My Beloved Dog, Brownie 1994-2008

October 26, 2008 · Filed under Memoir, family · Tagged , , ,

 

Update from: “Love in a Cage…Waiting” Posting
My beloved dog Brownie passed away on Friday night, October 3, 2008 just before 7:30 p.m. in my arms.
A week before she suddenly became very ill and was seen by a fine neurologist at the MSPCA/Angell Medical Center. The vertebrae in her spine in the neck and mid back area were in very bad condition and inflamed and swollen. She was put on a high dose of prednisone, plus pain killers, to ease her distress and try to begin to heal her. But as each day passed she grew worse. The pain radiated from her neck and back into her back legs until she was no longer able to stand on them. Her front legs were also failing, not because they were weak, but because the disease process in her spine affected the nerves that connected her spine to her four legs.
By this past Wednesday night she no longer wanted to eat. After just a few steps with assistance she collasped onto her side again and again. I brought her back to the hospital hoping that their more expert care would help her. But despite everything, she got worse almost by the hour. The pain was so severe despite pain medication that shortly before she passed away, her breathing rate was more that 90 times per minute.
I wanted her to live, to be with me. Except for this horrible problem, she was in excellent general health. But her suffering was so great, the possibility of her recovery nearly zero, that I knew in my head and heart what she was telling me in the way a dog can tell a person…..
I held her in my arms and told her how fine a dog she is and how much I love her and thanked her for sharing her life with me as a kind doctor gave her a painless injection. She only heard my voice and felt my arms holding her and my face so close to hers in the seconds it took to stop her suffering.
I stayed alone with her for more than an hour after that. Patting her. Feeling her beautiful thick fur. Talking to her soul. And seeing that she was at peace.
She is in my heart and always with me. My sweet Brownie who was almost always in the same room I was in for all those years.
My Brownie, I wish my all my heart that this awful medical condition never happened to you, and that you didn’t get so much worse so fast despite treatment. I know that in the times to come I will be able to look back and see it all more clearly. And I know that for the rest of my life I will miss you, my sweet, gentle pup. I am so proud and fortunate that I was “your person.”

From Love in a Cage…Waiting

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My Last Exam at Harvard, A Tribute

September 18, 2008 · Filed under Harvard, Memoir, family · Tagged ,

I closed the last blue exam book of my time at Harvard, placed it on my professor’s desk, smiled at him saying “thank you” softly, and left. Sever Hall smelled musty as always. The oversized wood doors of this ancient looking brick fortress made noble entrances to every room and stairwell. As I stomped down the iron staircase, my boots made the old metal sing. This building was a monument to the old fashioned way of learning: acquiring knowledge for the love of it.

     Five years of hard work were now behind me. I had loved it all. It was winter twilight. Deep snow covered everything except the stairs and walkways. A former Boston street kid, granddaughter of immigrants, daughter of a real pickle man, I crossed Harvard Yard.

     I found my favorite sitting spot. The gray concrete slab under a huge tree was the length of a bench, backless, and high enough to sit on. The wind grew stronger. I sat down on my old friend, and let my thoughts, as I had done so often here, wander and see where they would take me.

     Students were all around, but I knew no one. My children were young and I had commuter student loneliness. But the air was delicious, clean and arctic, and I pushed the isolation away. I’d just become a part of Harvard’s history and this was my own quiet celebration.

     People in heavy coats rushed past me, crunching snow and ice. I was the only person sitting anywhere and must have looked odd, but it felt right. I waited, prolonging that milestone moment, shivering, and rooted like the tree next to me. I could have frozen to death so deep were my thoughts. Images and words I grew up with came to my awareness suddenly, although they had always been there.

      I grew up in an old brown wood Boston triple-decker house. My parents, brother, and I lived on the first floor. My mother’s parents, my Mama and Papa who owned the house, lived on the second floor, and the third floor was rented out. On that freezing day of my last day at Harvard, my home was a large brick Georgian colonial house in an upscale suburb, but my heart was in my old Boston neighborhood.

     My Papa was the oldest of eight children. He left Lithuania when he was thirteen years old because it was too dangerous for a Jewish boy of that age to remain there; he would have been stolen by soldiers for the army. He came to America by himself and worked for years as a bricklayer to bring his younger brothers and sisters to safety. Finally, when the last of their children were safe in America, my Papa’s parents consented to follow them. But my great grandfather, Avraham, developed the dreaded eye infection that meant deportation at Ellis Island in those days. He wanted Chaya, my great grandmother, to go without him. She loved her husband and refused to leave.

     Clouds passed over the moon as I remembered my mother telling the story again and again, of how the family gathered when she was a young girl, while a neighbor translated a letter written in Yiddish addressed to my Papa: Jacob Shapiro, Boston, America. It reported there had been a pogrom. My Papa’s parents were herded onto a cattle train with the entire village, and sent north because they were Jews. The writer, their neighbor, witnessed their deaths from starvation and cold. The train stopped, and soldiers threw their bodies into a field

     Tears froze on my face. That sorrow was a part of me, even at times of joy. Softly I spoke to the sky, “My beloved great grandparents, know that your family is safe now. I have just finished Harvard University and I dedicate this achievement to you both. Rest, be at peace. I love you.”

