TheBanyanTree: Bad medicine

[Tobie Shapiro]

September 28, 2000000004



Wishing you all well,

	This morning I was trying to find a missing hair clip.  It 
had disappeared from its perch on the corner of my bedside table 
during the night.  I had to assume that Shulamit knocked it off by 
accident, or when I was fumbling around for some pill or clock in the 
middle of the dark night, maybe I dislodged it and sent it flying to 
the floor.  I'd looked all over the whole area --  crouched down with 
a flashlight, finding other hideous things under the bed and under 
the night stand: dust, tumbleweeds of dust, papers, old catalogues, a 
few piles of ancient cat vomit -- no hair clip.

	I was searching through the open drawer in the night stand. 
It sits open, full of pill bottles, an oversized envelope of postage 
stamps and address labels, ointments and creams, medicines of every 
stripe  --  discarded pharmaceuticals that caused bad side effects 
(so why do I keep them?), Vogelsang's old collar and tag, a lot of 
cat hair, pens.  The drawer stands open and a cornucopia of junk 
extrudes from it.  Maybe the hair clip fell into the gaping drawer.

	So I was rifling around in it and came across a Polaroid 
photograph of Villainman, when he was still the husband who doesn't 
love me.  There he was, examining something small, a cat in the 
background.

	I stared at the photo for as long as I could stand it.  A 
slice of melancholy slit my throat.  Here was the man I lived with, 
shared a life with, suffered mundanities and duties with.  We raised 
children and accompanied each other through catastrophes, every day, 
for nearly 20 years.  He was so familiar to me.  He wasn't well loved 
by me for quite some time, at least, not respected other than for his 
intellect, maybe for a wishy-washy conviction or two.  I mostly wept 
about the awful marriage.  Couldn't we fix it?  Why wouldn't he wake 
up and fix it with me?  He never tried.  Now, he is an utter 
stranger.  He's turned cold and irrational.  Hallucinations, what he 
thinks of as insights and revelations, guide his moves --   the man 
who returned from Greece after a three week stay, and hasn't called 
to ask how his children are.  The worst of him has flowered, and the 
best of him has expired.

	I turned the picture over and deposited it back into the 
drawer, like a bad batch of pills that were supposed to cure me, but 
just gave  me heart palpitations, rashes, and headaches.  I couldn't 
quite throw the picture away, even though I don't ever want to look 
at it again.

Tobie
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net