TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 197

[Tobie Shapiro]

April 8, 20000000007


Dear People of Diverse Backgrounds,

	Today all the stores are closed, and I 
could go down to the Safeway lot and drive my car 
around, practicing parking, testing out the 
turning radius, shouting out the window.  (How 
about when the disheveled stranger barks out his 
window, "I can fix that dent for you, cheap!")

	It is also still Passover week, and we 
are eating no leavened bread, only matzah.  As 
long as I've got enough horseradish and 
charoshes, I'm fine with matzah.  Meyshe has 
gotten salmon and matzah sandwiches for lunch all 
week, and little bowls of charoshes with a spoon 
and a few extra matzah.  He finishes everything. 
Good boy!

	There is something wrong with our 
refrigerator.  The milk is freezing.  A bowl of 
cut up mushrooms are solid like ice.  The soup 
was crystals.  You could skate on the surface. 
So I think I turned the cooler down, but I didn't 
know which direction to turn it.  It didn't help, 
so I turned it the other way.  That's when the 
lettuce froze solid and the fruit was ruined.  So 
I turned it the other way.  Turned it until the 
motor went off.  Now it will probably heat things 
up.  It didn't occur to me until recently that 
there could be something doing with the unit 
itself.  After all, it's not as if someone went 
in there and fussed with the controls before all 
this happened.  Another repairman, another 
hundred dollars.





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Do you have to be nuts?

	My favourite subjects in high school were 
Music, of course, English and Art.  That 
qualified me for being the lady in the arts in my 
family.  My brother, Daniel, made his mark early 
on in the sciences.  In school, he excelled in 
every hard science subject known to students. 
His greatest gripe was his height.  He was short, 
slow to develop.  We were all short.  But for a 
boy, being on the short side caused him grief, 
teasing and bullying.  When he was in high 
school, thugs routinely shook him down for 
whatever cash he was stupid or hopeful enough to 
carry.  He'd come home with a fresh report every 
day.  His brain, however, was the size of the 
beast from twenty thousand fathoms, and it worked 
so fast that most people couldn't even follow 
him.  My older sister had her favourite subjects, 
too, but I don't think she ever confided in me 
what they were.  She was good at Math, Algebra, 
Geometry, Biology, Chemistry, and any other 
science you could shake at her.  She also did 
well at History and English, though I don't know 
how much she liked them.  She got the good grades 
and the A plusses on her papers.  Work would come 
back to her with exclamation points all over it. 
The teachers lauded her, underlined sections of 
the paper and wrote, "Excellent!" in the margins. 
She had friends in school, but some of them 
didn't treat her so well, and she made a lot of 
enemies, or at least, hurt feelings and seething 
followed in her wake.

	I was Madam Arts.  What did the rest of 
the world think of a bright girl who got As in 
Orchestra, Music History, Art, and English?  They 
thought she was taking all the easy As, a 
slacker.  And in my family, I always had the 
feeling that I was the dumb one.  I struggled 
just to slash my way through Math and Algebra.  I 
got good grades in the classes, I just loathed 
them.  I groaned every time homework was assigned 
in the sciences.  I just didn't like squeezing my 
mind around it all.  English came naturally to 
me.  I was the oddball in the middle row who 
loved analyzing sentences, had fun with the 
grammar homework where we were asked to employ 
two participial phrases, a gerund, a dependent 
clause and a passive verb in a sentence.  I was 
considered weird.

	In my junior year in high school, the 
English teacher assigned us to write poetry, and 
I liked that, too.  I was taken aside when the 
poetry assignment came back.  The teacher and I 
sat on the stairs, and she went over my tortured 
poem:

	"We choke the dead with selfish tears . . ."

	She liked it.  Well, it was virtually 
marinating in neurosis, and like so many 
adolescent poets, and young expressive artistes, 
I confused neurosis with depth.  Depth was, "Look 
how hurt I am."  Depth was an invitation to watch 
me bleed, swoon, writhe in the agony of life. 
Woe!

	In my Music History class, I remember a 
heated discussion about Beethoven.  Beethoven was 
a tortured soul, his disheveled head tipping 
right off its stem.  He ranted.  He fumed.  He 
sued everyone he could.  Everything drove him 
crazy.  He was not happy.  Most of the class was 
of the stated opinion that Beethoven's genius was 
linked to his craziness.  In order to be a 
genius, a person had to be twisted, miserable, 
neurotic at least, but a true high density genius 
had to be psychotic.  In their psychosis was 
their strength, their talent, their immortality. 
I was the sole defender of the theory that if 
anything, Beethoven's genius was hampered by his 
psychological rat's nest.  If only he'd been 
happy!  Think how much more he could have done.

	It was an argument of survival.  I dearly 
wanted to believe that my genius was not caused 
by my ample, nearly florid, neuroses.  The worry 
crept into my head frequently.  What if I were 
free of my father, free of my upbringing, my 
damage repaired, my anguish abated.  What if the 
price to pay for it would be that I'd be stripped 
of my personality, my creative spark, my 
identity.  My identity was as an expressive 
artist.  I was as near to God as the last story 
I'd written, the last string quartet I'd played, 
the last song I'd composed, the last work of art 
I'd produced.  I was no one without my 
proliferation of creative product.

	So, were my good grades and my genius due 
to being sick in the head?  Did I have to be sick 
in the head to have an identity?  I'd have to be 
crazy to think that.  Thank God.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net