     I stood up feeling the blessings of my ancestors and walked slowly to my car, stiff from sitting so long on concrete on a cold night.

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Rape, 1989; Raped Shelter Child and I, 2002

September 17, 2008 · Filed under Memoir, child abuse, rape, recovery, recovery from rape, shelter for abused women and children, trauma · Tagged , , , , , ,

Part 1: Night and Morning – April 1989

At midnight, the entire house was dark, except for the kitchen light. I lay on my back on the carpet in my living room, waiting for the car to leave. His headlights shined into windows. The motor started. Then I heard him drive away.

The room was huge, I was small. Street lights made odd shapes on the ceiling. I stared at them. Beyond this room the house was huge. I didn’t move, numb to everything except the shadows and the hugeness. I must sit up now, I thought, or I never will.

The baby grand piano was a silent sentinel in the darkness. The simple fireplace with the rose colored mantle rose up at my head. Its silver andirons, tools and screen came with the house. “Never polish them, Lila. They’ll lose their character,” my dear friend, Stan, told me. I touched the cold metal, remembering. I could have called him, but didn’t. I could have called anyone, but didn’t.

My new light pink sofa was there, waiting. I loved to read and do ordinary things in its comfort, but now it appeared defeated, like me. I stared too long at the pillows on its seats, backs, and sides that always had to be put right. The curtains, made to a designer’s plan, tied back with matching pink and green floral fabric and hung perfectly on a custom rod by a specialist in such things, made me want to cry in their sincerity to please. The lamp on the glass and brass table that held my treasures of books and bowls and silk flowers looked lost. I shivered, feeling cold and pain for the first time; the blessed numbness was wearing off.

I slowly pulled myself up holding the sofa, walked through the dark hall to the front door, opened it, and sat on my top brick step several feet away. Across the street my neighbor’s English country house slept. To my left, a red brick colonial like mine slept too. I didn’t think of going to my neighbors, my friends for years. The cold bricks numbed the pain in my body.

I sat there too long, staring up the street lined with huge old trees with leaf buds. A different pain returned. My husband left in a taxi with our three children the day before. I tried to pack, unable to start till it was almost time to go. Eight weeks of severe diarrhea and inability to eat from illness left me too weak. “I don’t have the strength to pack. Just a sip of water, and I feel it in my gut. My colon is burning. I’m too sick to fly across the country,” I told him, trying not to cry in front of my children.

“It’s a shame to waste your plane ticket,” he said and told our oldest daughter to invite her friend to use my ticket for California. “She has to be here in twenty minutes or we’ll be late and leave without her,” he instructed. Miriam’s parents said yes, and brought her right over. The taxi came. Everyone got in. My children waved sadly, confused, but excited to see their cousins, and followed their father. I smiled waving goodbye, not wanting to spoil their pleasure of the Passover seders to come and their large family.

I stopped remembering. The bricks grew colder. I got up, went inside, and slowly climbed the stairs to the bedrooms. I gathered heavy quilt after heavy quilt from each child’s dark room, then piled them on my bed. I used the toilet, putting a light on at last. The burning made me cry. The streaks of blood scared me. No one will know how filthy I have become, how bad, how much I hate myself, I decided. The brief unwanted primal pleasure when he did it, he whose name I cannot say to this day, haunted me, pained me, humiliated me. I am garbage. I lay down in the middle of my too big bed and one by one, smelling the scent of each child, pulled quilts over me, their weight my protection. I slept a sleep that felt like death.

At six a.m. I woke suddenly. I grabbed the phone. “Is Dr. Blotner home?” I asked his wife, my neighbor way up the street. He called back minutes later. “Don’t hate me, “I begged. “The pain is bad. I’m bleeding. It’s my fault. I opened the door and let him in. He raped me with his fist,” I sobbed. Someone knew; the long healing had begun.

My husband returned home to me on the first possible plane after I told him.

Part 2: Shelter Child and I – 2002

The shelter for battered women and children hides in plain sight, an ordinary big brown house on a busy street outside of Boston. It has eight bedrooms and two kitchens, all disguised as a two family.

“Maureen, what’s up?” I asked the director, an abused woman who found safety in this shelter with her children years before. Now she ran it.

“New people got here late yesterday. The mom came home to find her new husband raping her nine year old daughter,” she said. “Lila, you’re not running your support group today. Just stopping by?”

“Yes,” I said looking at the file for the newcomers. “I missed it here. I’m not a vacation person. I’m back to running groups next week. Need anything now that I can do?”

Maureen said. “That girl’s seeing the trauma therapist today. But she refuses to speak to anyone, not even the ER doctor when he examined her last night.”

“I don’t blame her,” I said. “Everyone’s a stranger here. And her mom left that pig alone with her daughter. The girl must be bitter towards her now. Was the mother abused by him too?”

“Yes,” Maureen said. “But that man raping her daughter finally made her leave him. That’s what it took to convince her to face the reality of him. Damn, it almost always takes a tragedy to wake people up.”

“Want me to try to talk to the girl?” I asked. “Shall I tell her about me? It’s helped when I’ve told the women.”

“Absolutely. But be careful. She’s fragile. Don’t push her further into her shell. She doesn’t even cry,” she said. “She’s in the living room.”

