TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 117

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 11, 200000007


Dear Practitioners of Good Deed Doing,

	While Feyna has been gone in Tahoe and 
Reno, we got by without her washing the dishes. 
It was rough.  She hates the job, but does it 
without much complaint, while Meyshe clears the 
table and sweeps the floor in the dining room, 
then cleans off the table with a sponge and wipes 
it dry with a towel.  I'm putting away food, 
cleaning off the stove top and counters.  When we 
all cooperate, the old saying goes, the work gets 
done quickly.  And it does.

	A long time ago, the kids couldn't even 
do dishes.  They had no idea how to put food 
away, nor what to do with floors and counters. 
Everything had been done for them.  But I gave 
villainman the task of teaching them how to do 
these things, and told them that when they were 
at the point that they could clean up after 
dinner, put the food away, the whole thing, I 
would take them to the snow.  Villainman didn't 
teach them.  Time went on.  He said it was easier 
to do it himself.  But that's not good for the 
kids, I told him.  He still didn't make an 
effort.  So, I hit the computer and wrote up a 
three page instruction manual for cleaning up 
after dinner.  Everything from how to clear the 
table, what to do with the table cloth, to how to 
differentiate things that could go in the 
dishwasher from things that couldn't.  I handed 
that to villainman and told him that that should 
make it simpler.  But that didn't work either.

	After he jumped ship, the kids knew how 
to do it all in less than two weeks.  I didn't 
even have to use the manual.  But I gave it to 
them as a reference they could rely on in tight 
spots.  The hardest part is putting the food away.

	Now, for me is the hardest part:  taking 
them to the snow.  I should, the first time they 
do the whole thing themselves without my 
mother's or my help.

	I should




 
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What we remember

	It seems hardly possible that we can 
remember things early on in our lives.  I watch 
little children, three, four years old with their 
parents guiding them through a crowded store, 
showing them how to wait in line, how to keep 
their hands off of whatever is in front of them. 
What is the difference between what you can touch 
and what you musn't?   How can these tiny beings, 
barely talking in more than a squeak, remember 
anything from this day at the coffee house?

	What holds memory together and where does 
it reside in the brain?  And why does it stay 
there?  If it is dislodged, what can dislodge it, 
and how does that happen?  How do we retrieve a 
memory from our lives when language was 
rudimentary and we had to perceive the world in 
pictures and sensation?  But I do remember.  I 
remember standing up in a crib and looking down a 
hallway.  The crib's head or foot was near the 
doorway, and the side was flat against the wall. 
There was a light switch near the doorway, within 
my reach, as I stood in the crib.  I was unhappy, 
and thirsty, and I was crying for the magic mommy 
to come to me and satisfy my needs.  I had 
finished my bottle.  It was empty and I was 
holding it in my hand, my right hand.  I threw it 
down the hall.  It bounced on the floor and spun 
a little before settling.  Then the door at the 
end of the hallway opened, and my mother came 
out.  She had black shoulder length hair, and she 
was tying the belt of her bathrobe around her 
waist.  She picked up the bottle and came to me, 
lifted me up and carried me away.  That is where 
the memory dissolves.  There is no end to the 
scene, no conclusion to the story.  My memory 
simply stops there.  How much of what I remember 
is from what I've been told?  How much is pure 
memory, uninvaded by adult reasoning?  My mother 
tells me that by what I describe, this must have 
happened on Teresita Boulevard which we moved to 
from Encline Court when I was six months old, and 
from which we moved to Maryland when I was two. 
So, I can't have been older than two.

	My daughter, Feyna, remembers an incident 
that happened when she was eight months old. 
That is her earliest memory.  When she described 
her memory to me, I could barely believe it. 
Eight months old and she recalled lying in her 
crib on her back and vomiting like a Vesuvius. 
It rose in the air, and came down to bury all 
those it splattered.  She was sick with the flu 
and had a fever of 104º Fahrenheit.  That fever 
may have peaked the mechanism that triggers the 
storage of a memory.  She remembers nothing else, 
though the adventure proceeded as I drew a bath 
and had to clean the vomit out of her hair and 
her ears, her face, her hands, her tiny body and 
her legs and feet.  Every toe was covered with 
vomit.  I was covered with vomit.  I cleaned her 
up and dressed her and put her back in her crib. 
All this while Meyshe slept soundly in the next 
bed.

	 I remember a swing set and see saw in 
the back yard in San Francisco.  I was put on one 
seat of the see saw, and on the other, opposite 
me, was my big sister.  The see saw went up and I 
went up, still being held by the hands coming 
from behind me.  The see saw went down, and 
bumped when it hit the ground.  Dana went up in 
her seat.  Then I went up again.  I was not 
ecstatic at this ride.  Rather, I tolerated it. 
It jostled me too much, and I wanted to get off. 
So I voiced my displeasure, and the hands removed 
me from the see saw while I was up in the air, 
and my sister was down near the ground.

	I remember my sister waking me up by 
reaching across a narrow room and shaking me.  My 
bed was opposite hers in a narrow room.  The sun 
was bright.  There were windows behind me.  I 
don't remember my sister's face, just her arm and 
her hand coming to shake me.  The floor was 
linoleum tiles.  I remember my plaid coat.  My 
sister had one just like it, only bigger.  It had 
leather buttons and it was a dark colour.  I was 
standing at the top of a staircase outside, 
having just come out of a big building.  Or maybe 
I was about to go into the big building.  The big 
building was the Smithsonian Institution in 
Washington, D.C.

	In the apartment building in Hyattsville, 
we were given marionettes.  I fiddled with mine 
and the string got all tangled up.  I brought it 
to my mother, and she untangled it, handed it 
back to me.  I went outside the apartment, into 
the hallway and turned left up the stairs to the 
apartment above us.  I knocked on the door.  A 
woman came out of the apartment and walked me 
back down to ours.  She knocked on our door and 
my mother came to answer it.  This was the first 
time the two women had met each other.  Her name 
was Betty Roos.  We maintained a friendship with 
her above and beyond the marionette.  It was 
tangled again.

	I am haunted by a report I heard once 
about experiments in physical location of memory 
in the brain.  During brain surgery, the doctors 
were given permission to probe the brain of a 
woman with a tiny wire.  When they probed in one 
location, the woman said, "Chocolate!  I smell 
chocolate!"  Then they removed the probe and put 
it in a millimeter away from the first site.  "A 
circus!  A parade for the circus!"  They removed 
the probe and returned it to the first location. 
"Chocolate again!"  That our memories are all 
sitting in our brains in exact localities amazes 
me.  We retrieve the memories without wire 
probes, by inspiring some chemical or electrical 
activity in the brain.  And the memory stays 
where it was.  Did the woman who remembered the 
chocolate and the circus remember those things 
before her brain was stimulated at those sites? 
There is more in here, inside the skull, 
protected by the thick bone I call my head.  My 
impression is that there is more in here than I 
will ever be able to retrieve, that is without a 
wire and brain surgery.



 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net