Can an oak tree smile?

My parents built their home on a wooded hillside, in the newly-founded town of Tivon (House of Nature).  They placed the house under the shade of an old oak tree which they loved and respected.  For my brother Gini and me, the tree was a dear childhood friend, yet as we matured, it slowly receded from our lives.  After my parents’ death, Gini moved into the house, and family life shifted away from the tree, and to the air-conditioned living room.  The old oak became an unobserved presence.  On my infrequent visits to Tivon, I would walk beside it without taking notice.  Until a story told by a neighbor prompted me to visit my giant friend.

I approached the tree, and to my surprise, despite the many years that passed, it still boasted the same healthy canopy that I held in my memories. Irrationally, I expected the tree to decline in parallel to my own aging body.  I walked around it, and casually rested my hand on its thick trunk.  An oak tree is not pleasant to the touch.  The deeply corrugated bark is hard, and the ridges are as sharp as a knife.  Yet as I touched the rough surface, childhood memories flooded my consciousness.  Usually, I need Gini to help me recreate past events.  Now, I could clearly see myself as a young boy, leaning my arms against the tree trunk.  I could sense the tough bark biting into my skin while, with my eyes tightly shut, I was loudly counting to ten.  The other kids were scrambling to find a hiding spot.  I felt the anticipation of the hunt as I set out to search for my concealed friends.

If trees like company, summer was the oak’s best season.   Friends would come over, and the lawn under its wide protective shade became the stage for our imagination.  The tree itself was an active participant in our games.  We played Hide and Seek, Cowboys and Indians, and many other adventures of our own invention.  During the summer our relatives would come to Tivon to seek refuge from the heat and humidity of Tel Aviv.  Suddenly, my stomach cramped with guilt as I remembered my cousin Neta, a girl my age.  It was here on this lawn that, in a moment of childish anger, I punched her in the stomach.  I was shocked as she doubled-over with pain.  Eventually, she stopped crying, and we resumed our play, but the sensation in my gut persisted for several days.  Summer must have been the setting for my first SMB experience.  As told by Pnina, our next door neighbor, in a voice that was an intriguing mixture of reproach and delight, Gini and I tied her to the tree and turned the sprinkler on.  The tree had company all day long.  On summer evenings, when the house was still too hot for comfort, my mother would set up a table under a bare bulb which hung from a horizontal branch.  Insects of all shapes gathered around that bulb, while my father carefully diced vegetables, ripened to perfection in his garden.  He would then add salt and oil to prepare the salad we all craved.

I looked up and recalled the dozens, maybe hundreds of times I climbed this tree.  I climbed it for thrill, for solitude, but mainly, to live my dream of becoming a pilot.  I climbed high, to where the branches were barely thick enough to support my weight.  There, a forking branch provided a comfortable seat, two extrusions acted as foot pedals, and as if by design, a vertical branch extended between my thighs to serve as a control stick.  With blue sky directly above, the ground, obscured by the foliage below, and a deep valley in front, I was flying.  The breeze swayed the thin branches in exact response to my aileron commands as I engaged a German Messerschmitt in a fierce dogfight.  In later years, I upgraded from the Spitfire into the Mystere jet, and the arena moved from the skies over Britain to the Sinai.  I did not become an air force pilot, and the tree would remain unclimbed, until it was discovered by my physically-gifted son Ofer.  From an early age, to the horror of my father, he would scramble effortlessly up the tree, and disappear from sight.  Worse still, he would come down swinging Tarzan-style from limb to limb.  Inevitably, he grew up, and the tree remained alone again.

Now, fifty years later, neuro-muscular synapses re-formed, and I could feel my body tensing in sync with the movements required to climb the tree.  Hop, pull up, bare foot there, twist, swing, and reaching the first fork, take a rest.  After the difficult first stage, it was only a matter of a careful ladder-like climb to the top.  My body craved to climb the tree, yet the thin skin on my hands and feet, cringed at the thought of scraping against the rough bark.  I also noticed that the lowest horizontal branch, which served as the launching point for the climb, was missing.  I suspect that my father sawed it off, in a futile attempt to deter his agile grandson from endangering his life.  I did not climb.  Instead, I told my story to Yair, Gini’s son.  He was energized, and being taller and younger, he promptly made his way up.

From above, Yair smiled triumphantly, and I could swear that the oak tree was smiling too.

Karma

The residents of the remote village of Flatgrass, lived in peace and harmony.  When they met, they would greet each other with a smile.

“Good morning Mr. Baker.”  The greeter would say.

“Good morning, Mrs. Blacksmith.  What a nice day.”  would be the equally friendly reply.

The village carpenter was a kind and peaceful man.  After lunch, he would sit on his front porch, greet those passing by, and exchange with them a few words about current events.  One day, he felt slightly dejected.  Maybe the carved cabinet he was working on, was not coming out as well as he expected, and maybe he had a glass of wine too many.  In any case, he was too absorbed in himself when the grocer passed by.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Carpenter.” the grocer repeated the greeting, in a louder voice and a bigger smile.

“Humph” answered the carpenter, without looking up.

The grocer walked on, but his peace of mind was disturbed.

‘What did I do to deserve that kind of treatment?’ he thought, growing even more indignant as he dwelt on the incident.

‘What makes him think he is superior to me?’ 

He then remembered his childhood.  How even then, the carpenter and his friends would make fun of him for being so clumsy.

It is with this negative frame of mind that the grocer returned home.  Dinner was ready, and his children were waiting for him, but he could only find fault with whatever he saw.  He sat down without a greeting, tasted the food, and scrunched his face.

“Where did you learn to cook?” he asked his wife harshly.

She didn’t answer, yet he continued,

“Look at this house, it’s filthy.  What do you do all day when I am gone?”

That night, his wife would not share his bed, and the grocer’s mood did not improve.  With time, his negativity worsened, and he would often let his anger out on the children.  After weeks and months of this dark, and sometimes violent, behavior, Mrs. Grocer took the children, and left the village.

Life is hard for a single mother in the city.  She tried to get work, but jobs were hard to find.  There were nights when they went to sleep hungry.  It was hard for her to see the children suffering, and to feed them, she would steal food from the market stalls.  Eventually, she was caught, and sent to prison.  The children were put in custody of the state.

The oldest boy was placed in a foster home under the care of a school teacher and his wife.  The couple believed that only strict discipline would allow the boy to overcome his lowly upbringing.  To escape this harsh environment, the boy would spend all his free time reading the books in the teacher library.  The books, despite the school teacher’s intentions, developed in the boy a hate for the regime, and a love of the “people”.  On his own at last, he gathered around him like-minded friends, and planned the revolution.  The revolutionaries grew in strength and numbers, and after bitter fighting, the old regime collapsed.  The grocer’s son became “Our beloved brother”.  He sent secret agents far and wide to search for counter-revolutionaries.  In Flatgrass, the agent insisted on finding lovers of the old regime.  Eventually he was told that the carpenter’s son was a good friend of the former mayor.  The carpenter’s son was taken away, and was never heard-from again.

The old carpenter still sits on his porch in the afternoon, but these days, the villagers no longer greet each other with a smile.