TheBanyanTree: More stories from a life of stories

[Tobie Shapiro]

September 12, 200000000006


Dear Readers,

	Here are more stories I've lifted from my life.  I haven't 
altered them, so they are as true as my memory is.

 
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	When Dweller and I were living on Chestnut Street, he had a 
lot to say about my habits and rituals, my axioms of being.  He 
thought, of course, that I should be more like him.

	One thing he did that he thought I ought to be able to do is 
that we should have no problem peeing in front of each other.  I had 
a problem.  I think some things have to be kept private.  And I draw 
the line before the bathroom door.  But he was fairly adament.  If 
you were intimate with someone, you should be able to pee in their 
presence.

	Our bathroom was the connecting room between the front and 
back bedrooms.  It was a long narrow room.  The tub, over which there 
was a shower head, was right inside the door from the master bedroom. 
Right beyond the tub was a built in clothes hamper, a large tall 
affair that formed a wall on the other side of the tub.    It opened 
up with a hatch on top of it, hinged about a couple of feet back from 
the front.  It also formed a divider between the tub and the toilet. 
Then beyond the toilet was the door to the second bedroom, in the 
back of the house.

	I didn't like Dweller insisting that I pee in front of him. 
So, one day, when he was sitting on the toilet working on something 
fecal, I unlatched the hook and eye lock by passing a card up between 
the hook and the eye, and I entered the bathroom.  Dweller was 
sitting there concentrating on his business, and I came to sit on the 
clothes hamper next to the toilet.  I smiled at him, sweetly, and 
hummed a tune.

	"How ya doin'?"

	He grimaced an embarrassed smile and was going to break down 
laughing out of humiliation, and out of the sheer fact that he'd lost 
this argument and I'd won.  He was eager to pee in person, but not 
poo in person.  From then on, he kept his mouth shut about communal 
peeing.

 
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	When I was still too little to choose for myself, my parents 
took us to the Smithsonian Institute every Sunday it seemed.  There 
was always a lot to see, of course, but of course, they chose for us. 
My sister liked the blood and guts stuff.  I liked the dinosaur bones 
and the big glass cases of scenes with primitive humans working 
around a fire, or animals going about their (stuffed) business in the 
wilds.

	One Sunday there was an exhibit that I knew from listening to 
what was going on above me, was about "Pathology", a word I couldn't 
have understood and probably couldn't read yet.  My mother instructed 
my father not to bring me in to the pathology exhibit because it 
would frighten  me.  She was going to go with my sister into the red 
building over there, she explained.  Take Tobie someplace else.  The 
next thing I remember after  my mother trotting off with Dana was my 
father's face looming close above me.  He said, "You won't be scared, 
will you?!  It's just photographs."  He may even have asked me to 
promise I wouldn't be scared.  And I, naturally, wanted to please my 
father, so I said, no, I wouldn't be scared, that I promised not to 
be scared, an impossible thing to promise.  I didn't know what I'd be 
up against.  So my father took me by the hand and marched up the 
stairs into the Pathology exhibit.  The rooms were dark in my 
recollection.  The walls were plastered with back lit photographs. 
This is as I remember it, these glowing pictures in the dark.  It may 
not have been dark and the pictures may not have glowed, but in my 
history, this was a glowing and glowering event.  The very first 
photograph I viewed was of the face of a person ravaged by small pox. 
The entire exhibit was about small pox, I think.  I saw this 
miserable afflicted, disfigured, dying human being, and I screamed. 
Somehow my mother appeared with Dana in tow, and scolded my father 
for doing exactly what she warned him not to do.  She told him to 
take me back outside, or maybe we all went outside at that point. 
Then my father got angry at me.  His huge moon of a face loomed large 
again above me.

	"You promised you wouldn't be scared," he growled at me, 
angrily.  "You broke your promise!"  I didn't know which to be more 
frightened of: small pox, or my father.  History tells us I had more 
to fear from my father.

         ;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;?;

	There is more.  There will be more.

	Yours,

	Tobie
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net