Grandpa's Beard Has Disappeared

By Diana Levine

A special man in my life had a beard. One day it was gone. This inspired me to write the poem Grandpa's Beard Has Disappeared. This in turn grew into this collection of stories and poems for children. All are biographic or autobiographic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 17, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465329615

Diana Levine

Diana Levine writing as Bubbe Levine has been a writer since 1981. She was a newspaper columnist before she began selling stories and poems to magazines. She has written five books for children before writing this, her sixth. Another book of children’s stories is a work in progress at this time. Bubbe Levine was a teacher before becoming a published author. She is a widow with two sons, eleven grandchildren and one great-granddaughter. She lives in New York State.

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Grandpa’s Beard

Has Disappeared

Diana Levine

Copyright © 2008 by Diana Levine.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

PART I

PATTERNING OUR LIVES

THE TRAVELING SPOON

MAMA’S BEDSTOCKINGS

THE TOY SHELF

THAT SHAWL

ADAM’S COUSIN

MY SOCKS WER HELD CAPTIVE

THE LITTLE BLUE CAR THAT ALMOST RAN AWAY

GRANDMA WENT TO CAMP

ALMOST BROTHERS

MA, I DON’T WANNA GO

NATANYA IN NETANYA

PART II

MALKA, THE LITTLE SABBATH QUEEN

HAVDALAH

USHERING OUT THE QUEEN

PEARS FOR SELICHOT

ADAM AT THE LAKE

EATING UNDER THE STARS

RACHEL DANCED WITH THE TORAH

ASHLEY’S DREYDL

YENTA THE CHANUKAH DREYDL

A HOLIDAY FOR PICNICS

A SEDER FOR TU B’SHEVAT?

HAMANTOSCHIN FOR HALLOWEEN

WHO FOUND THE AFIKOMEN?

TORAH’S BIRTHDAY

PART III

GRANDPARENTS DAY

THANKSGIVING IS

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

A GREAT MIRACLE HAPPENED

MY MAGIC PLANT

A PIDYON HA-BEN FOR ADAM

WOODSTOCK BAR MITZVAH(a true story)

JACOB’S FIRST HAIRCUT

WHAT DOES TWO TIMES THREE EQUAL?

ZEYDAH’S BAR MITZVAH

PART IV

THE SNAKE THAT GOT AWAY

THE BIRD FAMILY IN MY OVERHANG

CAT’S IN THE DOG HOUSE

COMPUTER CAT

HOOP, THE CIRCUS DOG

J.P. CAT

KARA SAVES THE DAY

A DEER NAMED VELVET

LOVE’S LOST

PART V

THE DANCING WAVES

A TRIP TO NOWHERE

THE WINTER SEA

ADAM AT THE SHORE

BEACH DOG

SEAGULL ON THE BEACH

QUESTIONS

BRIDE OF THE SEA

THE TEN-DAY OCEAN TRIP

THE END OF THE RAINBOW

PART VI

WATCHING THE WIND

THE DANCING PARTNERS

FLYING WEATHER

THE DANDELIONS GROWING THERE

DOLLIES IN THE BOX

SPRINGTIME

SOAP FOR DINNER

AUTHOR’S BIO

INTRODUCTION

Grandpa’s Beard Has Disapeared

A special man in my life had a beard. One day it was gone. This inspired me to write the poem Grandpa’s Beard Has Disappeared. This in turn grew into this collection of stories and poems for children. All are biographic or autobiographic.

This book is dedicated to the loving memory of this special person.

GRANDPA’S BEARD

Grandpa’s Beard

Has disappeared.

Where it has gone, we’d like to know.

It came off with the razor and shaving cream snow,

And went down the drain with the warm water’s flow,

Carrying memories of a beautiful face

That hairlessness can never replace.

With the beard out of sight

Grandpa’s face doesn’t seem quite right.

Handsome still but not the same,

But it can grow again from whence it came.

A beard makes a man look all knowing.

So on Grandpa’s face a beard should be growing.

Though Grandpa’s beard has disappeared,

He’s still the same loving person,

So we’ve learned there’s nothing to be feared.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Once again I thank my longtime typist, Diane Genender, without whose help this book would not have been completed. Her help and friendship cannot be measured.

PART I

FAMILY AND FRIENDS

PATTERNING OUR LIVES

A million dollar family. That was the term used years ago to describe a family that consisted of a boy and a girl. When our daughter was born in 1960, that’s what we had. A four-year-old son and a daughter: our million dollar family.

It turned out that what we could have used was a million dollars, because our daughter was born with multiple severe handicaps, and the cost of going to doctors and trying to get help was staggering.

