TheBanyanTree: What a card

[Tobie Shapiro]

September 5, 2000000000000000000000000000000000000004


Dearly Bedraggled,

	While hurricanes slap the living daylights out of the 
southeast, out here in Berkeley, California, the little wavy lines 
are rising from the sidewalk.  It seldom gets hot out here, and in 
fact the weather reports are boring (fog in the morning, clearing in 
the afternoon), and never include the word, "dangerous".   But every 
once in a while we have a spell of heat.  I don't want you to laugh 
when I say it got up in the 90s yesterday, and about the same is 
planned for today.  That kind of heat is an every day thing all over 
the world, but here, in the bay area, we are spoiled and soft, and 
fall apart when the temperate zone presses the envelope.   We are the 
Goldilocks people:  not too hot, not too cold, just right.

	Still, when the sun shines down unforgiving of what we are 
used to, it is as bad for us as grown up weather is for the rest of 
you.  I've nearly had my head chopped off (in the distant past) at 
another writers' venue on the net, for being a pansy about heat.  I 
get heat stroke.  So sue me.  Let me get my heat stroke and wind up 
in a hospital with I.V.s of saline dripping into my veins so that 
they can stabilize my blood pressure above 60 over 20.  Let me lie 
there with my heat stroke.  And then, sue me.  It's only fair.

	This is what I observed last night, as I lay in bed on my 
stomach, writing, writing, writing.


Saturday, Shabbos, September 4, 2004

	We are enjoying a local heat wave.  They seem to last longer 
and peak higher in these days of global warming.  The heat stifles 
everything in me.  I think less clearly.  I breathe less deeply.  I 
can't move around with the proper arms and legs; they shuffle, or 
tangle.  My eyesight becomes blurry.  I yearn for cool, and what I 
did today to stay out of the heat in the main part of the house, was 
really not pretty.  I ensconced myself in the basement, smack in 
front of the computer, my bony behind on a soft office chair, and I 
played senseless, mind numbing games of pointless solitaire for hours 
on end.

	I'm not proud of this.  But fear of heat and fear of actual 
heat stroke are enough to keep me humiliated but still flipping the 
cards.  No earthly good can come of these games of solitaire.  It is 
like taking cerebral novocaine.  But with the novocaine injected that 
inspires dentists to do their most ambitious glorious work, we do not 
use our mouths and teeth until it has worn off completely.  When even 
the tingling has passed and we can tell whether we are chewing up our 
tongues and cheeks, then we will let ourselves sink our teeth into a 
sandwich or a piece of crisp fruit.  Not before.  The difference here 
is that when we are under the influence of cerebral novocaine, we are 
forced to continue using our brains, though we are probably chewing 
our heads up and thinking ourselves to shreds.  It's ugly, sitting 
there motionless, clicking and dragging with the mouse to make the 
little jack of diamonds carry itself over to rest quietly upon the 
queen of clubs (just what sort of nasty symbolism is this!?), but it 
was what I did today, in the cool shadowy basement of our hot pad.

	The only fairly productive thing I did was sit upstairs in my 
(this) room with the air conditioner on full blast, watching Feyna 
and her pal, Natalie, play games with a real three dimensional deck 
of cards while I went looking back through this journal, rereading, 
either crying silently, cringing in horror,  or laughing my heated 
ass off.

	It is strange that as I write myself to sleep in this big 
book, I am galled by the repetition, the mandanity, the awful 
ordinariness and tediousness of my life and the way I describe it. 
But when I reread, I find it insightful, arresting, hilarious, 
evocative, unusual and never redundant.

	I read what I wrote from waiting room to bedroom, another 
waiting room, the same bedroom, another waiting room.  My life moves 
on and on.  It may be wretched, frightening, full of grief and tears, 
but it isn't boring.

dc

	As the sun sits slowly on the west,

	I remain,

	Yours,

	And then some,

	Tobie

-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net