“Hi,” I said to a beautiful nine year girl with long, shiny dark blond hair. “Can I sit with you? My name’s Lila. I help out around here.” She nodded

I sat a cushion’s length away from her on the donated old sofa. “I love this room,” I said. “Artists painted the walls to look like a garden. Silly thing is that real flowers don’t grow up to the ceiling.” She looked out from a dark place at the walls long enough to show me that the bastard hadn’t killed her.

She looks so poised and intelligent, I thought. “You look like a real life princess, noble and strong,” I said. Her lovely blue eyes blinked back sudden tears.

“A man I knew and trusted hurt me too in my own house a few years ago. He raped me with his fist,” I said. The girl sat up straight, alert. “I taught him and his wife how to speak English. But he still hurt me so bad. My body healed. Still working on the heart though.” She looked at me. The maturity of her obvious comprehension made me want to kill her stepfather.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I said. It wasn’t your fault either.”

The girl trembled. Tears traced her cheeks. “He told me it was,” she said, looking down at the floor.

“Sweetheart, bad people who hurt others often say that their victim made them do it. You did nothing wrong. You didn’t harm him. He hurt you, body and soul. He’s a very bad man. My rapist told me that ‘I wanted him to do it.’” I said.

“He told me the same thing,” she said, weeping at last.

“He’s wrong. And he’s bad. You know that deep inside,” I said quietly.

“Yes,” she responded.

“Want to know what I see when I look at you?” I asked.

She looked up. “Yes.”

“My grandfather told me, when I was nine like you, that I would become ‘the finest lady in all of Boston.’ Every time really bad stuff hurt me at home, especially when my brother beat me up, or my mother screamed and cried, my grandfather told me about becoming the finest lady in Boston.

She looked in my eyes for the first time. “I asked how knew this. He said, ‘I’m an old man, I know people. I look at your face and see you’ll be this lady.’ He made me believe that he understood my suffering, and those bad times would end and I’d be OK one day. I still believe him, and I don’t even live in Boston anymore!” I said. She laughed, a child blessed by my grandfather’s memory.

“I know that one day you’ll become the finest lady of someplace too. I’m not an old lady, but I know people. Will you keep this locked in a special part of your heart that no one else can touch? I asked.

“Yes,” she said wiping her face with a tissue.

“Hi, Mom,” she said to a pretty blond woman who came into the room. I smiled at her mom and nodded. She had to go.

“May I hug you?” I asked. Before touching children or women in the shelter, every staffer had to ask for permission to do so,to give respect and choices, things rare in broken lives.

“Yes,” she said, and wrapped her arms around my waist, hugging me before I could put my arms out to her.

 Small miracles happen quickly in a shelter.

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War Planes Flying over Small Children; I Pray for Peace for All

September 16, 2008 · Filed under Boston, Children affected by war, Cold War, Mattapan, Memoir, Squadrons, baby boomers, childhood · Tagged , , , , ,

When I was a very small girl, several times a day for months huge squadrons of U.S. military planes flew over my house. I was always in my bedroom when they woke me quite early in the morning or late at night. Some days they came both morning and night. The planes also came during the day as I played outside.

My Boston wood triple-decker house in Mattapan had always felt safe, especially my back bedroom. It was filled with dolls, toys and heavy soft quilts. The windows framed the narrow driveway, old wood garages and huge mud puddle that was my view since the day my parents brought me home as a newborn. But when the planes came, the huge pink cabbage roses on the wallpaper of my room became shadows of ogres. When the planes came in the middle of the day and darkened the sky it was scary, but not like when they woke me suddenly. A little girl was no match for what seemed like millions of planes that seemed to never stop.

One night as I was falling asleep the dreaded clamor started in the distance. I stiffened as it grow louder and closer. Then the squadrons were over my house. I felt deep vibrations from the sky in my small body and cried in terror, “Mommy! Mommy! Make them stop the noise! Mommy! Mommy!” It felt like a long time for my mother to come to the back of the house to me; a minute was an eternity as I trembled.

She stood by my bed and said, “Lila, they’ll go away soon.” But the droning and thunder grew louder as a second squadron flew over us. It was impossible for my mother to comfort her hysterical child. I cried and screamed and although she hugged me, the noise pierced her arms around me. There was no safe place.

Unlike all the other times, my mother relaxed as she let go of me and said, “I’ll call the operator on the phone right now and tell her to make the planes go away.” Then she smiled, I remember. It was her epiphany, I see in retrospect. She had taught me how to dial that precious zero to reach help in an emergency.

I stopped crying as I watched her lift the old heavy black receiver on the table just outside my door, Then she spun the rotary dial all the way to the end and back again. “Hello? Operator?” she said. “My little daughter is very frightened by the planes. Please make them go away. You will? Thank you very much.” The noise stopped and I went to sleep.

After that, my mother made many calls to the “operator” for me. Looking back, I see that she spoke slowly to the phone and always finished in the time it took for the squadrons to pass. After a while I was less fearful when the planes came and just asked my mother to “call the operator.” No doubt she had her finger on the off button as she spoke. I really did think that she got the operator to stop the planes for me.

I pray now that all those brave pilots went and came safely. They were my best friends, although I couldn’t comprehend it then. The U.S. Air Force flew military exercises during the Cold War from bases in the New England region which included my back bedroom.

