TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 187

Sat Mar 24 07:28:34 PDT 2007

March 24, 2000000007

Dear Trees,

	Do you have any idea how much 24 lamb 
chops weigh?  These are the shoulder chops, the 
big ones.  This is what my mother wants for her 
birthday dinner tonight.  I went by the meat 
market and while I was ordering the gefilte fish 
concoction, the beef tongues and the brisket, I 
picked up the 24 lamb chops.  Or, rather, one of 
the men behind the counter picked it up and put 
it in my trunk.  They weigh a lot.  And they cost 
a lot, too.  Over a hundred dollars.  I've 
planned two chops for everyone, but of course, 
there will be those who don't have even one, and 
there will be those who eat three or more. 
Judging quantity has never been my strong suit. 
We will maybe be drowning in lamb chops some time 
soon?  And I got the white potatoes, yams and 
prunes.  I got the various vegetables to roast: 
celery root, beets, turnips, mushrooms and 
zucchini.  My brother is bringing the salad.  My 
sister is bringing the cake.  This thing will 
happen.  No one is bringing wine.  We are not a 
wine drinking family, though.  One bottle of wine 
for twelve people would be plenty. I shall have 
to pick up a bottle of wine for the affair. 
Seven o'clock.  Be there.

	The Life Story today is a continuation of 
yesterday's, about the can of Feminine Deodorant 
Spray my brother, Daniel, and I tampered with and 
gave to our mother.

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	Then Daniel and I turned our attentions 
towared each other.  He gave me jumbly uglies, 
those soft gooey rubber animals, usually ones 
with tentacles or very long arms that can stretch 
almost indefinitely.  These are the rubber toys 
that, when left on the shelf, collect more dust 
and scuzz than seems possible.  Daniel gave me a 
pile of these things.  And in return, I gave him 
a few pounds of Rocky Mountain Oysters wrapped in 
a road map of California.  This went over well, 
but of course, it set us up for more.

	He fashioned a drawstring bag and stuffed 
a big yam in it, positioned so that if I followed 
his step by step instructions, the yam would come 
squirting out of the sphincter and hit the soft 
couch or cushion I was supposed to hold it over. 
That was graphic, maybe too graphic for the other 
people in the room.  Then I had to steal myself 
away and come up with a present to rival that. 
It was the beginning of the ties.  I went out to 
a used clothing store and rummaged through the 
box of twenty five cent ties, all in a heap and 
tangled.  These were ties that had been taken 
from the closets of men no longer with us, men 
who had tossed out their ancient wide ties, 
ancient skinny ties, and ugly ties, too ugly to 
wear, which is saying something considering how 
ugly ties can get.  I salvaged a tie with a snail 
crawling across the widest part of it.  I 
salvaged a tie with red fleurs-de-lys  on blue 
that eyes could not focus on without the whole 
thing vibrating.  I found op art ties.  I found 
souvenir ties of various cities.  I found ties so 
soiled with grease stains that it was hard to 
tell which colour they had originally been.  I 
found ties with big hippie daisies all over them, 
with obnoxious plaids.  I bought knitted ties 
that were shaped like belts with the knitting 
coming apart.  I found ties with patterns that 
boggled the eye, ties with hula dancers on them, 
Hawaiian shirt ties, ties made out of material 
that must have come from an upholstered porch 
swing, that shiny smooth cotton fabric with the 
oversized flowers on it.  In all, I put together 
about thirty ties.

	I took one tie and immersed it in salad 
dressing in a water proof snap top container.  It 
came along with instructions for growing your own 
ties from scratch.  The theory, as I presented 
it, was that ties were not made; they were 
spontaneously generated from salad dressing, 
gravy, grease, wine and other staining liquids. 
This marinating tie I wrapped carefully, 
beautifully, with lovely paper and pretty 
ribbons.  Daniel took the ties, lined them on a 
lamp shade, and thus gave them all back to me. 
We'd used up the ties.

	We moved on to lamps.  Mostly, I gave 
Daniel lamps.  He tolerated them.  I'd go to 
garage sales, thrift stores, places like St. 
Vincent Du Paul, and grab the ugliest lamps I 
could find.  One was a swirling mass of 
transparent blue glop, shaped as if it had been 
extruded from a giant cake decorating tip.  Then 
there were circular impressions as if made from 
the bottoms of one pound cans, distributed over 
the surface.  Below the top layer of transparent 
blue was a swirling storm of opaque grey green. 
This was spectacular!  And I found at Salvation 
Army, the golfer lamp.  It was made of plaster of 
Paris.  It was a statue of a cartoonish golfer, 
in the process of aiming for the ball with a wide 
back swing.  His shirt didn't come down to meet 
his pants, so his pot belly ballooned out above 
his belt.  His pants were too long and slopped 
around his heels.  His shoes were too big.  He 
was some form of clown, but meant to serve the 
golfer with golf and nothing but golf on his 
mind.  It was positively hideous.  These were 
added to Daniel's collection.  I found out, once 
I started to hunt for them, that ugly lamps are 
plentiful and cheap, though some of them are 
expensive and ugly, too.  The lamps served my 
gift giving compulsion for years.  There was no 
ugly lamp that couldn't be topped with an uglier 
one.  But finally, we both tired of the lamps. 
Maybe they were too ugly.  Maybe they just wore 
us out, but I decided to go out in a blaze of 
glory.

	I gave Daniel a wooden lamp that was also 
a little table.  The post came up through the 
round table surface and was topped with a macrame 
shade that was too small for the lamp.  It was in 
the American Colonial style and it was very very 
bad.  I gave the lamp to him along with a 
hatchet, and invited him to destroy the gift with 
as much verve and joy as he could muster.  It was 
much more sturdy than I would have guessed.  I 
presented it to him in the front yard of his 
house in Menlo Park.  I stood it among the ground 
cover.  There were many people present.  Everyone 
had at it with the hatchet, but it refused to 
die.  Little pieces of it flew off, cracks 
appeared in the shaft.  The  decorative struts 
encircling the round table halfway up the post 
came unglued.  But it took a village to kill this 
lamp.

	We have put our gross gift giving to rest 
for the time being.  And where did all these 
things go?  When you receive a gift like this, 
what do you do?  Keep it?  Toss it?  Give it away 
to someone else?  Use it, and decorate your house 
with laughable grotesqueries?  Stash it away in 
the basement under a tarpaulin?  Eventually, all 
these things go to landfills, to landfills.

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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net