TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 57

[Tobie Shapiro]

November 12, 200000006


Dear and cherished,

	I woke up early this morning.  Don't ask 
me why, because I went to bed late last night.  I 
just don't have that internal clock ticking away 
to regulate my hours.  Do you?  If you were put 
in an environment with lights on all the time, 
and no clocks anywhere, would you know when to go 
to bed?  We live by the clock so much.  You can 
be sure the restaurant will be busiest at noon, 
and clear out by 1:30.  You know that you scurry 
home from work around five o'clock and that 
dinner is at approximately the same time every 
night.  Then who hasn't said, "I'm tired.  I feel 
like it's midnight, but it's too early to go to 
bed"?  And you stay up until at least 10:00 
because that's what the clock says.  They've done 
experiments with things like this, and they find 
that everyone adjusts to an inner clock 
eventually.  Some people are running on a natural 
36 hour day.  Some people are on a shorter day. 
The world without clocks.  I ought to try that 
some time when I've absolutely nothing else to do 
and it doesn't matter where I am when.  This 
might be a while.

Stay a while.


 
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World History

	I went to high school with a girl named 
Susan Mandelbaum.  She had a head of kinky Jewish 
hair that stood out in a halo all around her 
noggin.  She was funny, smart, sincere and tended 
to hang around all the black kids.  That was very 
unusual in those days.  Things were so terribly 
segregated among the student population, not by 
bigotry, but by choice, by class.  Pretty much 
all the African Americans, who liked to be called 
Negroes then, were working class or less, and the 
white kids were middle class or more.  There were 
exceptions of course.  There was Charlie Darden, 
who was elected class president every time he 
cared to run.  He was brilliant at math, played 
French horn in the orchestra, helped conduct the 
orchestra at times, took the lead role in,  "The 
King and I", when that was the semester's 
musical.  Everyone loved and admired Charlie 
Darden.  Susan Mandelbaum could have passed for 
black, with her olive complexion, her full lips 
and kinky hair.  Maybe that's why she gravitated.

	But she was the polar opposite of her 
mother, whom we all knew as Mrs. Mandelbaum.  She 
was a teacher at Berkeley High School, and I had 
the distinct honour of falling asleep in her 
World History class every Monday and Wednesday 
from one o'clock to one forty.  I was not the 
only one.  Everyone fell asleep in Mrs. 
Mandelbaum's World History class.  I think even 
Mandelbaum herself got woozy listening to herself 
drone on and on.

	There were a combination of factors at 
work here that made her class such a powerful 
soporific.  The classroom was a corner room in 
the G building, and there were skylights 
overhead.  This let the sun beat down on our 
tired heads.  But the class was also scheduled at 
one o'clock, p.m., right after lunch when the sun 
was highest and the digestive tracks were busy 
digesting, robbing our precious bodies of 
energies otherwise needed to stay awake.  Then 
there was the foremost cause of somnolence, which 
was the very honourable Mrs. Mandelbaum, a stolid 
woman with a voice like a dial tone, so 
expressive!  And there was her style of teaching 
which astounds me still.  She would read out the 
assignment at the end of every class, and if we 
were cognizant, we'd write it down in our 
binders.  The assignments were always reading a 
hefty section from the thick shiny text book on 
World History, by which the authors meant 
European Christian history.  China did not exist, 
all of Asia, in fact, was non-existent.  South 
America didn't exist except when Europeans were 
conquering it.  Africa was only a dot on the 
globe, a place famed only for its bustling source 
of slaves.  It is a puzzlement why they called 
this an education.

	The reading assignment was a torture. 
The text was as interesting as Mrs. Mandelbaum's 
flat voice.  Even the frequent illustrations were 
of no help.  Nothing could spice up this dreck. 
Every time I'd try to delve into the fifteen or 
twenty pages of assigned text, I'd be assaulted 
by aggressive ennui, or sleep attacks.  It 
couldn't be helped.  Then in class, Mrs. 
Mandelbaum would welcome us all to World History 
and commence reading, verbatim, the pages she'd 
assigned us to read.  That was the lesson.  There 
were no questions and answers, no lively 
discussions, no scrawling interesting points on 
the blackboard.  No nothing.  From one o'clock to 
one forty, Mrs. Mandelbaum with her helmet of 
hair, read to us in a monotone, the exact same 
thing she'd assigned us to read.  She did not 
diverge.

	And there I was, in the front row, 
battling for my consciousness, with the midday 
sun beating down upon my head, and the teacher 
droning on and the book coming in and out of 
focus.  My notes for the class were a series of 
ink spots where the pen had stopped on the page, 
and then a descending thready line dropping down 
the page and into my lap.  It was illegible and 
incoherent when letters were actually formed.  We 
all fell asleep in there.  We dropped like flies, 
the music of our skulls like hollow gourds 
hitting our desks.  Thunk.  Thunk.  But I learned 
an important lesson.  What I did for forty 
minutes in World History class was not learn, nor 
sleep.  I was in a constant state of attempting 
to stay awake, unsuccessfully.  I was in a 
constant state of trying to pay attention and 
learn, all in vain.  So I was unsuccessful at 
sleeping and unsuccessful at staying awake.  No 
learning nor sleeping was getting done.  Here's 
the lesson:  why not just abandon the effort to 
appear awake, and just lay my head down on the 
desk and saw logs?  At least I'd be getting some 
sleep, i.e. getting something accomplished.

	I cannot remember a jot of "World 
History", but I remember the classroom experience 
vividly.  And here's to Mrs. Mandelbaum, a woman 
whose secret should have been used by the 
military to put the enemy to sleep as our guys 
advanced down the battlefield reading aloud from 
the World History text book with Mandelbaum's 
copyrighted dial tone voice, as good as an animal 
tranquilizer shot from a blow gun into the hide 
of some poor unfortunate beast, who is for a 
second shocked, then disabled and felled.


 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net