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Russian Jews, Papa, and I

September 10, 2008 · Filed under ESL, Memoir, New Americans, Refugees, Russian Jews, family · Tagged , , ,

At the age of thirteen, my grandfather, Jacob Shapiro, the oldest of nine children, had to leave his poor village in Lithuania to escape conscription of Jewish children into the army. He traveled alone in steerage to South Africa where he worked as a laborer for distant cousins until he was seventeen. Then he traveled in steerage, again alone, across the Atlantic Ocean to America where my Papa worked as a bricklayer. Over many years, one by one he brought his younger brothers and sisters to safety here when they were old enough to come.

My Papa’s own parents, my beloved great grandparents Avraham and Chaya Shapiro, refused to leave until the last of their children escaped Eastern Europe. But after their last child left, Avraham and Chaya were captured by anti-semites in a pogrom in the 1920’s. They died from exposure on a train bound for Siberia. Their bodies were thrown off the train into a field. A letter from shtetl neighbors who survived the journey was sent to the family in America to tell what had happened. My mother told me that as her father heard this letter read, Papa ripped his shirt in mourning and wept.

My Papa lived to be ninety-one years old. As a little girl, it was my pride and pleasure to teach him to read and write English. Even now, as an adult with hindsight and objectivity, I can still say that he was the finest man I have ever known. He was a great teacher of “life” for me. 

Years later I became a volunteer English as a Second Language teacher to a new wave of refugees. They were the Russian Jewish “refusenicks” from the former Soviet Union, as well as people of many religions from other communist controlled East European countries. I didn’t teach grammar or punctuation. That was left to their morning formal class instructors. My classes were English immersion seminars. We sat in a circle and practiced their new English skills week after week, year after year. Between 1988 and 1996, I had the privilege of teaching, and being taught by, more than eight hundred refugees. 

In August 1990, I brought in candy and drinks to celebrate the first year of this endeavor. By that time more than one hundred adults and I had sat together in circles of chairs while outside the classroom the world swirled in historic events. The Berlin Wall came down, Bush and Gorbachev met on stormy seas off Malta, and Russian Jews began an exodus to Israel, America, and religious freedom in biblical numbers. The Cold War ended. Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbachev held hands in Washington D.C. like former school chums as the last decade of the old millennium began. People in the USSR began to speak and write freely for the first time since the Russian revolution. Drug lords continued to prosper and American soldiers blasted Noriega out of hiding in Panama with rock music. The earth under San Francisco trembled in a major quake. Mickey Mouse turned sixty and Donald Duck turned fifty without a wrinkle. And the earth spun in space while mankind caused the ozone layer to get thinner and the sun’s rays stronger until protective suntan lotion became the newest health trend to follow oat bran. 

But we were safe, my fellow passengers on this planet and I, in our Writing/Conversation classes. The form of each class was hard work, but the substance was love and inspiration. There was no government, but there was peace and a unique prosperity of spirit. There were no contests, yet everyone won. We were all strangers, yet we knew each other because of our human bond.

Some had difficulty speaking, but they were understood and honored for striving. And though these refugees had problems and sadness, they laughed often, and in English. Those classes were points in time during the difficult process of resettlement. Each person had a unique voice and point of view; unlike life under communism, individuality was cherished. The humanity of each was rediscovered in a new land after being hidden since birth from their former governments. 

My students taught me about “life” the way my Papa had taught me about life, and I, and others, taught them more than just English; the correct word was acculturation. Learning to adapt to a new country, even to freedom, was difficult. In return, my students taught me about courage, hope, and how to go living when much is either lost or left behind. They taught me by example how to struggle with dignity and endure disappointments. And the New Americans learned that they could read, write, speak, understand, and even dream in the language of their new home.

Many had thought it would be impossible; it was not. Together we worked and took our small, but important places as footnotes in history. And I hope that they all did truly live “happily ever after.”

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Sesame Street and French Cooking

September 8, 2008 · Filed under Julia Child, Memoir, baby boomers · Tagged , , , ,

Julia Child was my “Big Bird” of French cooking. Just like her counterpart who lives on Sesame Street, Julia was tall, robust, and cheerful. Big Bird pranced down Sesame Street daily, dispensing wisdom to children. Julia’s route was from sink to stove to oven on the PBS kitchen set of “The French Chef.” 

 

In her constant apron, she worked magic and turned dull ingredients into a chocolate bombe, or animal entrails into eight different pates encased together in pastry crust. She diced onions at the speed of sound with her lethal chef knives, and whacked a dead chicken in half without flinching. “Now here we have a beautiful young pullet. Look at how lovely the flesh is!” she proclaimed from the TV that barely boxed her in. Then Julia axed that carcass as she sweated under the hot studio lights. She always made a mess and rarely paused to wipe a spill. The wonders of television rendered it all clean by the next scene.

 

Julia’s no nonsense calm during culinary disasters, and bouts of joy when a soufflé rose, comforted me. She had the temperament of the good and solid farm women in old TV westerns. She was patient with the cooking heathen I was, and I grew up to become one of millions who loved her. Julia Child took my hand through the years, like Big Bird held children’s hands, and led me through a half hour of peace every week. The preparation of a seven page recipe looked easy. She never flaunted her talents. She shared them.

