TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 143

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 6, 200000007


Dear Lords and Ladies,

	I keep having all these dreams where I 
misplace my shoes, or they are stolen, or turn 
out to be too small or someone else's shoes.  In 
this last dream, we were all seated in someone's 
apartment.  They were college students.  We were 
listening to a performance that started out as a 
poetry reading and progressed to a concert with a 
band and various singers.  The first singer was a 
woman that had been sitting between me and 
another woman, a friend of mine.  For some reason 
she was furious at my friend.  As furious as if 
there had been a major betrayal, but I knew that 
couldn't be the case.  When she sang, she 
directed her singing to my friend, insulted her, 
whined and finally tore a book she had with her 
on stage, and threw it at her forcefully.  Part 
of the book hit me, and she rushed over to assure 
me that she meant me no ill.  She wasn't mad at 
me.  Me, she liked.  It was this other person. 
And was I all right about it.  I told her that 
she was hurting a friend of mine, so I wasn't all 
right about it.

	Then another act came on, and I got up to 
go, but my shoes weren't there, I grabbed all my 
writing, my journal, my cello, and a couple of 
bags of miscellaneous travelling supplies and 
made it out to the street where there were 
familiar faces.  I said I had to take the bus 
back to Berkeley, but I had no shoes.  I imagined 
getting on the train unshod, and thought I'd 
probably cut myself or get disgustingly, 
infectiously dirty, but I would probably have to 
manage it.  How was I going to carry all this 
stuff?  One of the familiar faces, a young man, 
offered to give me a ride in his car.  And for 
some reason, I resisted.  I resisted while 
telling myself, "TAKE HIM UP ON HIS OFFER!" 
Unfortunately, I never found my shoes, just 
someone else's shoes that didn't fit, and 
belonged to someone else so I couldn't have worn 
them even if they had fit.  There, where my left 
foot had been was a stump, and at the end of it 
was a blob of blood the consistency of congealed 
gravy.  I took no big notice of the fact that I 
no longer had a foot, although that reduced my 
hunt for shoes by a half.  And then my alarm rang.

	What did that mean?  I asked myself as I 
shook the night out of my head.




 
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Mike Gold

	My father played chamber music, on 
occasion, with a splendid pianist, Anna Gold. 
Anna Gold was the sister of Zara Nelsova, a 
flamboyant concert cellist, whose real name was 
Sarah Nelson.  They had lived in London during 
the blitz, in an apartment with only one room to 
practice in.  So they learned to practice at the 
same time, Sarah, the cellist, facing one corner, 
and Anna, the pianist, facing the opposite 
corner.  How did they do that, and while the 
blitz was going on?  They did it, because they 
had to.  Because there was no other way to do it. 
You learn to tune out what is going on around 
you, and concentrate only on the notes emitting 
from your own intentions.

	One of the evenings that Anna Gold came 
over, she brought her eldest son, Mike, who was 
twenty two at the time.  I was sixteen and I 
suppose I was ripe for plucking, because, 
according to what Mike told me later, he'd come 
because he heard the Shapiros had a sixteen year 
old daughter who was a cellist.  He came and met 
me, then went home that night, broke up with his 
girlfriend of three years and dedicated himself 
to me.  His devotion was frightening.  He swore 
off all other women, called me constantly, 
accompanied me whenever he could, wherever I was 
going, and promised to remain a virgin until we 
could share our first experience together.  Of 
course, this dedication was flattering, but that 
didn't, in and of itself, make me fall in love 
with him, as he professed he was in love with me.

