TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 82

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 7, 200000006


Dear Folks,

	The settlement conference went well enough.  The good part 
was that villainman wasn't there.  He was in Paris, poor dear, at 
some physics function.  There was a lot of talk about what would 
happen to an agreement under every circumstance possible, e.g., if I 
pre-decease villainman, if he should die before he retires, if he 
doesn't retire for three years, etc.  What would happen to the trust 
fund we are setting up?  Villainman is supposed to give his proceeds 
from the house sale to a special needs trust to fund Meyshe's and 
Feyna's existence, and pay for their lessons, therapies, food, 
clothing and shelter, that sort of thing.  He's dragging his heels, 
wants to under-fund the trust.  All those nice things you might 
expect of him.  Other good news is that since villainman wasn't 
there, the two lawyers, the judge and I could all meet in the same 
room.  None of this Judge running back and forth to different 
conference rooms to keep the parties separate.  As my attorney 
explained to me, this was good because the opposing lawyer, Sterling 
(that's his name), could see me as a human being, flesh and blood and 
real, instead of relying upon the rumours and legends fed to him by 
villainman and his new wife who hates my guts (what about guts are to 
love?  Do we ever say, "I love his guts"?).  There were calls to 
Paris so Sterling could consult with his recalcitrant client who is 
throwing a tantrum, that special sort of vindictive tantrum reserved 
for adults.  And is it possible that we didn't finish our business, 
even though we were there from  1:30 to 5:00?  Yes, and they let me 
go home at 5:00 while they stayed to confer further.  There will be 
other conferences, I'm afraid.  Oh woe.  Oy veh.



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Seasons greetings from the storyteller

	We inhabited the house we rented on Hopkins Street in 
Berkeley for six months while my parents were looking for a house to 
buy.  Eventually, they found the house on Domingo Avenue at the other 
end of Berkeley.  It was a different market then.  The house on 
Domingo had been for sale for three years, and there had been no 
offers.  They had it listed at $40,000, a fancy price in 1956.  My 
mother said she was not enthusiastic about the house because of all 
the stairs, and because it just seemed too rich for her:  all these 
grand entrance ways, the arches, the cove ceilinged thirty foot 
living room, the ornate plaster fireplaces imported from Italy.  It 
was just too much.  And they couldn't afford $40,000.  So they 
offered $30,000.  And the sellers accepted.  This was a big shock. 
Suddenly, we were living in a dazzlingly beautiful Spanish style 
house built in 1923.  Naturally, someone had come through and 
bastardized it in the '40s, and then done further damage in the '50s, 
but it was a solid, lovely house, luxurious even.  And that was hard 
for my mother to take.  She was a Roosevelt liberal, sympathetic to 
the Spanish Civil War, signed all sorts of petitions, talked about 
socialized medicine.  And here she was living in The Man's house.  It 
embarrassed her.

	We kids were oblivious to the sub-text; we just loved the 
house.  My sister and I chose our separate bedrooms with ease.  She 
wanted the front room with the view of San Francisco, and I wanted 
the back room with the view of the trees and garden.  For the first 
time, we would not be sharing a bedroom.  It felt huge.  We would be 
going to John Muir Elementary School, which was just across the 
street and down a pathway between houses on Domingo.  Less than five 
minutes of a walk.  John Muir was a big old imitation Tudor mansion. 
All the rooms had high, twelve foot ceilings, and the hallways were 
broad, bright and architecturally alluring, with the hardwood floors 
and the great stairways with sweeping, curving bannisters.  I was 
then in the fourth grade, an upper classman.

	My teacher was only there for less than a month before she 
got sick, and a substitute, Mrs. Fuller, took over for her.  Mrs. 
Fuller was presiding when the March 22nd, 1957 earthquake on the 
Hayward fault occurred.  The school was basically on top of the 
Hayward fault, and the shaking and rolling was prodigious.  We'd been 
drilled to death about earthquakes, and all knew to leap under our 
desks for the duck and cover.  But Mrs. Fuller evidently hadn't 
gotten the benefit of all our earthquake drills, and when it hit, she 
ran back and forth in front of the classroom, screaming, while we all 
looked at her, a strange sight, from under the protective canopy of 
our desks.  I watched the ceiling fixtures sway in great arcs, and 
the floor see saw angrily, like a diving board off of which a three 
hundred pound swimmer has just leapt.

	In those days, once a week, these big yellow buses arrived 
and parked in front of the school, and all the Christian kids whose 
parents had signed up for it, had to go to these buses for Bible 
study, while the rest of us, and that was not too damn many, twiddled 
our thumbs in the deserted classrooms.  This would be inconceivable 
today.  Even though separation of church and state has been blurred 
of late, it's stronger than when I was in the educational system, and 
unshackled Christians roamed the public schools.

	Every winter, there were weeks spent rehearsing, leading up 
to the Christmas pageant.  Christmas carols were sung and the three 
wise men came to ogle the baby Jesus.  Some lucky girl got to play 
the mother of the son of God, and the whole thing was unabashedly 
Christian.  I felt disloyal, disloyal to the bone, being forced to 
sing Christmas carols, and would sing until the name, "Jesus", came 
up.  Then I'd drop out and come back in after Jesus was gone from the 
song.  I suppose, I could have requested not to participate at all, 
but then what would I have been doing for the four weeks prior to the 
Christmas show?  The orchestra rehearsed Christmas music.  All the 
little voices, even the kindergartners performed their Christmas 
ditties, some seasonal, some outright religious.  Christmas dominated 
the classroom activities.  I felt very uncomfortable, but anything 
else would have been like dropping out of school.  I wondered how it 
felt to be part of the great majority, the dominant piece of the 
culture, lording it over everyone else, all us puny non-Christians. 
"You and your Moses!" Dickie Seymour taunted me as he turned around 
in his chair to look at me struggling with the lyrics of, "Away in 
the Manger."

	There was a big girls' yard, the north playground, the big 
boys' yard, the south playground, and the little kids' playground in 
between.  When the bell for recess rang, I used to gather up as many 
of the little kids as I could.  They would form a circle around the 
big redwood tree in the hole in the concrete.  And I would tell them 
stories.  These would be ex tempora stories from my head.  The little 
kids loved this.  They ate up these tales that streamed from my busy 
brain, and laughed or gasped, or cringed at the right moments.  This 
became a tradition, the best way I could spend my ten minute recess. 
But the teachers put a stop to this.  They advised me that it was all 
nice and good that I had this gift for storytelling, but recess was 
really for exercize, and no one was getting any of that while sitting 
on their tiny buttocks listening to me spew.  So the story telling 
sessions were halted, and everyone went back to the jungle gyms. 
That is, except me.  I sat there by the tree, writing stories about 
Tobie and the little Squacklejig.  A squacklejig was a cat from Mars. 
Its tail could stretch, and it spoke.  It could grant wishes.  It 
could be silly.  I sat there by that same tree with my paper and 
pencil and I wrote my stories to be read during show and tell.  But 
the yard monitors didn't like my writing during recess either.  They 
took my papers and pencils away and told me to get some exercize. 
But I didn't want some exercize.  Right then, I wanted to write 
stories.  That's still how I am.


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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net