TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 222

[Tobie Shapiro]

May 18, 2000007


Dear Flower Gatherers,

	I thank you all for your words of 
encouragement and empathy.  You helped me sleep 
last night.  Mint is home, with her feeding tube 
emerging from under the bandages around her neck. 
The jolly vet tech demonstrated how to give Mint 
her medication and food and water through the 
tube with the syringes.  Feyna kept zoning out, 
and I had to nudge her.  "Feyna, pay attention. 
You'll need to know how to do this yourself." 
And she'd attend for the next few paragraphs. 
The whole scene made us all nervous and 
melancholy, worried,  scatter brained.  Four 
feedings a day.  Many medications to crush up and 
mix with the food or water, three times a day. 
Some only one time a day.  A stomach settling 
aperitif a half hour before meals, for three of 
the meals.  One pill that has to go down her 
throat.  They gave us a thing called a pillar 
that delivers little pills into the throats of 
uncooperative cats.  We walked out of there with 
a case of special food that can be delivered by 
syringe through the tube.  Just mix with water, 
fill up to the 20ml marking, and push it slowly 
in.  Mint just sits there calmly while her meal 
is placed directly in her belly.  This was 
remarkable, because Mint never sits calmly at a 
veterinary clinic.  I guess over the few days she 
was there, she got used to them.  When the vet 
tech brought Mint in, she was wrapped in a towel. 
She was so excited to see us, her mother and her 
grandmother that a minute later, she threw up. 
It alarmed me.  I thought, "Oh no.  The cat is 
exploding."  Watching her, all bony and subdued, 
I started to cry.  Feyna reacted immediately by 
holding my shoulder, saying, "Oh Mom!" tending to 
me.  I said not to worry.  I cry easy.  I do.  We 
asked a lot of questions.  One of them was about 
prognosis.  Vet tech says, "It's hepatic 
lipidosis".  "No," I shook my head, "That's the 
diagnosis.  I'm asking about the prognosis.  What 
are the chances that Mint will pull through this 
and recover?"  Vet tech was upbeat.  "Oh, sure 
she will.  Most cats recover from this."

	My mother pitched in to pay part of the astonishing bills.




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Life Saver

	It wasn't frequent, but we did go up to 
Portland, Oregon, from time to time to visit my 
father's older sister, Selma, her husband, "Uncle 
Milton," and their two kids, our cousins, Joell 
and David.  I don't know why Joell was named 
Joell, but David was named David because he was 
born on the day of his grandfather, David's, 
funeral.  There were a lot of Davids in the 
family.  It was hard to keep up with them.  So 
when my brother was born, they named him Daniel, 
using the D to honour Grampa David, but not going 
full bore on the whole name.

	Grama Lena, the widow, asked my mother 
about this.  "You're not going to call him David?"

	"There are already Davids in the family. 
Selma's son is David.  They'd get confused."

	She put up a little bit of a struggle, 
applying a cool guilt compress to my mother's 
temples, but the name was already on the birth 
certificate.  Too late.  That was the final word, 
"Too late now."

	But it wasn't too late in Lena's mind. 
She continued to refer to Daniel as David and had 
to be corrected each time, as if it had never 
happened before.  Lena spread the news around the 
family, and to this day, there are relatives who 
call Daniel David.  At least we know where it 
came from.

	The summer visit when I was nine landed 
in the middle of a heat wave in Portland.  No one 
was used to it.  No one had air conditioning, and 
I remember watching the adults sit around in 
brief clothing, an ice cold drink of tea or 
coffee or soda in their hands, holding the 
glasses to their cheeks.

	When it snowed in Maryland, if it were a 
good solid snow that felled the area, they would 
call off school.  Parents would dress their kids 
up in snow gear, open their front doors and let 
them loose on the empty streets.  When cars did 
go by they would be announced by the snow chains 
strapped to their tires.  The combination of 
clanking metal and the shushing of the snow could 
be heard half a block away at least.  And then, 
in retreat, we heard it until the car and its 
tires were far down the road.

	So if they called off school for heavy 
snow, why didn't they call off school, work, 
deadlines, responsibilities in general for a heat 
wave?  I thought this was a very bright and 
original thought, and brought it to my mother.

	"When it snowed, they called it a snow 
day in Maryland, and we didn't have to go to 
school.  Why don't they call this a heat wave 
day, and call off school?"

	"But, Tobie, there is no school.  It's summer vacation."

	I stammered, shifted my weight, stood 
there in the middle of my mistake, wanting to 
make my point nonetheless.

	"You know what I mean.  What if there 
were school?  Then they should cancel it.  That's 
what I mean."

	Where do you go from there?  I mean, as a 
parent, what's the next step?  Do you acknowledge 
the good idea and talk about how to get this idea 
to the proper people?  Suggest a letter to the 
editor a lesson in form and protocol?  Suggest a 
petition to the school board, a lesson in 
politics and frustration?  Suggest taking a 
survey to determine what support there would be 
for such an idea, a lesson in organization, 
statistics and sociology?  But when you're being 
Mommy to three children who all have their good 
ideas, how many great causes can you champion? 
It would be a valuable learning experience in 
civic function, government organization, or even 
just following through with a good idea.  And it 
would take days dedicated to the causes to make a 
small step forward.  In the heat, I could see my 
mother's wheels spinning more slowly than usual. 
It was just too much to contemplate.

