TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 38

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 24, 2000000000000000000000000000000000000000006


Dear We,

	I heard from the people who owned the 
house I was going to rent.  The ones that called 
me last minute and told me that they'd sold the 
house and couldn't rent it to me -- those ones. 
They said that the sale fell through and would I 
want to rent the house again?  Lord, does this 
present a bit of a dilemma.  Sure, I'd like to 
have a place to live other than my mother's 
house.  Do I trust these people not to sell the 
house out from under me again?  No.  What about 
this:  it cost me ten thousand dollars to move 
everything into storage and some to my mom's 
house.  There were 450 boxes.  I said that 
yesterday, I think.  I keep getting surprised by 
it.  Now, to turn around right away and spend 
another several thousand dollars moving 
everything from storage into the rental, and 
everything from my mom's house to pack up again 
and send to the new house....the new house 
doesn't even have a garage.  I'd have to find a 
place to park on the street, and carry in 
groceries from there.  I am licking my wounds 
from the physical, financial, and psychological 
expenditure of moving here, and to pick up and do 
it again only a week after the first great 
disruption.......I don't know.  Anyone want to 
weigh in?  I'd appreciate any advice you can give 
me.  I know, I know, get it in writing this time. 
But get what in writing, and what about the fact 
that there would be a year's lease, and what with 
the upcoming sale of our old house, I'll be in a 
position to buy a house.  If I'm in the middle of 
the lease, how can I do that?  Oy oy oy.  Moving.

	Here's more moving.


 
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Penguin on the Floor

	When I was eight years old, in the 
Spring, my parents told us that we would be 
moving back to California, to Berkeley, a place I 
knew nothing about.  When we visited out west 
from Maryland, we never strayed from San 
Francisco to the other side of the bay.  To me, 
Berkeley was a complete unknown, and a 
destination that I rued.  I was comfortable in 
Silver Spring.  This is what I knew.  I had my 
friends, my orientation, my house, my whole small 
life, in a few blocks' radius.  I didn't want to 
move, but I didn't say much about it.  The move 
was already decided.  There was no sense in 
opposing it.

	I ran to the schoolyard where my 
classmates were playing.  I see this scene as if 
I am above it and behind me, watching my back as 
I run through the grass toward my friends.

	"We're moving.  We're moving to Berkeley!"

	I was asked what Berkeley was, and I 
didn't know.  What IS Berkeley?  I didn't know 
there was a University in Berkeley, and I 
certainly was unaware of its reputation for being 
a hot bed of radicalism.  Nor would I have 
comprehended what a hot bed or a radical was. 
The plan was to move after the school year was 
over.  I was in the third grade, and our teacher 
was Miss Malofsky, a dark haired, beautiful woman 
who had a 28" television in her apartment.  I 
know, because I saw it there.  What I was doing 
in her apartment can only be Halloween related. 
28" was enormous.  The set took up the whole 
apartment.  It was the dominant piece of 
furniture in a day when televisions were 
furniture.  My mother has my autograph book from 
the third grade.  There is a picture of Miss 
Malofsky in the front, right after the 
principal's and vice principal's pictures.  Then 
there are many pages designated for friends.  But 
there aren't many pictures, and no one wrote in 
the book about our immanent move.

	The last project of the year that we did 
in the third grade was to draw and paint a 
picture of our idea of the evolutionary ancestor 
of a current species.  I had chosen a penguin, 
and the rendering depicted a black and white 
penguin with two rows of sharp teeth, because I 
imagined everything being fiercer back in 
prehistoric days.  You see what progress has been 
made in the teaching of evolution since the late 
1950s.  Time marches backwards.

	It was the picture of the prehistoric 
penguin that was laid out on our bedroom floor 
(Dana and I shared a room).  Before grabbing it 
up and leaving for the airport, Dana and I 
determined to kiss every room in the house, so we 
started in the kitchen and worked our way through 
the dining and living rooms, then the bedrooms 
and bathroom, and we went down the stairs into 
the basement to distribute our kisses there. 
Then, being told to hurry, we rushed out to the 
car.  We were on the airplane before I remembered 
that I'd left my prehistoric penguin on the 
bedroom floor.  And that is the way I remember 
the house at last, empty of all furniture, with 
that picture spread out on the bedroom floor.