We spent the first few years going to Cornell University—New York Hospital in New York City. Tests showed she was severely retarded quadriplegic because of brain damage, the cause of which, at the time, could not be determined. It has since been learned the drug I was given in the beginning weeks of pregnancy to prevent the severe vomiting I had experienced during the time I was expecting our son may have been the cause. Doctors at the time did not know that certain drugs can cause brain damage in the fetus.

While New York Hospital took care of her physically, they were unable to help her as far as training and education. Going to doctors on a regular basis required us to make some changes in our lives so that we would have time for these trips. We had a poultry farm which we had to give up. My husband went to work for the post office and I changed from full-time teaching to substitute teaching.

One day in September 1963, while reading Life magazine, an article about a place in Philadelphia giving therapy to brain-injured children caught my eye. I wanted to know more about this place and program, so I wrote to the editor of Life to get the full address because it was not given in the article. When I received the information, I wrote to the Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential. Within a short time, a letter came back from them, not with answers to the question I had asked, but with an appointment for October 1964. Since that was a year from then, I put the letter away and forgot about it and went on taking care of our daughter and our son, who was in school by this time. This same year, we had another baby, another boy.

In September 1964, we received a call from the Institute in Philadelphia confirming our appointment. Still not knowing anything about this place, we did not know whether we should go or not, but since we desperately needed a rest, we looked on the trip as a vacation and decided to go. On October 1, 1964, we left our sons with their grandparents and set out to an unknown future.

What we thought would be a vacation turned out to be a week of extremely difficult training for a program called patterning. According to Doctors Doman and Delacato, the educators who were the developers of this program, patterning was a program of physical therapy exercises, all done in a swimming motion-breathing exercises, visual training, and even reading—all in an attempt to train those parts of the brain that were not injured. It was their philosophy that a brain-injured child has parts of the brain that function normally and these can be trained to do the functions of the damaged parts.

The main exercise was a swimming motion done on a special table, which had to be built, by three, four, or five people four times a day, seven days a week. The other parts of the program were creeping and crawling, also in swimming motions on the floor and in special boxes that also would have to be built, breathing with a plastic bag over her head one minute every hour, flashing lights for visual training, salt massage in the bathtub once a day, limiting her fluid intake to thirty-two ounces per twenty-four hours, and reading flash cards. We were told this would be a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week program, and that we would need volunteers to help with the main exercise. There would be no time off except to return to Philadelphia every two months for evaluation and program change.

Back home, we went into total confusion. Where were we going to get so many people to help? How could we manage such a rigorous routine, especially with two other children in the family? I asked the local newspapers to write stories about us in an attempt to get volunteers. I also asked all the schools in the area and the local community college for volunteers. In the meantime, the special table and boxes for the physical therapy were being built, and we bought the other special items that we would need.

While we waited for the people and equipment, we began the breathing exercises, the salt massage, the eye exercise, the fluid limitation, the body rubs, and the reading cards. Two weeks after we began, the program came to an abrupt end temporarily because I was badly injured in an automobile accident. The newspapers carried our story, again adding that now that I was hospitalized, it was imperative that people volunteer so that the program could go on. During my hospitalization, a few adults offered to help, so the program began again sporadically.

Unknown to us at that time, the local high schools and college were organizing teams of students to come to our house for the times the main patterning had to be done. It was a coordinated effort and each school had a definite time schedule by one coordinator. It was even set up so that if or when a substitute was needed, arrangements were made through that one person without bothering us.

As soon as the table and boxes were ready, each team came for forty-five minutes, doing the main pattern twice and spending the time in-between for the creeping and crawling exercises, visual exercises, reading cards, and breathing exercises, thus relieving us of a lot of the work of the therapy. Our living room looked like a gym with the table and boxes in it.

Even though our first visit back to Philadelphia showed improvement in eye focusing and some muscle strength, there was no dramatic improvement. Still, we continued this routine for two years. The students continued to come, never getting discouraged. When students graduated or left the area, new ones took their place, all work was done by one person who was overseeing this so we would not have to worry about replacements. Two years after we began, the Institute in Philadelphia asked us to become part of a research project. Instead of doing the main patterning with people, they wanted us to do the exercise with a machine that had been invented for this purpose. All we had to do was turn her head. The machine would move her arms and legs. We would no longer need people coming in to help.

Though we no longer needed them, the students continued to come to help with the rest of the program that remained unchanged. They found the machine fascinating and worked it for us, thus relieving us again of some of the burden of the program.

We worked with the machine three years. After a total of five years on patterning, there were only minor changes and improvements, and so we decided to go off the program. We gave