whole process happens without my seeing it, I am fine 
to cook the beasts, but I can't participate in the slaughter.  I'd be 
a vegetarian.  Then again, why accost the innocent vegetables and 
slay them with knife and peeler?  There is no free lunch.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net