TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 140

Sat Feb 3 09:36:27 PST 2007

February 3, 2000000007

Dear Good People,

	So, it's the weekend.  I wrote down my 
list of things to do today, and it starts out: 
Do nothing.  Rest.  Enjoy your life.  So I am 
busy obeying that.  Then it dives into explaining 
what is going on or not, today.  It says:  no 
taxi.  no school.  no soap.  no worries.  And I 
am reflecting on that.  I slept in until eight 
o'clock.  Heaven help us!

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Vogelsang

	Vogelsang was my sweetheart.  I got her 
when she was a tiny kitten, a calico tortoise 
shell, a beautiful little thing she was.  She was 
very vocal, and very active.  I selected her for 
her curiosity and liveliness, because she was to 
serve a purpose outside of being my cat.  Bernie 
had just moved into my house in Richmond Annex. 
It had been weeks, and he still had his 
collection of antique cameras, and all his 
photography equipment, his stacks of photographs, 
and all his personal effects all over the floor. 
I'd asked him to put his things away, but asking 
him didn't do much good.  He'd just say, "All 
right.  I'll do it," and then he wouldn't.  So 
Vogelsang's job was to act spritely among 
Bernie's possessions on the floor, so that he'd 
have to pick them up or abandon them to the 
batting and leaping, the intense curiosity and 
playfulness of a kitten who knew what a mess was 
and was willing to help it along.  A week after 
Vogelsang arrived at home, Bernie's garbage was 
off the floor and put away.

	Vogel outlasted Bernie by sixteen years. 
Our marriage was desperate and short.  A little 
over a year after his arrival in my life, he was 
gone from it, in all his paranoid splendor, 
banished from my house, and moved into an 
apartment in the city.  The divorce papers were 
not far behind.

	Vogel was the best cat.  She was 
affectionate and sweet, characterful and loyal. 
She adapted well to every new situation, and 
every new person who crossed her path.  She 
stayed with me.  I was her home.  When we lived, 
just the two of us, on Sacramento Street, we 
would bed down at night together.  I slept on the 
living room floor.  I'd fold a blanket up and lay 
it down for a mattress.  Then I'd put a doubled 
sheet down and pile a blanket or two over it. 
There was a bed.  I'd crawl into this bed, and 
watch late night television on the small T.V. 
that I set on the floor about a couple of feet 
from my head.  I'd settle in, and then lift the 
covers.  Vogelsang would creep between the 
sheets, spelunk all the way to my feet, then turn 
around, come back up, and lie down in my embrace, 
throwing her arms around my neck.  She never gave 
me a moment of displeasure.  She's been gone now 
almost ten years, and I still miss her.

	I had to put her down.  She had developed 
bladder cancer, incurable, in her seventeenth 
year.  I decided it was time when I had to put a 
tarp over our bedding because she had become 
incontinent.  Once, she squatted down to pee on 
the tarp and I pushed her so she'd leap to the 
kitty box I'd set up near the bed.  But she just 
fell over, stiffly, on her side, and went into a 
short convulsion.  I'd waited too long.  She was 
suffering, and I was so fixated on not putting 
her down too soon, that I let the right time 
careen past.  I called the vet and I brought her 
in.  She wouldn't lie still for the I.V., so I 
had to hold her down while the vet inserted the 
needle in her front leg.  I watched her eyes as 
the poison was injected.  They stayed open.  The 
vet had to tell me it was all over.  I thought 
she'd close her eyes.

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Lao Da

	When Harry moved down to San Diego to 
teach at Grossmont College, he left me up in 
Berkeley, wandering around without a port in the 
storm.  I used to go with a book to eat dinner at 
the King Tsin, the first Mandarin Chinese 
restaurant in Berkeley.  After I'd been in a few 
times, one of the waiters noticed me.  He used to 
give me preferential treatment.  He'd bring me 
samples of new dishes, and when the bill came, it 
would be for practically nothing.  I'd ask what 
he'd done, and he'd say he wrote on the bill that 
I'd had a dish of lychee, when I'd actually had a 
whole meal with soup and a main dish.  We got to 
talking.  He was fresh off the boat really, the 
eldest son of the owner of the restaurant who was 
a brutal man that my new friend confided in me 
had beat him and his siblings into submission in 
preference to reasoning with them.  Since he was 
the oldest, they called him, "Lao Da", or, "Old 
Big".  So that is what I called him.  He would 
take me with him on his run into San Francisco 
Chinatown for produce and meat.  He would drive 
the big van with King Tsin on the side, and we'd 
make the rounds of all the big vendors.  They had 
a standing order with all of them.  He'd load it 
in and we'd continue on our rounds.  It was not 
long before all the vendors recognized me as the 
girl friend.  They'd take me into the back of the 
store and feed me from their private kitchens, 
all the real food that you never see on the menu.

	"Have you ever noticed," Lao Da said, 
"That there aren't many dogs in Chinatown?"  I 
gaped at him blankly.  "The black shiny ones are 
the best," he added.

	When Lao Da and I got to sex, we went 
crazy with it.  He'd never had a lover before, 
though he was no virgin by any means.  The 
Chinese girls didn't sleep with anyone before 
marriage, so he'd had sex with hippies, the 
sexual avant garde women who picked him up hitch 
hiking, and women whom he picked up hitch hiking. 
And then there was I, a nut case for sure, but a 
clean and intelligent one.  We made love on every 
surface of the King Tsin's kitchen after he 
closed the place down and locked it up.  I know 
how close the Peking Duck came to being part of a 
menage a trois.  We knew no limits.  But 
eventually it all caught up with me.  Lao Da was 
really in love with me.  And I was truly in love 
with Harry down in the southland of California. 
Lao Da was practically illiterate in English, 
though he was plenty smart enough and would 
learn.  But his world was entirely different than 
mine.  He certainly didn't understand western 
classical music, and could barely get the jokes I 
whipped up.  The attraction was fierce, but for 
the wrong reasons to sustain a long term 
relationship.  Could he go to a gallery opening 
and comment on the artwork?  Would he read my 
writing and be able to grasp the references to my 
cultural heritage?  And then, I didn't know a 
thing about the structure of a Chinese family.  I 
would be the foreign devil.  It was only what it 
was at the moment, and would not last, but I'd 
had a history of mistaking wild affairs with the 
stuff of permanence.  When Lao Da asked me to 
marry him, I had to say no, and he gave me a much 
needed lecture on what I didn't know about love. 
He did it in English, even though his wasn't that 
good.  But I understood his wisdom.   After he 
left and closed the door behind him, I put my 
face in my hands and cried bitterly.

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-- 

Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net