TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 95

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 20, 200000000000000000000000000000000000000006


Dear Old Folks at Home,

	I keep wanting to go to bed earlier and 
earlier.  I crawl into my bed any time after 
eight o'clock, to perform my nightly ritual. 
First I write.  That carries me through nine 
o'clock at least.  Then I read.  I read a section 
of the most recent Funny Times, and then I read 
the current book I am pushing myself through. 
Right now I'm reading, "The Poisonwood Bible", by 
Barbara Kingsolver.  And what do I think about 
the book?  I think I wonder about her name. 
Kingsolver.  Where did this unusual last name 
come from?  Kingsolver.  Maybe it was once upon a 
time, King's Oliver, meaning the man that made 
olive oil for the king.  Maybe the original 
Kingsolver solved the King, whatever that means. 
Maybe it used to be Kings All Were, meaning that 
they all were kings.

	Shapiro is easy.  It's the bastardized 
name of a town, Spier. And the Shapiros come from 
there.  But not this Shapiro.  This Shapiro was a 
chosen name by the great great grandfather 
Bogotch, which means, "rich", in Russian.  They 
weren't rich.  It was a name given out when names 
were being given out to Jews.  They were being 
sarcastic.  Well, the rules of the Russian army 
were that if you had one son, he didn't have to 
go in the army, but if you had more than one son, 
they did have to go.  So Bogotch, being of sound 
mind, gave his sons different last names as they 
were born:  Bogotch, Poleiov and Shapiro.  So 
when the Czar's army came for them, Bogotch told 
them they were foundlings and he was raising them 
for their stricken families.  It worked.  No army 
for the Bogotches.

	I went to bed last night at eight o'clock 
and fell asleep before midnight.  Then I woke up 
this morning at six o'clock.  Here I am to type 
up another story.  This one was hard to write 
because it deals with my third husband, the one 
who walked out on me and my children in January 
of 2004.  I don't like writing about him.  I just 
want to bury his memory under some fold of my 
convolutions and only have to think about him 
when he and his lawyer do something else stupid, 
causing me to have to respond with documentation 
and letters.  But here it is.  As honest as I 
could be.



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How to Select a Mate

	After my awful experience with Glenn 
Watson, the agoraphobic with no doorbell, I took 
myself aside and thought things through.  I took 
a bold look at myself, without any excuses or 
devious rationalizations.  How was I doing at 
this romance business?  Not well.  What seemed to 
be the matter?  I chose men who were shmucks.  I 
had a long line of shmucks: cheapskates, 
depressives, insolvents, men who couldn't commit, 
men who couldn't love, men who refused to have 
sex, men who treated me with tolerance, men who 
had no direction, men falling off the bottom rung 
of the social ladder.  These men broke hearts and 
contributed little if anything to the world into 
which they were so generously born.

	I asked myself some very basic questions 
-   not, "What kind of a man do you want to 
meet?" but more basic: Do you want to settle down 
with anybody at all?  Do you want to be in some 
committed relationship?  And I turned that over 
in my head, and decided that I did.  I probably 
wanted to be married with Mr. Forever.  So, if 
that were the case, I continued, what sort of 
man, intellectually, psychologically, 
spiritually, did I want to find?  This brought me 
to myself.  What was the essence of me?  If I 
kept removing traits and behaviours, talents and 
attitudes from myself, at what point would I have 
to say, "No.  That isn't me anymore; you have to 
keep that"?  I determined that it didn't matter 
that I did exactly the things I did, but it did 
matter that I had creative outlet.  I was 
essentially an expressive person:  the expressive 
arts.  I couldn't take away that passion and 
still be who I was.  That passion provided 
direction and center.  I wanted to find the same 
in a partner.

	So I was looking for someone with a 
passion for something.  Did it matter what the 
passion was?  Well, yes.  I would not do well 
with a man who had a passion for guns or hunting, 
sports, or designing nuclear weapons.  I decided 
brains were essential, too.  In fact, what I 
wanted was someone, like myself, who derived 
primal joy from thinking.  Now, where would I 
find this person?  And I thought of all the 
annoying music I'd tolerated listening to while 
hooked up to various men  -  all that music that 
appealed to the brain stem alone.  This is when I 
thought that classical music was the connection. 
Someone who liked classical music would derive 
primal joy from thinking.

	I was standing in line at the post office 
while I was going over this in my head.  My eyes 
focussed on a letter that the person in front of 
me was going to mail.  The person in front of me 
was Joy McCarthy, a violinist who played music 
sometimes with my father.  The address she was 
mailing to was: The Classical Music Lovers' 
Exchange, in Pelham, New York.

	"Excuse me," I said, very cautiously, 
knowing I was interrupting her private life, "but 
what is the Classical Music Lovers' Exchange?" 
Joy was happy to tell me that it was a dating 
service.  You paid your membership dues and then 
the CMLE would send you a read-out of all the men 
who were members, marked with location, age, and 
accompanied by a brief autobiographical sketch. 
Then you wrote to CMLE and gave them the member 
numbers of all the ones who interested you, with 
a check for one dollar for every man.  Then they 
sent you back copies of the detailed forms these 
men had filled out, which included name and 
contact information.  At that point, it was up to 
you.

