TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 203

[Tobie Shapiro]

April 20, 2000000007


Dear Willing Lagubriants,

	No, I have no idea what that means.  But there it is.

	Today, as I found out many years ago, is 
Hitler's birthday.  It is also my sister's and 
her husband's anniversary.  They didn't know it 
at the time they got married, but they know it 
now, because I told my sister one day when she 
was abusing me, and I was scrambling for 
something with which to fight back.  It stopped 
the abuse cold, in an instant.  "Well, thanks," 
is all she said.  Then she walked away.

	Trouble is, it's no longer a surprise, so 
I'm all set up to send them a few e-mail 
anniversary cards today.  I pick weird and 
surreal ones.  Cards that are funny because the 
makers take them seriously, or cards that stretch 
the mind trying to figure out what the heck they 
mean.

	My anniversaries were on unremarkable 
days to the rest of the world.  July twentieth 
for the first one, July eighteenth for the second 
one, and October fifth for the third.   Well, it 
turned out that July twentieth was the day the 
men landed on the moon (one small step for man, 
one rehearsed step for mankind).  So that's out 
as unremarkable.  October fifth always turned out 
to be open house night at Alex's and Ben's 
schools.  So that's what we did for our 
anniversary: run from this class to that one, 
villainman taking the science and math classes, I 
taking the arts, history, social studies, 
literature classes.  It was okay, actually.  We 
were never very good at celebrating our 
anniversary.  We'd go out to some restaurant that 
we always went to, and order what we always 
ordered, try to act festive, then go home and pay 
the sitter.

	Now I have no anniversary.  One less 
present to buy.  One less time to dress up and 
look nice.  So there are plusses.





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                                     ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
 
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Finding the Man

	There was a time in my life when the 
undercurrent and the overcurrent were finding the 
man.  The drive begins with the onset of the 
awareness of boys as that other species, the ones 
we finally nest with.  It comes on slowly. 
Usually the sign that this period of your life 
has begun is a crush on some boy in class.  You 
stare at him, wonder about him.  You fixate on 
the way he looks and moves, his expressions, his 
language.  I think there is an instinct in 
selection.  We seek out people who share some 
look or behaviour with those with whom we are 
familiar: some look, some language, some gesture 
that we can read, or think we can read.  There is 
always that possible error in judgment.

	I thought I could read him, but he turned 
out to be speaking a whole other language.

	The first crush I had that involved a 
sexual zing was in the seventh grade with Ronnie 
La Salle.  Ronnie La Salle was a thin, dark 
haired kid with gangly limbs and clean looks.  He 
was a little stiff.  He was not the class clown, 
or the class intellect, the class leader or the 
class jock.  He was a little shy.  His skin was 
very pale white, with a few red dots of the 
beginnings of acne.  He blushed frequently and it 
turned him a vibrant pink.  You could just sense 
the heat coming off of him.  I hadn't the 
foggiest notion why I liked him.  I didn't know 
him.  I didn't even know his circle of friends. 
He was in my home room and English/Social Studies 
class with Mr. Garcia.  On Joe Garcia, I had one 
of my, "daddy," crushes.  I consciously imagined 
him to be my father instead of the one that I had 
at home.  Joe Garcia noticed me, and there were 
rumours that Tobie Shapiro was teacher's pet.  He 
held my work up as an example, called on me 
whenever I raised my hand, and talked to me after 
class.

	Ronnie La Salle sat a few rows in front 
of me and closer to the door.  That mysterious 
drive had me staring at him.  There was a sudden 
burst of sexual adrenalin that went through me 
like a shock of static electricity when he looked 
at me, when he was standing close by.  I didn't 
know at all what to make of this, and I don't 
think I fantasized kissing him.  Just the 
fixation and the electricity.  I wondered what he 
thought of me.  Did he notice me?  Shapiro, the 
teacher's pet?

