TheBanyanTree: Back from Monterey

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 19, 200000006


Dear Fellow Travellers,

	We arrived home from Monterey in one piece each of us, but 
each housing our own cluster of frustrations left over from the 
vacation.  It was a cross between delightful and harrowing.  I was 
the coordinator, referee, guide and mediator for the group, and it 
was sometimes a multi-tasking job.  Gramma can walk fine, but more 
slowly than the rest of us, while Meyshe shoots out ahead if you 
don't bungee him to someone or something.  He spent much of the time 
glued to his gameboy, giggling, completely engrossed, shuffling up 
the street while concentrating on the little screen.  I had to take 
the thing away from him a few times just so he wouldn't present a 
danger to himself or others, bumping into things.

	Meyshe and I shared a room in the upscale hotel.  Adjoining 
our room, Feyna and Gramma shared a mirror image of our room.  The 
two of them, Feyna and my mother, did not blend well at times.  Both 
are worriers.  It's the Brodofsky gene, I tell you.  The Brodofskys 
started out in Lithuania, where all my family comes from.  They were 
given the name during the period when all the Jews were rounded up 
and assigned last names.  If you had money to bribe the officials 
handing out names, they'd give you a good one:  Goldberg (gold 
mountain), Silberstein (silver stone).  If you had no money or 
displeased the officials in any way, they'd hand you a crummy moniker 
that would follow you and your descendents down to the seventh 
generation: Neiman (no one), Sheiskopf (shithead).  The first 
Brodofsky reached across the table to sign his name and the official 
noticed he had a wart on the back of his hand.  Brodofsky means 
"wart".   The Brodofskys are worriers.  Big time worriers.  They 
don't need any particular awful thing to worry about.  They will find 
something to worry about like the one needle in the haystack that 
keeps poking them.  And they will perform anguish over this, wringing 
hands, furrowing brows, sighing, anxiously pacing or fretting out 
loud.  Everything that could go wrong is assumed will go wrong.  It's 
not an easy life.  I once suggested that the way the Brodofskys 
earned their livings in the old country was by hiring themselves out 
as surrogate worriers, since they were going to worry anyway, and 
they may as well make some money at it.

	So here you had Feyna and my mother, both with the gene 
marked with an "oy", but worrying about different things, 
incompatible things.  Feyna worries about getting out of the room 
with everything she owns on her person, and she loses things, then 
goes crazy fixating on finding them.  It takes her forever to 
organize and depart.  The rest of us were always waiting.  My mother, 
on the other hand, worries about things happening on a schedule.  It 
is an artificial schedule, as we were on a vacation, but it was the 
schedule she imagined, so she worried about the timing.  Here was 
Feyna dragging on, having lost her wallet, or a rubber band to hold a 
sock up, frenetically pawing through all the piles of possessions on 
her side of the room.  There was Gramma fretting visibly on the other 
side of the room, because we were not on schedule.  I had to mediate. 
And I realized while I was doing so, how much of my life is spent 
waiting for Feyna to get herself together.  I am used to it.  I am 
the picture of patience (but maybe not the substance of patience).

	Feyna and Meyshe get along and they don't get along.  Just 
like siblings do and don't.  At times, anything either of them did 
annoyed the other, and little tiffs would spurt up here and there. 
In the meantime, Feyna wanted to drive the car, having just gotten 
her license, and this made Gramma exceptionally agitated.  She'd slam 
her foot on an imaginary brake, gasp as we changed lanes, or rounded 
a corner.  I calmed her if I could, and had to explain to Feyna why 
she would not be driving the car on the freeway at night in a light 
rain to a place we were not sure how to find.

	Thank God for the Monterey Bay Aquarium!  With four walkie 
talkies distributed among our party, each person could wander off and 
follow his or her impulse without any worry (there's that word again) 
of anyone getting lost, or being inaccessible.  I mostly stayed with 
my mother, walking her slow pace, examining the exhibits, talking to 
each  other about the kids, the fish, the world, the nettled details 
of life.  We stood, enrapt by the jellyfish, mesmerized by their 
pumping swim, with their tentacles streaming out below them, like 
heads of hair in currents of water.  One tank after another filled 
with these mysteriously ethereal creatures.  And I had to ask one of 
the expert docents manning a nearby information station, "Which 
jellyfish are the ones we eat?" These experts get every question 
imaginable, and they draw from their well of knowledge plus the 
battering of experience when they answer.  But what I got was, "We 
eat jellyfish?  Who eats jellyfish?"

