TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 141

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 4, 20000007


Dear intimate crowd,

	My nephew and his wife are down here from 
Seattle for a few days with their one year old 
baby boy, Lumen.  (Yes, Lumen, a measurement of 
light).  This is my mother's first great 
grandchild and she's wiggy over him.  We all are 
actually.  He's my grand nephew, after all. 
Dana's grandson, Jaron's nephew, Meyshe's and 
Feyna's cousin once removed.  Blood of our blood. 
He's awfully cute.  Honest.  Here's the surprise: 
he eats whatever they give him.  He likes spicy 
food, weird food, vegetables and squid, scrambled 
eggs and Ethiopian enjira.  Now, does this mean 
that he's going to be a foodie?  Or does it mean 
that he has vestigial taste buds and won't be 
able to tell the difference between apples and 
pears, chicken and beef liver?  I've only seen 
him a few times, but I am struck by how relaxed 
his parents are about him.  None of this nervous 
hovering.  But plenty of too much attention. 
That's what babies should get, according to me: 
too much attention.  So my sister is throwing 
another brunch at her house.  It is meant for a 
venue for showing off Lumen.  I love Lumen, but I 
don't like brunch.  I'm never hungry for that 
kind of food.  So I'll spend that much more time 
with the baby.  I'll live.




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Moving

	After the great fire of 1991, in which we 
lost everything but what little I could stash in 
the car, we moved seven times in three years.  We 
kept moving because we couldn't do permanent 
until we knew what sort of money we would have to 
buy a house, and we didn't know what sort of 
money we'd have until the insurance company paid 
us what we were due.  And the insurance company 
wouldn't pay us what we were due until we'd sued 
them right proper.  It took three years to sue 
them.

	The first place we moved was to Yvonne's 
house in Oakland.  That was the first night and a 
week following.  We thought at first that we were 
just camping there until we could go back to our 
house, but I didn't really think we'd go back 
there.  I suspected it was one of the houses that 
burned down.  On the day that the city of Oakland 
allowed us all to go back into the fire area and 
check on our houses, David and I left Feyna and 
Meyshe at Yvonne's house with Wyda in charge. 
Wyda had been helping us with Feyna and Meyshe 
since they were four days old.  She was a 
constant, a wise and unflappable presence in our 
lives.  Wyda had faith in Jesus and said she'd 
pay me fifty bucks if our house had burned down.

	"I'll remember that," I said as we walked out the front door.

	When we returned from our exploration, we 
opened the door, I saw Wyda and said immediately, 
"You owe me fifty bucks."

	She recoiled in disbelief.  She really 
didn't think our house would burn up; it felt 
permanent to her.  Jesus had let her down, but 
she kept up the faith nevertheless.  Those 
deities work in mysterious ways.

	I went to Feyna first, to give her the 
news.  She'd anticipated what I had to say, maybe 
even had overheard the news.  She hunkered down 
and tucked her head between her knees, put her 
hands over her ears.  If she couldn't hear it, it 
wouldn't have happened, which is a variation on, 
"These little yellow boots will fit my two big 
feet if I insist they will".  I tried to face 
her, but she swiveled away from me.  So I put my 
arms around her from behind.  I told her, "Feyna, 
you know that Papa and I went back to see if the 
house was still there.  It wasn't sweetheart. 
Our house burned down.  But Mama and Papa will 
take care of you, and we will all be fine.  We 
are all alive and well, and that is what's most 
important."  She pressed her hands harder over 
her ears.  I told her I had to go tell Meyshe.

	Meyshe was standing near the front door. 
I approached him and told him that the house was 
gone, but we were all together and would be all 
right.  He got a bewildered look on his face, and 
staggered around for a while.  Then he put his 
back up against the front door and slid down to 
the floor.

	"White house gone," he whimpered.  "White 
house gone.  Build a new white house."