	Our class had a party at one of the 
parents' homes.  I cannot recall the occasion, 
but Joe Garcia was in charge of the games to 
amuse us.  One of the games started with a fleet 
of balloons.  We were to pair off, girl/boy, 
girl/boy, and put one of these balloons between 
us.  The object was to pop the balloon just using 
your two bodies: no pins, no pencils, no tools at 
all.  Mr. Garcia paired us up.  He called off two 
names, handed them a balloon and had them wait 
for the signal to start.  He put me with Ronnie 
La Salle.  I flushed red.  I chickened out.  I 
refused.  Mr. Garcia was playing Cupid, but I was 
not ready for phase two, which would be actual 
social contact.  He urged me to play, but I was 
resolute.  He finally gave up, found another girl 
for Ronnie.  It probably surprised him: this 
vibrating, obvious crush, and a refusal to go 
near him.  But that's part of the first phases of 
that era in your life.  That's the one where you 
secretly like someone but never let him know. 
Him knowing would be unthinkable.

	From all that innocence eventually 
evolves a full fledged woman who has all the 
equipment and is not afraid to use it.  It takes 
time.  There are forays into exchanges of 
affections.  This is where the feeling is mutual. 
That's a strange development.  I was completely 
unprepared.  I knew all the facts about sex, but 
nothing whatever about courting.  A whole book of 
rules applies.  No one knows what they are.  But 
we are mortified when we transgress.

	It's from then on that the undercurrent 
and overcurrent are to find the man.  The man is 
not doing the same thing that we are.  We are 
looking for the man.  The man is looking for a 
flock of women, any woman who has legs that go up 
all the way and a hole.  If he's attracted to her 
in some way, so much the better.  But he's not 
looking for someone to nest with.  Nesting 
doesn't enter into the picture.  The primordial 
drive is to impregnate, impregnate as many women 
as possible.  That's how the species is 
perpetuated.  And here we are, among the flock of 
women, dreaming of forever, writing our names a 
dozen times, substituting his last name for ours. 
What would it be like to spend forever with the 
man?  We are trained for this from an early age.

	When you have a fresh new apple, hold it 
in one hand and hold the stem in the other.  Now 
twist the stem.  For every revolution, count 
through the alphabet.  A, B, C, D, E . . . If the 
stem breaks off on F, you will marry a man whose 
last name begins with F.

	Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief. 
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief.  Soldier, 
sailor, tinker, tailor.  Count buttons, count 
toenail clippings, count pebbles on the ground. 
Land on, "Tinker," and after you find out what a 
tinker is, you will marry one.

	For as many years as it takes you to bear 
children, that is the number of years that are 
occupied by looking for the man.  After you are a 
mother, you take a fresh new look at the man.  I 
took a long time to have children.  I was thirty 
nine when Feyna and Meyshe were born.  So it was 
decades that I looked for the man.

	My mother asked me, "Where do you find 
these men?"  She was not smiling.

	"Leave no stone unturned," I answered.

	Yes, I found them under rocks.  I found 
them behind counters.  I found them in the 
process of farting their lives away.  My talent 
for selection was notorious shit.  How could I 
have coupled with some of those men?  Oh, well, I 
fooled myself into believing them to be 
brilliant, gifted, full of potential, maybe 
misunderstood by the masses, but saved as gold by 
me.  This skewed vision, I could achieve with 
desperation and delusion: the two Ds.  There are 
other Ds as well: death, doom, destruction, 
defeat, despair, disaster, desolation, 
debilitation.  And those applied, too.

	I forgot dung.  There was also dung.

	I never lusted after a man's body.  A 
photo gallery of my, "the man," would attest to 
that.  It was brains, ingenuity, personality, 
integrity.  And that turned out to be defined by 
all those Ds, as well.  The megawatts of power I 
wasted, the sink hole of creative energy I 
expended, the sentient synapses I lured into 
somnolence.  The things I could have done with 
the time I devoted to seeking the man.  The 
wisdom trashed by that instinctive, consuming 
drive.  I could have lived a whole other life, 
ascended to uncharted spiritual heights, attained 
unfathomable accomplishments.  But, no, I had to 
seek a soul mate.

	My soul mate, it turns out, so far, is 
myself.  The rest of the forevers never worked 
out.  The fevered pitch of the full hormonal 
quest subsides after a few decades, and there is 
a chance, at last, to take a breath, contemplate 
love as a higher plane, a sacred state, the home 
of reality, the glimpse of God.



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                                     ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
 
*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*°*
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net