	The concierge at the hotel directed us to her favourite 
restaurant for the birthday dinner.  She made the reservations, and 
told me not to order hors de'ouvres because they would be on the 
house, thanks for staying in our hotel.  The restaurant turned out to 
be one of those huge, cavernous things with a thousand tables in 24 
rooms, with coordinated decor, grapes hanging from the ceiling, and 
giant painted metal roosters posted here and there.  We had a 
reservation, but we had to wait anyway.  From the entrance waiting 
area we watched diners consuming their meals.  The din was 
unimaginable.  We found ourselves shouting at each other, not polite, 
and futile, too.  When it was time to order, I heard nothing about 
the complimentary hors de'ouvres, so I had to mention it.  The waiter 
gave me a blank look, shook his head and said he didn't know anything 
about it.  Strike one for the concierge.  For their birthday, I gave 
Feyna and Meyshe each a copy of, "Virtual PC", a program they can put 
in their e-macs that will allow them to play any windows program on 
them.  Meyshe hugged his present, and squealed his thank you.  He's 
had his eye on a virtual garden program that only comes in a windows 
format.  Gramma gave a card to each of them.  To Meyshe she promised 
to buy him three programs for his computer.  For Feyna, she promised 
to buy my nephews car as a gift to Feyna.  True, the inspiration for 
this was the horrible fact that Feyna was promised a motor scooter 
for Channukah, and the car was supposed to obviate that horror. 
Feyna received the offer graciously, but tentatively, and with a 
great deal of embarrassment.  Only hours before she was sitting at 
the table being told that she was going to be given a car, she'd been 
on the phone to her half brother, Alex, in Georgia, going on and on 
about how she has no need for a car at this stage.  Just wants a 
scooter.  No car for her.  Too expensive.  Too much responsibility. 
Too cumbersome.  Overkill.  No way.  No how.  No sirree.  She knew 
that my mother had overheard that conversation.

	And we finally departed Monterey, on Feyna's schedule, with 
Gramma bothering herself about the time of departure, and Meyshe 
buried in his game boy, and I trying to sew everyone up into a 
compatible comforter, all snuggled up lovingly together.  The drive 
back was easy.  I just put a CD in the player and listened to the 
Brahms second viola quintet, followed by the Brahms clarinet quintet, 
followed by the Brahms second viola quintet, followed by the Brahms 
clarinet quintet.  And we were home.  The kids were dead asleep in 
the back seats.

	When we walked into our house, we noticed there were some 
flies in the dining room.  Too many flies.  It's not as if we'd left 
some carrion out for rotting and munching.  I unpacked, first my 
bathroom equipment.  I opened the door to the bathroom, looked up and 
said, "Oh my God."  There were clusters of flies buzzing around the 
skylight.  I looked to the sink.  "Oh my God."  There were more flies 
dotting the counter and the mirror, crawling on the water glass, 
enjoying the box of kleenex.  I looked to the west wall.  "Oh my 
God!"  More flies.  And to the north.  "OH my GOD!"  To the east and 
south, "OH MY GOD!"  There must have been a hundred flies in the 
bathroom, which was the obvious epicenter of the infestation.  But 
where were they coming from, and why?  I got the hell out of the 
bathroom.  There are times for fly swatters, and there are times to 
forget the ecology and go out to buy RAID, breathe in the fumes and 
get rid of the blight.  We bought two cans.  One labelled, "Organic", 
and the other your plain old nerve poison, unbiodegradable straight 
shooting toxicania.  I must have put half a can in the bathroom, and 
the pests died like flies.  The dead bodies were everywhere, a 
disgusting sight.  The counters and floor, all the bathroom things 
that you put in your mouth, your hair, your nose, your ass, 
everything covered with a thick layer of poison, and the smell was 
unparalleled.  I ran from the room holding my hand over my mouth and 
nose.  The flies were dead, and we cleaned them up.  But more 
appeared in their place.  For every one that was felled, it seemed 
that two more rose in its place.

	I have called the exterminator.  I left a message and got no 
return call.  I have called another exterminator, left another 
message, and received no return call.  I am going to attack the 
yellow pages and call other exterminators, a raft of exterminators, 
many exterminators, all of them with lives of their own, and 
businesses killing tiny things that bother humans, live off of them, 
eat their staple foods, invade their houses, make them squirm with 
repulsion.  I will get a message from someone, and the first one to 
return the call will get the job.  Where did something die and 
attract all the flies?  And why the bathroom?  There is an old joke 
about flies.  You've probably heard it.  You may skip ahead to the 
last paragraph to avoid a bad joke.  I mean a really bad joke.  But 
you're probably going to read it anyway, so here goes:

	A man in India goes into hotel after hotel looking for a 
room, but they are all full.  There's a convention in town.  He gets 
desperate and demands at the next place to be shown some room, any 
room.  He will take anything.  The clerk tells him that there is one 
room, but it has flies.  "So what? Flies?  India has flies.  I can 
take flies.  Give me the room!"  The clerk repeats the warning about 
the flies, and admonishes him that this being India, a room having 
flies means more than it might elsewhere.  But the man insists on 
taking the room.  The next morning, the man is checking out, and the 
clerk asks him, hesitantly, how he slept, you know, with the flies 
and all.  The man says it was no problem.  He just crapped in the 
corner.

	Okay.  Bad joke, but this episode with the flies has me 
thinking creatively about a solution if none of the exterminators 
chooses to answer my plea.  I am banished from my bathroom, and the 
kitchen is filled with bug spray, too.  No cooking here until the 
crisis has passed.

	So I am back, and many times grateful to be so.  Feyna is 
thinking it over about the car.  Meyshe is ecstatic about virtual PC. 
I am thinking over my options too.  Should I relax, or get back to 
business?  Settlement conference on Thursday.  Oh my.  It will be 
good to get that over with.  And I sit in my basement room, at my 
computer, spraying pixils on the screen in a message to you. 
Remember next time you eat jellyfish at your favourite Chinese 
restaurant, how ethereal they look, pumping themselves through the 
water at the Aquarium, glowing and dancing in the current.

	Love,

	Tobie
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net