 

I was always sad when she took her prepared delights to a fake dining room because that meant the show was over. I wanted to climb into the TV and sit with her then. I didn’t know then that Julia Child was dangerous too. She sautéed, creamed, and sauced her way into my heart without warning that it could be less than healthy.

 

“Bon appetit!” she chirped, raising a crystal wine glass as cheerful eating music played and the picture faded. 

 

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Love in a Cage…Waiting

September 4, 2008 · Filed under Memoir, baby boomers, pet adoption, shelter dogs · Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

I am privileged to be owned by formerly homeless dogs, both now and in the past. At eighteen, I found a stray puppy of no particular breed. On a mid winter twilight just after a snowstorm, I took a less traveled route home from the drugstore after buying my father his evening newspaper. In the middle of the barely shoveled sidewalk stood a puppy that looked like a fox that mysteriously seemed to be waiting for me. I bent down to pat her, and she let me. There were no tags on her red collar and she was cold. I had always wanted a dog named Jeff, but my mother refused to let me have any pet except parakeets and simple fish. 

“Hi Jeff,” I said to the puppy and tapped my coat for her to follow. She did and I was very happy. Even my mother liked her after a search for her owners found nothing, and tales on the street the next day where I found her told about a puppy being thrown out of a passing car. Jeff turned out to be a female, but the name stayed. So did she until her 14th birthday. By then I was married and had young children. We buried her in a solemn ceremony in the back yard. For years after I stood at her grave and cried when no one was looking. It was a perfect match, a perfect adoption. In the saddest of times, Jeff comforted me. In the happiest times she jumped like a kangaroo in shared glee. She was a gift to three generations of my family. Even my grandfather, who thought that dogs were “dirty” grew to love her. When he died, Jeff licked away my tears. 

Weeks after Jeff died, I felt that universal “hole in my heart,” followed by a sudden feeling that I “must” get to the Animal Rescue League of Boston.

I didn’t know why, but it felt like an emergency as I drove there and rushed in. Walking between the rows of caged dogs that waited for either a home or execution, I saw a truly funny looking mixed breed pup, all white with a brown eye patch. He looked so wise and sad that it startled me. The attendant opened the cage, and the dog sprang into my arms. I was adopted. He looked like the dog in “Lady and the Tramp,” and I said, “Hi Tramp.”

I took him home. The next day he woke up coughing and very ill. The vet said, “He has puppy bronchitis. If you didn’t adopt him yesterday, the shelter would have destroyed him today.” Antibiotics, a vaporizer, soft blankets and love helped him recover. He lived to be fifteen years old. I held him as the vet ended his suffering and wept.

A few weeks later my youngest daughter, Sara, who was born after Tramp adopted me, cried, “Mommy, we are dogless!” Another shelter trip while Sara was in school, and Brownie the sweet mutt adopted me. She’s 13 now, fifty pounds, a silk black coat, white vest, golden trim, one white paw, and full of vitality.

When Brownie was 4, I was newly divorced, and Sara and I were sad. Her older sister was married, and her older brother was at graduate school. To soothe ourselves, each week we visited one of the many shelters near us to play with the dogs. 

Late one December afternoon, a gentle gold lab and beagle mix puppy sat in her cage looking downward and wretched. We walked by, stopped, then stepped back. Hannah looked up and, with one look, adopted us with her eyes. Sara held her in the back seat as we drove home. It felt so good. 

Years of days after that have been sweeter because of Brownie and Hannah, even the bad days, sad days, sick days, angry days, heart breaking days. Brownie was a stray and was brought to the shelter after the legal ten days at the dog pound. Unknown owners gave up Hannah and took a risk because she would have been destroyed if not adopted. 

Shelters are filled with wonderful dogs and cats. Animals that may be dangerous are not put up for adoption. Brownie and Hannah are safe, but countless other dogs (and cats) languish in shelters, cramped in cages with little social contact, waiting for either a forever home or euthanasia. Other animals are fortunate enough to be in no-kill shelters. Some are superb, like Best Friends in southern Utah (bestfriends.org). Others are adequate or minimal. Human volunteers bless all shelters. But they can only visit.

At night the lights go out and these social, feeling, potential blessings to humans are alone and waiting. Unfortunately, even some no-kill shelters must destroy dogs and cats to make room for the endless flow of new ones. Fortunately, there are new programs between shelters, and dedicated volunteers transport the animals to less crowded facilities to save lives (Humane Society of the United States). Still, thousands are killed. Some of the dead are adult dogs, trained and appreciative, who would have been loving companions. All were destroyed for one reason or another as they waited for someone to come to take them home. 

Sometimes I think it may be a pleasure to add a third dog to the house. If that day comes, the new one will be only from a shelter, or from a rescue organization for specific breeds (petfinder.com is an excellent source). On one of our shelter visiting trips, Sara and I wanted to buy the silly poster in the waiting area of the MSPCA, but none were for sale. It showed a bright-eyed dog that clearly had the genes of many breeds. The caption: “Can’t decide what kind of dog to get? Why not get them all and adopt me!” Oh yes, I surely will!