	At Yvonne's house, we slept in the cellar 
with the cats and the fleas.  All of us in 
sleeping bags on the floor, the twins clinging to 
me from either side, David rolled over facing 
away from us.  He had his private mourning to 
which no one else was invited.  Those first few 
days at Yvonne's house are a blur.  There was so 
much we had to do to satisfy the city of Oakland, 
the county of Alameda, the state of California, 
the federal government and the insurance company. 
Forms to fill out, documents to file, 
bureaucratic lines to stand in, departments at 
which to register.  And then we'd return after a 
day of busyness to try to focus on the people 
around us.  Yvonne, Tom and Yvonne's son, Yuri. 
We couldn't stay at Yvonne's house forever.  The 
negotiations went on with my parents about 
whether we could stay with them until we found a 
rental.  It was agreed.  And we moved again, with 
our small clump of possessions, into my parents' 
house.  Alex and Ben took my brother's old place 
in the basement.  They had a whole floor to 
themselves, two bedrooms, a full bathroom.  It 
was like an apartment.  David and I and the twins 
slept in one room.  This was a choice.  There was 
another bedroom in which we could have put the 
twins, but that would mean that they would be 
separated from me during the night, and at other 
times during the day.  I didn't want them 
unprotected, and unaccompanied with my father in 
the house.  So we slept in one room together, the 
grown ups on the two single beds crammed 
together, even though they kept drifting apart, 
the twins on futons, their heads at our feet, 
with about a foot of space between the ends of 
our beds and their pillows.  But usually, they 
piled into bed with us.  Feyna, Mama, Meyshe, 
Papa, all in a row.  Feyna and I would play word 
games before falling asleep.  In the dark, I'd 
say something like, "Goodnight, curtain horse." 
And she'd say, "Goodnight, door book." 
"Goodnight, cabbage mountain."  "Goodnight, fish 
glass".  Then I'd sing to them both, the songs my 
grandmother sang to me when I was lying in my bed 
ready to close down for the night.

	We stayed in that room in the family 
manse from late October until late spring when we 
found a house to rent for three months.  Some 
lucky family had moved to England for a 
sabbatical, and we got to stay in their house. 
When we arrived we thought we were relieved, but 
then we realized we didn't have towels.  We 
didn't have a book.  We had nothing of our own. 
We'd been living in borrowed quarters for over 
half a year; there was no room for acquiring 
possessions.  Now, we were in our own rented 
house.  The twins would ask me, "Is this mine? 
Does this belong to the landlord?"  "May I touch 
this chair?  May I sit on this couch?"  This is 
when we bought the trampoline at Costco. 
Fourteen feet in diameter and able to accommodate 
several hundred pounds of human, the kids jumped 
out their frustrations on it.  I bounced on it to 
feel the wind in my hair.

	Ben was in high school and edgy with 
hormones, bristling with the angry urge to get 
the hell out of his parents' house.  He'd 
shoulder his way into the upstairs, carrying 
secretive bags to his room, roll up a towel and 
stuff it in the crack under his door, and still 
the unmistakable blossoming of marijuana smoke 
would curl out of the key hole, or through the 
door itself.  He was so serious about it, but it 
was kind of comical.  He was hiding his stoning 
from a baby boomer and a man who had smoked 
plenty of grass with his mother.

	In this house, we stayed for three 
months.  And during those three months, I looked 
for the next place to stay.  I reproduced an old 
photograph of the house we lost and added text to 
it, made a flyer that I tacked up all over town.

	"This is the house we lost on October 20, 
1991.  Help us find a new place to live.  Two 
grown ups, four children and one matronly 
neutered calico cat seek rental in Berkeley. 
Please contact . . . "

	We got no response from it.  But I did 
find a huge house for rent, cheap because the 
house was situated at the intersection of Hayward 
Fault Line and Slide Area.  It was a boat of a 
house, grand architecture, eight bedrooms, three 
floors, but you could see three inches of dead 
space between the stairs and the wall, just from 
earthquake activity, and slippage.  In the big 
one, this house would roll down the hill and 
break apart like crackers in soup.  But for the 
one year we'd be there, it was just a calculated 
risk we chose to take.  It wouldn't be available 
until a month after we had to move out of the 
trampoline house.  So it was back to my parents' 
house again.  After the month was up, we gathered 
our growing collection of boxes and moved to the 
mansion on the Hayward Fault.  We lived on the 
crack in the earth for a year, and the lawsuit 
was heating up.  We were going have to move back 
in with my parents until the end of the lawsuit, 
and the purchase of a house.

	I was sitting in the study of the fault 
line mansion where I wrote and worked.  On the 
wall was a copy of the flyer we'd tacked up 
around town.  Every once in a while, I'd gaze at 
it, and a tear would shed.  All the moving back 
and forth, all the uncertainty.  How much longer 
would the insurance company be lying and cheating 
and stealing and harassing us?  When would we be 
able to look for a house to buy?

	As I was bent over my writing, Feyna came 
in.  She was wearing her purple dress.  She 
started talking to me about what to bring to show 
and tell, when she caught sight of the flyer 
hanging on the wall.  She stopped in mid 
sentence, looked up at the photograph.  There was 
a longing in her voice.

	"I loved that old house of ours."

	"Why don't you take that picture with you to school for show and tell?"

	"That's right," she said excitedly. 
"They don't know that house.  They all think we 
live HERE."



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net