TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 139

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 2, 20000000007


Dear Members of the Clan,

	All this talk about the young man who was 
killed by the inexcusable driver outside your 
Trader Joe's (#17).  I cannot imagine seeing the 
note and not contributing, whether I'd been there 
or not.  I was not there, and yet I would 
contribute something if you told me how to do it. 
It is just something we do for each other.

	It is interesting to me that some people 
can shut out the pain of the world, even if it is 
right at their front doors, let alone on the 
other side of the earth.  We have to learn to do 
this, of course.  "I know that in Darfur there is 
chaos and murder, yet, today, for this one hour, 
we are going to eat our lunch and talk to each 
other about the latest exhibit at the Asian Art 
Museum."  If we couldn't do that, we would 
expire.  There is just too much suffering in this 
world.  But there is also joy, and we sometimes 
forget to empathize with that.

	Somewhere, a young woman is gathering 
wild flowers from her back yard and singing. 
There are people hearing her sing who are 
transported into joy.  Their joy is passed on to 
their children who feel that Mommy is full of 
happiness.  Mommy goes to the market and buys 
beets for supper, and while she is there, she 
smiles specially at the grocer who feels 
rejuvenated by her smile and brings this pleasure 
home to share with the family.  So many wild 
flowers, one song and so much joy.  We are human 
beings and we allow these feelings to break in 
upon us, the delight and the sorrow.  But we have 
to tame it.  "I know that right now, I am elated 
because I heard a man singing to himself in the 
park, but right now, I have to be sober because 
we are having an important meeting about the 
divorce settlement.  I will not burst out in 
song."  Sure.  It would be inappropriate.

	If we could hold on to these feelings 
when we need to and let them go when we need to, 
it would make things simpler, easier.  But easier 
is not always better.  The actor, playwright who 
was killed by that car in front of your Trader 
Joe's (#17) should be remembered and celebrated, 
and his parents should know that he was not alone 
in his moment of death.  The only thing worse 
than your own child dying would be bearing the 
tragedy that your child died alone and forgotten. 
Those close to him should know he was tended to 
and soothed, encouraged and held.

	I know my children well.  If I were to 
tell them about the incident in front of Trader 
Joe's in Los Angeles, they would gasp and hold 
their hearts.  They would each volunteer to send 
a few dollars to the fund.  My children do not 
have that ability to employ the paradox:  there 
is anguish in the world, but I will continue to 
tell my joke.  Especially Meyshe, because of his 
autism, and also because of the way he is.  He 
crumples over headlines in the newspaper.  He 
perseverates on bad tidings.  He felt the misery 
of the victims of the Tsunami.  He feels the 
agony of all the tragic players in the mid-east 
drama.  I have to hide newspapers from him, or 
turn over the magazine to remove the influence of 
the article on some fresh new disease devastating 
a region on the globe.

	Your co-workers who can walk by the 
message you posted are just too good at the 
paradox game.  Sometimes when you turn yourself 
off, you can't turn yourself on again.




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Rapture of heights

	Many times we took Meyshe and Feyna to 
the Oakland Zoo when they were very little.  It 
was about a twenty minute drive to the zoo, in 
the east bay hills in south Oakland.  It was 
called the Knowland Park Zoo.  My mother told me 
stories about Knowland, an arch reactionary 
newspaper owner.  "What controls the news 
controls what we know".  The lesson stuck on me. 
Every time we took the kids to the zoo I'd think 
of Knowland the fascist public figure, and I'd 
feel like I was betraying a cause by going.  So 
we were using his facilities, his grounds, his 
picnic tables, his train ride, and his little 
kids' amusement park.  We used his bathrooms and 
we fed his baby pygmy goats, and Meyshe even rode 
on his huge scraping tortoise, on its glacier 
like run to the far side of the pen.  We looked 
at his elephants and giraffes, his primates 
hooting in their encampments, the whole animal 
kingdom.  And right there, next to all the cages 
and enclosures was a little known exhibit, 
"Family with twins.  Homo Sapiens Sapiens, North 
America.  Please do not feed the animals.  They 
will have heart attacks, or die of diabetes."

	Chasing after Meyshe was something we 
took turns at, David and I.  "Meet you over at 
the baby zoo in a half hour.  We'll trade off." 
One of the nicest parts about the Oakland Zoo was 
that, if we timed it right, we could feed the 
kids lunch, clean up, change them, and hit the 
freeway.  On the twenty minute drive back, they 
would usually fall asleep and take a nap for 
about an hour and a half, giving us a needed 
break.  It didn't always work, and I'd been known 
to have turned around and headed back toward the 
zoo until they nodded off.