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One Scary Night During an Epidemic

September 2, 2008 · Filed under Dr. Eli Shapiro, Memoir, childhood, family, housecalls, polio · Tagged , ,

“Mommy! Mommy! Maaaaaaaaaaa!” I cry out in the night. Where is my mother? My legs hurt so badly. The light on my ceiling clicks on. I see the big pink roses on my wallpaper. My little toy dog, Brownie, is too far away on the maple dresser. I want him. “Mommy, please give me brownie,” I ask. She does. The soft quilt is on the floor. I don’t want it. It’s too hot. My old goose feather pillow is flattened and wet from my sweat. The white sheer curtains billow in the cool night breeze from the dark city backyard. My mommy is beside me in her long nightgown. I am safe.

“What’s wrong? Why are you crying and screaming?” mommy asks. She looks at me like she knows something that I don’t know. I’ve seen that look before. This time it scares me. She puts her palm on my forehead. “You’re on fire,” she says. “Does your throat hurt? Your ears? You’re tummy?” she asks. I’m very small; those are too many questions to answer.

“My legs hurt so bad! There’s big pains in them. Please don’t call Uncle Eli. He’s gonna give me a needle,” I tell her between sobs. Mommy rubs my legs and stretches one. “Oooow,” I screech and push her away. I’m really a big girl. But I can’t stop crying. My mommy’s face looks scared like when I fall down and before she sees that I’m okay. She’s leaving my room. “Where are you going? Don’t leave me! Come back!”

She turns and says, “I’m calling Uncle Eli. He’ll come right over. I want my brother to look at you. He’s a wonderful doctor and he’ll make you all better. A little girl with such sore legs shouldn’t wait till morning to be examined.”

I hear mommy talking on the hall telephone in her voice for grownups. “Mommy,” I shout to her, “Tell him I don’t want a needle!” She tells him. I hear the phone hang up, then water running in the bathroom sink. Mommy brings in a wet towel and gently wipes my face and shoulders with it. It feels so cool, so good. I love my mommy. She pushes the hair off my forehead. Daddy is still asleep. The house is quiet. Love is stronger than pain.

The doorbell rings. Mommy runs to the front of the house and opens the door. Uncle Eli rushes in carrying his mysterious black doctor’s bag. He has trousers on over his pajama pants. His striped pajama top looks silly too. He’s so tall. Mommy looks scared again as he sits on the bed next to me, making the mattress squish down under him. “Look at those beautiful rosy cheeks,” he admires me. “Does it hurt here?” he asks as he presses my tummy. I shake my head no. “Here? Here? There?” Nothing hurts there. He does doctor things to my neck and arms and head and back and chest, and he looks in my eyes and ears and mouth with a light.

“How does this feel?” he asks, slowly bending my legs. I scream from the pain. I can’t stop. My mommy starts to cry. I’m sorry I make her cry. I like when she’s happy. Uncle Eli sits me up. I cry louder and a stream from my nose runs into my mouth and makes me choke. He taps my knees with a little hammer. “Now I want to see you walk. I must see you walk,” Uncle Eli commands me. I walk. I walk across the room and back and pick up Brownie on my bed. Everything feels better when I walk. He listens to my chest and taps my knees again.

I look up at my Uncle Eli’s wonderful big face. There are tears behind his glasses. Mommy cries out, “What is it Eli? What is it?”

“It’s not polio, Sally. It’s not polio,” he tells her as he hugs me hard. “It’s just an ordinary virus and growing pains in her legs.”

 

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A True Story: Mothers and Dogs 1975

September 2, 2008 · Filed under Beacon Street, Memoir, autumn, baby boomers, childhood, dogs, family, motherhood, mourning, parks · Tagged , , , , ,

At twilight I sat alone on the ground in the immense park, pulling my mother’s camel hair coat tightly around myself to keep warm. I looked around. The colored leaves torn by the wind from their branches were beautiful in death as the wind carried them to the ground. I had no impulse to crunch through the leaves like I did before that autumn after my mother died.

I loved this park. It was a block away from busy Beacon Street where trolley tracks carried the outside world to and from nearby downtown Boston. The apartment buildings and constant traffic were hidden by the trees. It was an oasis of peace and I came here often. I was a twenty year old bride who read Redbook Magazine novellas on the grass while my new cookbook dinners simmered on the stove in our nearby apartment. I was a bright-eyed expectant new mother who dreamily watched nameless children play. Then I was a toddler’s mom with watchful eyes and cookies for my daughter as we both played in the sandbox and on the swings, Often I was a poet in search of the perfect tree to sit under and cut a gem of words from a raw diamond of inspiration. Now I was a mourner. My mother had died when I was five months pregnant with my son.

A huge black dog appeared at the far entrance. He paused, then slowly lumbered towards me. “I must be dreaming,” I whispered as the dog came closer. He stopped a few feet from me and stood still as if inviting inspection. Such a comic creature, I thought. He was panting and toothless, except for two yellowed front teeth. Long, thick, white dog drool hung from his enormous red tongue.

Suddenly a fit of itching seized him and he attacked himself with all four paws scratching at once. Then, just as suddenly, he stopped and arranged his face into a satisfied dog grin. I laughed.

The gentle beast came closer, sat down, and gracelessly settled his matted bulk next to me, leaning hard against my side. Repulsed by his obvious infestation of fleas, but deeply touched by his eagerness for company, I patted his huge head and remembered.