	I thought of Mike Gold as the guy that by 
all rights should get the girl.  I rooted for 
him.  I wanted to fall in love with him, but it 
just wasn't happening.  Mike was a good person, a 
good clarinettist, a help to his mother, a kind 
older brother to Dan Gold, an outdoorsman, a hard 
worker.  He was working his way through school at 
Humboldt State up in the park lands in northern 
California.  He would work as a surveyor for the 
city of Berkeley for a year, then go to school 
for a year.  He was aiming to be a forest ranger, 
a lonesome job.  I pictured him off in the woods, 
in a small house on stilts, his perch above the 
trees, a widow's walk around a little cupola on 
top of the station.  From there, he'd watch out 
over the forests looking for any signs of 
distress or fire.  And when the sun was about to 
set, the luminescence reaching up from the 
horizon, he'd take out his clarinet and play a 
doleful melody, something haunting in a minor 
key.  The animals would all wait for this moment 
in their days.  The birds would listen to someone 
else sing for a change.  The bears would stop 
pawing something to death.  The deer and elk, the 
foxes and wolves, whatever animals peopled the 
woods would stop to listen.  And the haunting 
music would go on for fifteen minutes, until the 
stars were appearing and the sun had set.  That 
is how I thought of Mike.  I wanted to love that.

	Our lives would be essential.  We would 
be living out in the wilds, alone together for 
months on end, making our own soap and devising 
our own central heating.  I would bake all the 
bread.  We'd grind the flour, pine nut flour, 
acorn flour.  We'd figure it out.  I would be the 
crazy wife, making artwork, playing cello and 
clarinet duets that I'd composed for the forest 
ranger and me, writing literary masterpieces that 
would never be discovered, decorating the trees 
with paintings.  Wouldn't this abstract go well 
on this redwood?  We'd have endless children and 
they would grow up being home schooled by us, 
learning to climb trees and to take naps on the 
canopy above the floor of the forest.  That is 
where my fantasy always faltered and then struck 
a wall.  I couldn't have endless children.  I 
didn't want children.  Then, what about Mike's 
desire to keep me barefoot and pregnant?  Tobie 
with ten kids.  This wasn't a detail.  But all 
that was important at the time was that there was 
a man who loved me, worshipped me, was willing to 
live for me.  That was hard for me to turn down.

	At the time we were doing our odd 
courtship, the Vietnam war was going on, and Mike 
wound up as a medic on the front lines.  From 
that steamy, tragic country, he wrote to me 
nearly every day, from the middle of the 
fighting.  Almost every day, I would receive an 
air mail letter, thin, nearly weightless blue 
paper on which was his symmetrical handwriting, 
tilted to the right a bit, legible and clear. 
He'd tell me about the catastrophes, the carnage, 
the hopes for coming home.  About a year in, he 
told me he was scheduled to get R & R in Hawaii 
for a couple of days; would I meet him there?  It 
would mean so much to him.  And I was in school 
and couldn't.  But I wouldn't have gone even if I 
could.  Even though I was rooting for him, I 
couldn't envision myself with him, not really. 
The couple in the forest were fantasies, 
fantasies of how I could resign from my consuming 
quest for leaving my mark, instead of banging my 
head on the wall for fame and fortune, excellence 
and the reputation of a genius.  I would strip my 
seamy ambitions bare, and step happily into 
anonymity, live without, do without.  I would 
find bliss in the scrubbing of floors, the 
weeding of a garden, the attentions paid to my 
husband of a hundred years.  We would argue as 
frequently as trees, rebel against the flow of 
time as ardently as the sun against setting.

	And if I would meet Mike Gold in Hawaii, 
I would have to sleep in the same room with him. 
Probably in the same bed.  I couldn't say no to 
him, and I wouldn't say yes.  So we didn't meet 
in Hawaii, and he kept writing.

	Finally, he reappeared in the United 
States, came home to Berkeley, lived with his 
mother.  He arrived after his celebrated trip to 
lively Vietnam and brought himself to our living 
room.  Vietnam had changed him.  He had served 
his country scraping up the dead from the muck on 
the earth.  He was somber, cynical.  He had lost 
all of his innocence and then some.  His love was 
dry, juiceless.  I no longer knew what to do with 
him.  I felt sorry for him, missed his former 
ebullience, but I couldn't find Mike in all the 
new confusion of bitterness.  If I had reached 
for him then, I would not have found him.  He was 
gone.  I still long to long for him.  What never 
was.



 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net