	Feyna would look at every single cage at 
the zoo.  She did not wander.  In fact she lagged 
behind.  She was carefully checking the exhibits 
off in her head, missing nothing.  For this 
reason, we rarely got past the tiger before we 
had to pick up and run to meet Meyshe and David 
who had had their exercize and should have been 
breathless.  It was then my turn to calm Meyshe 
down so he could see part of the zoo, not just 
pinball through it.  It must have bothered him to 
have to let up the pace.  He'd squirm at first. 
But I'd walk with him, holding his hand to keep 
him by my side and letting go only if he stayed 
beside me, grabbing him immediately if he started 
to dash.

	One visit, when the twins were three 
years old and we'd met up at the half hour mark, 
I took the notion in my head of bringing them on 
the sky train.  The sky train was elevated some 
times two hundred feet above the floor of the 
zoo, and took a path over the giraffes, the 
camels and a forest that hugged the hill up 
toward the rim of the park.  Each gondola had 
room enough for three.  There was a safety bar 
that lowered over you and served also as an arm 
rest.  The sky train looped from one supporting 
tower to the next, maybe a hundred feet between 
towers.  There were about eight of them.  It 
passed all the towers and then turned around the 
last one, coming back the other way.  It looked 
like a graceful ride with a lovely view.  David 
asked me if I were sure I wanted to take them, 
and I assured him I was.

	We stood in line, Meyshe squirming on one 
side of me and Feyna examining the pavement on 
the other.  We moved up in line.  When it's time 
to get on, you're directed to stand on the 
markers and then the gondola, swinging from its 
harness above, sweeps you up, while you 
simultaneously hop onto the seat.  Then it sways 
out over the platform and heads up the hill. 
When it came our turn to stand on the markers, I 
realized an error in my judgment.  It wasn't 
going to be quite as easy as I thought.  I would 
have to lift both Meyshe and Feyna and put them 
on the seat while I hopped onto it myself.  A 
little spurt of adrenalin shot through my veins, 
and somehow I picked them up, one in each arm, 
and placed them on either side of me.  The safety 
bar came down in front of us and we swung out 
over the zoo, far below.  Then I saw my second 
error of judgment.  The safety bar was only a 
safety bar if you were a full grown adult.  Both 
the twins were small enough to slide under the 
bar and plummet to their deaths onto some 
unsuspecting tourist.  The adrenalin surged and I 
held onto each of them for their dear lives.  As 
the serenity of the elevation, the quiet, the 
wind in my hair, the gentle swaying of the 
gondola would have soothed me under different 
circumstances, with my two toddlers in the seat, 
I clenched my teeth and held onto them.

	I thought about Meyshe who was always 
careening through life, bouncing into walls, not 
looking where he was going, just crashing through 
because he was in a big hurry to get nowhere.  I 
imagined him squirming for his last time, and 
slipping away from me.  I'd grab for his arm, but 
he'd be flailing and he'd hurtle out of my reach, 
I'd have to watch him fall, down, down, into the 
tree tops, a look of surprise on his face.  A 
shiver went up my spine and I shook the thought 
away.  I thought about Feyna who was so intent on 
every detail of each tiny thing that she could 
easily get lost inspecting one of her own hairs 
and slide out from under the bar following her 
brother into the treetops, onto the floor of the 
zoo so far below us.  I imagined her reaching for 
me, saying, "Mama," for the last time.  And there 
I would be, a lonesome passenger, no longer a 
Mommy, having to wait until the bucket I was 
travelling in had finished the ten minute ride 
and come into port before I could report the 
tragedy.  I stiffened and kept one eye on each 
child.  Wall eyed and deeply distressed, I sat 
there in the middle, breathing shallowly, living 
on the edge of an emergency.  As we passed the 
towers where the cables arched up to be caught by 
the supporting beams, I noted that each tower had 
huge staples in its side, climbing up from the 
ground to the very top.  Obviously this could be 
an escape route if something went wrong, or if a 
mechanic needed to climb up there to fix a dinged 
wheel, a loose connection, a stuck carriage.  I 
envisioned stopping the ride and carrying my 
children down those hammered in rungs, bringing 
them to safety.

	I stared at them.  They were both frozen 
in place, not moving a millimeter, holding onto 
the safety bar.  I'd never seen them so still 
except when they were asleep.  Could they be 
going through the same hell I was going through? 
We looped around the furthest tower and headed 
back home.  I saw the platform in the far 
distance, and it was a haven, a sacred altar that 
we were on our pilgrimage to visit.  When we got 
back, I would kneel down and kiss the cement.  I 
would grab my children by their hearts and thank 
God for them.

	There was no movement in our little 
flying bucket.  We were all three of us fixed 
like statues.  We rode out the return trip 
without speaking or even making a sound.  When we 
entered into port and had to jump off the seat to 
the ground, I lifted them again, and put them 
down.  Meyshe shook himself free and ran off 
toward the picnic tables.  Feyna dropped to the 
ground to explore the crack in the pavement, the 
tuft of moss growing through.



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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net