 
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Early Commercial Uses of the Computer

	I was in on the earliest stages of 
computer dating.  Though it seems impossible to 
believe now, it was not so long ago that 
computers were huge monolithic machines the size 
of rooms that were run with computer cards, thick 
paper sheets roughly the size and shape of a 
dollar bill, with holes punched in them.  But we 
still used IBM Selectric typewriters, not word 
processors, and if you were typing a fifty page 
report and had to insert an extra three 
paragraphs on page ten, you had to type the whole 
thing over again, from page ten.  None of this 
moving around the text within a document.  We 
didn't even call them documents.  It was a 
report, or a paper, or an essay, or a short 
story, a novel.  Now, everything is a document 
and "report", or, "novel", would be the 
sub-species.

	Way back in those early days, someone did 
figure out that you could fill out a form stating 
your personality traits, likes and dislikes and 
match it to a compatible form filled out by 
someone else.  It was the brand new thing, and 
the experiment was daring.  I was an eighteen 
year old, fresh from high school, and the 
promotional letter I received in the mail 
interested me.  There was no dating going on by 
other means, so why not try this?  I spent a long 
time filling out the form.  Put an X in the box. 
Choose between a, b, c, and d.  There is 
something about filling out forms that I like. 
My opportunity to mess around with the powers 
that be.

	Sex:  no thank you
	Marital status:  low

	So I sent in my form with my money, and 
waited the two to four weeks for the process to 
unfold.  I got in the mail an individual letter, 
written to me, not to, "dear client".  They 
explained that I was so unusual that the computer 
banks could not find a match for me. 
Congratulations!  Wasn't this wonderful!?  I 
thought, "Congratulations, Adolf Hitler.  We've 
found no match for you."  I felt weirder than 
usual, but I took it in stride.  Did they return 
my money?  No, they did not.  They asked my 
permission to keep trying, and I gave my ascent. 
A few weeks later, I got another letter.  This 
time they were pleased to inform me that they'd 
found one match, and they gave me his name and 
phone number.  I called.  He sounded reasonable, 
though I couldn't tell if he sounded compatible. 
We made a date to see a movie near the campus of 
the University.  There was a theater on Telegraph 
Avenue that showed art films, and this is where 
we would meet.  Then, we could go to the 
Mediterraneum Cafe afterwards to get acquainted.

	I remember the odd movie we saw.  It was 
called, "Hallelujah, the Hills."  about two men 
in love with the same young thing, off in the 
snowy winter of New England, maybe Vermont. 
While they were competing for her affections, she 
ran off with a third fellow, a big galoot of a 
guy with a full black beard and moustache, and an 
accompanying growl.  Then the two rejected 
suitors go off to the hills together to forget 
her.  It was a quirky film and I've never seen or 
heard about it since.  But I liked it.  This was 
what I wanted to talk about at the cafe 
afterwards:  did you notice the scene at the 
bonfire where they were dancing, and the Japanese 
characters appeared on the side of the screen, as 
if it were a wood block print?

	But I didn't get a chance to discuss the 
film, because my date commandeered the 
conversation regaling me with stories of the most 
he was ever stoned: on weed, on heroin, on 
amphetamines.  He was very active about his 
inactivity it seemed.  I was appalled and I 
wanted to go home right away, but I was afraid to 
ask that he get in his car and take me back. 
Back to where I came from, back before computer 
dating and all the wisdom of the computer cards 
with their little holes in them.  It made a 
Luddite of me for a while.  I cannot recall how I 
got him to the end of his discussion about drugs, 
needles, pipes and inhalers, and urged him to his 
car.  And I was fairly certain that he was 
probably high on something other than life at the 
moment.  I couldn't drive yet, and I was too 
chicken to take the bus and walk at night.  It 
was a draw which was more dangerous.  I do 
remember that he tried to kiss me, and I averted 
my face.

	"Well, I tried," he said, as he turned 
round and headed down the front stairs.

 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net