TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 35

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 21, 2000000006


Dears,

	Yesterday my computer consultant came and found out some 
wrinkles in our plan, so that she couldn't hook us all up to the DSL. 
We're still on my mother's cable, but at least I can send e-mail out. 
So I'm all set with continuing the onslaught of Life Stories.  It is 
Saturday morning, Shabbos, and I'm sitting here in my pajamas, 
enjoying the time when no one else is up but me.  The house is quiet 
and there are no responsibilities.  This will last for at least 
fifteen more minutes.

	More minutes.


 
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The Move East


	I was less than two years old when my parents moved us all 
from San Francisco to Maryland, right outside of Washington, D.C. 
What I don't remember, but my mother tells me is so, is that my 
father went out to Washington, D.C. to his

	It was not a move of selection.  It was a forced move.  This 
was the McCarthy era, and my father worked for the government, the 
Navy, at Mare Island near San Francisco.  He was an electrical 
engineer.  He planned the wiring for the radio station over which 
Emperor Hirohito surrendered.  There's patriotism for you.  But 
someone had accused my father of being soft on communism, maybe even 
a communist himself.  And even though at the hearings at the House 
Unamerican Activities Committee he was exonerated of all communist 
connections, his superiors at Mare Island Naval Base called him in 
and said, "Mr. Shapiro, there is something unflattering on your 
record, and we advise that you seek other employment."

	So my parents sent resumes all over the country and the 
American Instrument Company in Washington, D.C. hired him.  I wish I 
could remember the month that my mother and my sister and I lived 
together without my father.  It would have been a paradisiacal time. 
My father was such a negative influence on the family.  Without him, 
as it has been without him since his death in 1996, would have been a 
pleasure.

	We followed after that trial month in the new job, all three 
of us.  We took a plane.  I remember that my mother had brought us 
each flat little farm animals and flat green trees and fences and a 
farm house cut out of wood for us.  The animals, trees, farmhouse and 
fences came in a gold mesh netting with a draw string.  This was for 
us to play with on the long trip east.  I know I was only eighteen 
months old, but I remember the trip vividly.  I looked down at the 
jigsaw puzzle of farmland below the plane, and I saw the arteries of 
highways cutting through the land, heading east.  I imagined that the 
moving van was somewhere on those highways.  And it was a race to see 
who arrived first, the plane or the moving van.  I loved the animals 
and trees, the farmhouse, the fences.  It was an ideal toy to play 
with on board the plane.  For lunch, they put pillows on our laps and 
set the tray of food on top of the pillow.  But wasn't I too young 
for that?  My sister, at four years old could have managed a pillow 
and tray, but at eighteen months?   When the food came, it looked 
like a toy to me:  fake, imitation, not real food, in an arrangement 
like a T.V. dinner.  I wasn't interested.  I wanted to get back to my 
farm animals, the farmhouse and the fences, the gold mesh netting 
that it came in.

	I looked out the window and was satisfied that the most 
beautiful rendering of the country had been laid out before me.  We 
beat the moving van by quite a few days.  Airplanes made travel 
unbelievably fast and simple.

	Anywhere you wanted to go from anywhere you were unlucky enough to be.

 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net