	I thanked Joy and copied down the 
address.  I actually hurried home to write to the 
Classical Music Lovers' Exchange.  I set up a 
membership.  The packet of the list of member 
numbers I received in turn was gigantic.  I went 
over this list carefully, very carefully.  I set 
aside a whole day for this.  And from the list I 
culled eight members who were of immediate 
interest.  I wrote back with my check for $8.00, 
and got back eight fully formed forms that eight 
fully formed men had filled out.  I set about 
perusing them through their autobiographical 
statements, statistics and situation.  Remember, 
these were copies of the form they filled out, so 
I had a roundabout sample of handwriting.  I got 
rid of the tightwad, the philanderer, the 
arrogant bastard and the flake.  I thus 
eliminated four of them.  The remaining four 
stared at me from their filled out forms.

	I telephoned the four prospects.  One had 
already found his true love through some other 
means.  "Oh, am I still a member of CMLE?  I 
better notify them to take me off their list." 
The next answered the phone with a thick Russian 
accent.  We talked briefly, then made a date to 
meet over coffee.  He called back the next day 
and told me apologetically that he couldn't see 
me, ". . . becawz you are too tawll."  "I'm only 
five foot four.  Not even quite."  "Maybe you 
think thiz iz silly, but you are too tawll for 
me.  I am very sorry to disappoynt you, and hort 
your feelinks."  I told him that he hadn't broken 
my heart.  I didn't even know him.  It was all 
right, and, yes, I did think it was silly.  But 
he was the master of his own fate, and I 
respected his wishes.  So be it.  I woz too 
tawll.  The third turned out to be a very nice 
guy.  Lived in the city.  We talked several 
times, but couldn't find an opportunity to meet. 
So we kept talking.  Eventually he didn't return 
my calls, and that petered out.  The fourth was 
difficult to get hold of.  His machine was always 
answering the phone.  I left messages, but never 
heard back from him.  I was a little nervous 
about this one, because the form said he had two 
boys, nine and eleven years old, and he was only 
separated, not divorced yet.  Still, his 
handwriting said he was very smart, and that 
appealed to me.

	I was about to give up on him, but 
decided to give him one last chance to answer his 
phone.  My parents and I had gone out to dinner, 
and I excused myself from the table to make my 
last ditch phone call.  A flat voice answered the 
phone.  We started talking.  We kept talking.  We 
talked for twenty minutes.  My mother came back 
looking for me.   When she found me, I gave her 
the sign for, "perfect".  The man, David, and I 
made an arrangement to meet a couple days later 
for coffee.

	When he walked into the café, I was 
already seated at a small table.  I knew it was 
he, because he looked at me with a deliberate 
questioning eye.  I stood to greet him.  What I 
noticed most about him was his neck which was so 
thin it made his head look like one of those 
wobbly dolls you see in the back window of cars, 
the head bobbing up and down and from side to 
side on a spring.  And then, even though our 
conversation went well, his voice had such little 
expression.  I couldn't read him.  And his big 
white face was foreign to me.  His looks were 
alien.  He made no expressive gestures and there 
were no inflections in his speech.  This made him 
mysterious in a way, but different than the 
hysterical men I'd met and the crazy one I  had 
for a second husband.  We talked for a couple 
hours, and he asked if I would like to see his 
CD.  He'd just gotten a CD player.  This was the 
very newest thing.  Most people still had record 
players.  Not only had he bought the CD player, 
but he had invested in a real live CD, and I'd 
never seen one before.  We stood at the trunk of 
his car.  He reached into a bag and brought out a 
tiny case, out of which he produced a small shiny 
disc with a large hole in the middle.  The sun 
glinted off its mirror flat surface, and a 
rainbow shimmered.

	"Oh.  I see," I said.  And he put the disc back.

	he invited me to come over for dinner to 
meet his boys who would be staying with him for 
three weeks, fresh from their mother's house.  I 
accepted.  But after we parted, I ruminated about 
the match.  It just stuck in my heart and my head 
that he was so expressionless.  So flat, so 
distant, so seemingly unemotional.  I talked to 
my friend Julia who worked in the café in which 
we'd met.  She'd watched our meeting and observed 
us from behind the counter.

	She asked me what the matter was with him 
that I felt so hesitant.  I told her he was 
unemotional.

	"Is he really unemotional, or does he 
just not express his emotions the way you do?"

	"Well, I suppose he's inexpressive."

	"Then what's the matter?" she asked.

	To every qualm and every queasiness I had 
about him, she asked a salient question, and 
then, "So what's the matter?" until I finally 
gave in that maybe this was a good sign.  Maybe I 
needed this change.  Maybe what was best about 
him in fact was this feeling of mine that it was 
all wrong.  After all, he was a good intellectual 
match, and wasn't that one of the things I'd 
missed in my previous relationships?  See, I'd 
done every decision wrong in the past.  This was 
time for me to go against my instincts.  So I 
convinced myself to fall in love with him, even 
though it doesn't work that way, and even though 
I didn't.  I argued myself into staying with him, 
and I argued myself into accepting his marriage 
proposal.  And by the time we got together in a 
more intimate way, I'd done such a good job on 
myself that I didn't see the difference between 
natural love and an intellectualization of 
attachment.

	This is how I came to marry David, the 
nightmare of my life, the man who withheld every 
jot of his heart from me.  And, see, I did it to 
myself.  My instincts were correct, but I'd 
doubted them.  Who knows when to listen?  Is 
there no way to check on one's perceptions?  No, 
there is not.  We are sane and insane at the same 
time.  Rational and full of rationalizations at 
the same time.  I ask myself this again and 
again.  Can I trust myself about anything?  When 
can I rely on my own flawed judgment?



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net