My much loved stuffed dog, Brownie, was my comforter, confidante, and sleep partner when I was a little girl. Too often his soft, cinnamon fur was wet from my tears. My home was a sad one to grow up in. When I was seven, I was afraid to go to school for months, magically fearing my chronically ill mother would get worse and die if I left her. My mother wept each time her second grader stayed home. “You’re going to ruin you whole life if you don’t go to school,” she cried. I had no words for my feelings then and stood firm in my resolve to stay home and ruin my life to save my mommy. Bedecked in her floral housedress and apron, she was helpless against her daughter’s will. But one morning I realized that Brownie would be home to watch over mommy. I went to school every day after that.

Time and wear caused Brownie’s hind leg to fall off, and holes that released his sawdust guts appeared on his body. I still loved him.  One day he wasn’t there anymore. I searched and searched behind and under everything, but never found him. I sensed he had been thrown away, though my mother pleaded innocent. I longed for him years after that, and felt long into my adulthood, that childhood sense that Brownie longed for me too.

The huge dog licked my hand in a grand slurp of passion and gazed at me, bringing me back to the present. He let me stare back into his eyes, a rare thing for a dog to do. “Brownie?” I asked. He didn’t respond. I felt foolish and patted his head and neck. Gray was mixed in with his dark fur. The stranger poked his incredibly big wet nose under my arm and nuzzled. We sat that way for a long time as the sky grew darker.

There was no bond beyond the moment to keep him there, I thought as the dog stood up, shook himself off, walked a few steps away, stopped to turn and look back, then walked toward the street. “Wait boy!” I yelled getting up to catch him, study his many tags, worried that he was a lost dog. He kept on going and left the park with the confidence of a dog who knew his way.  The dog was not lost, I thought, I was, and slowly walked home to my four year old daughter and infant son.

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Doctor, Hero – 2003

August 31, 2008 · Filed under Army Doctor, Boston Medical Center, Dr. Eli Shapiro, Memoir, The Greatest Generation, World War 2, classical music composing, family, heroism · Tagged , , , , ,

The first time I learned that my Uncle Eli had gone ashore during the Normandy invasion during World War Two was on his ninetieth birthday, the day of his funeral. He was a newly minted medical doctor then, a Captain in the U.S. Army. Since my childhood, I heard stories about his wartime experiences, but rarely from him, except for a few amusing anecdotes. Perhaps after the first telling before I was born, his modesty silenced him. My mother, his sister, told me his stories. The cherished letters and postcards, clearly censured with black marks that he sent home told little except that he “was fine and sent his love.”

When I was a teenager, my Uncle Eli broke his silence to reassure me about the human immune system. I was afraid of catching some illness, one of many I feared then, adolescent angst displaced into intermittent hypochondria. “In France I was in charge of ‘hepatitis tents’ filled with hundreds of soldiers. They were sick and yellow, coughing everywhere and their sheets soiled with body fluids! Did I catch hepatitis? No. And my constant exposure put my immune system into high gear and helped me develop antibodies to it.” His medical lecture calmed and reassured me.

My Uncle Eli practiced medicine and taught at Boston University Medical Center forever, it seemed, until a year before he died. Many fine specialists in Boston were trained by him through those years, and he was awarded a “Lifetime Achievement Award” at their gala just before he was diagnosed with liver cancer. This cancer likely resulted from exposure in the hepatitis tents, harming him not until the next century.

In the funeral chapel, the rabbi continued, “Dr. Shapiro was part of the Normandy invasion that helped win the war. Doctors were among the last to land to tend the dying and wounded.” I smiled through my grief; growing up, I had always thought he appeared in France by magic and never questioned it.

My uncle was an old fashioned doctor who made house calls. I grew up in the Boston neighborhood where his enormous patient load lived. Almost very day, and some nights for years, he appeared at my house for a food refueling, fast nap, or to use the phone. When I was seven, I made him “dessert” for his lunch. While he napped after a night of emergency house calls, I mixed flour and water to make dough, shaped it into a fluted pie crust, and my mother baked it. It was possibly harder than a rock, but looked beautiful to my second grade eyes. “That’s the most wonderful pie crust I’ve ever seen!” Uncle Eli proclaimed as I formally presented it to him. “Shall I take it home?” he asked. I told him I wanted to see how he liked it. With difficulty he broke a piece off and ate it. Sitting in front of his casket, I remembered him say as he labored to chew, “Mmmmmmm! This tastes absolutely delicious! You really made this by yourself?” He ate the whole thing in front of me! I felt like a queen.

I sat by his bedside at the end of his life. We talked for hours at each visit; he didn’t want me to leave and I didn’t want to go. Often my mother had told me about the day Uncle Eli came back from the war. “My grandmother died of old age when my brother was in Europe. We didn’t tell him. He was in danger and he loved her so much. We worried that knowing would make him lose concentration and he’d get hurt.  Every letter he wrote asked, ‘How is my Bubbie?’ We answered she was fine. When he came home from the war, the first thing he asked was, ‘Where’s my Bubbie?’ We told him she died two years earlier.”

 I asked Uncle Eli about this for the first time. He said simply, “My heart was broken.” I reminded him that I was named after her. “Yes. She was a beautiful, wise, kind woman. You’re just like her.” As he lay dying, my uncle gave a gift to me.