	"That's a good idea, Tobie.  We should think about it."

	That punched my ticket, and I ran off to 
join Joell, David and Dana in our sweltering 
games.

	"You know, there's a public pool in the 
park," Selma said.  "Why don't we take the kids 
swimming?"

	Our ears heard this over our din from 
across the house and upstairs.  We dropped what 
we were doing and came barrelling in to make sure 
this happened.  We jumped up and down yelling, 
"Swimming!  Swimming!  Swimming!" leaping like 
Chihuahuas, making too much noise, annoying the 
grown ups.  We ran to get our swimsuits, some 
towels, our bathing caps, zorries.  There was 
stomping up and down the stairs, shouting, 
unbridled joy.

	Selma and my mother took us to the pool. 
They packed shopping bags with our supplies, 
loaded us into Selma's car.  The parking lot was 
huge, or at least it seemed that way to me. 
Everything was bigger and more official than it 
had been in Silver Spring.  This was because it 
was all new.  I had to ask Joell about the rules 
and regulations in Portland.  Do we have to take 
a shower before we get in the pool?  Who's 
allowed in the deep end?  Can you dive for coins? 
Can you bring your own pool toys in with you? 
Can you ask the life guard important questions 
even while they're on duty?  How deep is the deep 
end?  Can you stay in as long as you like?  What 
if somebody takes the stuff in your locker?  Can 
you pee in the pool?  Can you swim in the toilet? 
Dana told me to shut up, and snapped the strap of 
my swim suit on my bare shoulder.  It was a 
warning shot.  I held my questions.

	The mommies sat in chairs around the 
pool, and all four of us fell in as if we'd 
walked off a cliff.  I knew little more than the 
dog paddle even though at Webster/Neal day camp 
they'd given us swimming lessons.  But a dog 
paddle was a form of mobile flotation, so I was 
encouraged with my expertise.  I looked around 
me.  There were so many other kids my age, all 
splashing around, squirting water at each other, 
playing tag, seeing how long they could hold 
their breath under water, swimming underneath the 
water with their eyes open.  The bigger kids hung 
around at the edge of the pool, displaying their 
sexy sloth to members of the opposite sex.  All 
that was still pointless to me, a big nothing.

	"Look at me!" I shouted at Dana, when my 
mother wasn't available.  "Look.  I can stand on 
my hands in the water!"  I flipped myself over 
and touched the bottom with the flats of my 
palms, my legs emerging from the water, kicking, 
assuming all kinds of bizarre positions: legs 
spread wide, legs tight together, legs bent at 
the knees, legs peddling an imaginary bicycle, 
legs waving around randomly in the air.  Dana 
wasn't impressed.

	"I have better things to do with my time 
than watch you and your child like stunts."  She 
shoved off.

	I watched the big kids in the deep end, 
diving, cavorting, swimming on the surface while 
below them nine feet of water held them up, even 
though I knew it could pull them down.  I let go 
of the edge of the pool, and started to swim out 
to the deep end.  I felt wicked, dangerous. 
Then, WHAM, right in front of me, a hefty kid 
made himself into a canon ball and parted the 
sea.  Water sloshed up my nose.  Water streamed 
into my mouth.  I lost my bearings.  Which way 
was I facing?  How do I get back to the edge of 
the pool?  I breathed in some water and started 
hacking violently, thrashing around, my arms 
hitting out wherever they could land.  I felt 
myself going down under the water.  Then someone 
tore off my bathing cap, grabbed me by the hair 
and started dragging me away.  I needed to get up 
on top of whatever pile there was.  I grabbed 
onto the head of the person rescuing me, and 
tried to climb up.  I pushed the person down as I 
tried to rise.  Get to the air!  Get to the air! 
I had no idea what I was doing.  I was saving my 
life, scrambling over my saviour, reaching for 
the sky.

	I felt a blow to my head, a sharp new 
ache rattled my brains, and I could see for an 
instant that my rescuer was Dana.  And she was 
angry at me.  She hooked her elbow around my neck 
and paddled over to the side of the pool.  She 
screamed at me to stop flopping around.  I was 
more or less unable to order my thoughts, and 
kept fighting her.  Dana got me to the edge of 
the shallow end, pushed me by the tuchas up over 
the lip of the cement and deposited me, a fish 
having a nasty seizure, on the path surrounding 
the pool.

	I finally caught my breath, expelled the 
water in my lungs, and lay there exhausted, 
depending utterly on the wisdom and patience of 
those around me.  Nothing was said between Dana 
and me for the rest of the excursion.  But when 
we got into the car, all wet, wrapped in towels, 
sitting down and facing the front, she bubbled 
over at the peak of excitement to Selma and my 
mother.

	"I saved Tobie's life!  She tried to 
drown me, too, but I saved her anyway!"

	She got a lot of kudos for being my life 
saver.  She leaned over and told me, "I'll never 
let you forget this."  I swallowed my tongue.




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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net