My uncle had been assigned to a field hospital in France. The building was a deserted large stone school. Suddenly they got a radioed warning that German troops were advancing towards his hospital and just hours away. All doctors, staff, and injured and sick soldiers were ordered to evacuate. Those too sick to be moved were ordered to stay behind and become prisoners of war so they would not slow down the more able. Uncle Eli defied orders and refused to leave the sickest without a doctor; there were other doctors to take care of the evacuated soldiers.

The American military could have forced him to leave, and the Germans could have killed him if he stayed. He convinced his superiors that if the sickest were captured, they would surely need their doctor. There was no time to argue. My uncle helped load patients on a convoy of trucks that transported them from the advancing Germans. He was left with few medical supplies and many critically wounded soldiers.

The trucks reached the train and all got aboard. The Germans never got to the field hospital; they changed direction suddenly for unknown reasons. Uncle Eli kept the men alive for days until new American soldiers arrived with more medical supplies and food and guarded the hospital while he continued to heal his men. The train that carried the soldiers and staff away from harm was bombed by the Germans and all perished. Each person who remained in my uncle’s care survived because of his skills as a physician even without proper medical supplies, and his humanity and heroism.

I asked him about this family legend during one of my visits to his bedside. Was it true? “I couldn’t leave those poor souls! And they really would have needed a doctor if they ended up in a German prisoner of war camp,” he said and looked away. I couldn’t see the cancer, only a tall, brilliant, gentle spirit who had devoted his life to medicine.

 My Aunt Barbara appeared in the bedroom doorway. “Eli,” she said, “Did you tell Lila that every one of those soldiers lived to return to America, married, had families, and every Christmas sent you pictures and updates of their lives, and the future lives, you saved?” She smiled at me. I smiled at him.

The rabbi finished the prayer of mourning as the pall bearers stood beside the coffin. Then I heard my Uncle Eli playing his grand piano softly. It was haunting, as if he had suddenly come alive. “What you hear is a recording of Dr. Shapiro playing classical music and his own compositions.” the rabbi said. It was a sweet goodbye, so like my uncle, who always comforted those in pain with his gentle manner.

 

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The Little Bird

August 31, 2008 · Filed under Memoir · Tagged , , , , , ,

Late on a spring afternoon, my grandfather shouted from the outside back hall, “Lila, come quick!”

“Papa, what’s that?” I asked. He cupped a white handkerchief in his bricklayer hand and pulled back a corner of it. A wet brown baby bird lay there. “Where did you find this?”

“Maybe I didn’t do right,” he said in his old country accented English. “It vas on the ground. I thought it vas dead. So I threw vasser on it to be sure, and it voke up.” I was eighteen years old then, and adored my grandfather; to me, he never did the wrong thing even when he did. He was the finest man, one who would rather harm himself than hurt another person or the tiniest animal. He was in his eighties then, yet still strong from years of being a master brick mason. The baby sparrow appeared as innocent as he was to me.

“It’s ok Papa, “I reassured him and took the treasure from his hands. “You did the best you could.”

“Ven I saw it vas alive, I brought to you. Maybe a cat vould eat it. The nest in the tree it fell from is too high up for my ladder,” he explained. That would have been dangerous for a man his age, especially the delicate ballet necessary to place the fledgling into a nest on narrow branches. I loved his work ladder, spotted with concrete. Summer days when the huge impression in the middle of our broken concrete back yard wasn’t filled with a pond of rain water, he hoisted that ladder against the garage, and climbed up carrying buckets of water to fill pans for the birds, mostly city pigeons and sparrows, away from the cats.

Weary, Papa went upstairs to his flat in our Boston wood triple-decker house. “Maaaaa!” I yelled, “Look what Papa found!” I waited in the back hall, afraid to bring unknown bird germs into the house. My mother came slowly, painfully. Severe arthritis, and the lasting affects of rheumatic fever on her heart since she was twelve, were her constant companions. She looked at the bit of life I held in Papa’s handkerchief and frowned. “Can you find me a small box for the bird?” I asked. She said nothing and found a small cardboard box.

I asked my mother what to feed it. “I don’t know, Lila. The Audubon people will know,” she answered as she settled onto her kitchen chair and rested her head in her hands at the table. I called. The Audubon lady yelled at me for disturbing nature, said the bird would die, and to feed it canned dog food every hour. Fortunately, I had a dog.

That night I slept in the back hall beside the bird and fed it every hour. Before dawn, I went in to use the bathroom. My mother sat wide awake at the kitchen table, still in her clothes and apron. “Mom, why are you up so late?”

“I’m not going to let a pretty young girl be alone in the back hall all night. It’s doesn’t lock.” she said.

The bird peeped after the sun came up. I was so happy. My mother was too. I let my dog, Jeffy, a sweet mutt who looked like a fox, sniff the box. The wild scent didn’t bring out the beast in her; she sat down and graciously raised her paw at that speck of life, uncertain what to do.

I set the alarm clock for the next hourly feeding and finally lay on my bed. When it rang, I scooped out a teaspoon of dog food and went to the back hall. The bird was dead.

My mother gave me her nicest scarf to use as a shroud. Papa came down in time for the small ceremony, but I wanted to bury it alone. My mother watched from the kitchen window overhead as I dug a hole in the tiny patch of city dirt and buried the bird. Weeping, I whispered a eulogy and went inside. My mother’s eyes were red from crying too and she comforted me.

 

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