TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 123

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 17, 2000000007


Dear My Friends,

	I am flummoxed.  I went and met a guy from Jdate.  He was 
nice enough, but it was like talking to someone at 60 who was still 
trying to figure out what he wanted to do when he grew up.  He lived 
with his mother (admirable actually.  He's taking care of her), and 
used to run a bagel stand in Juneau Alaska.  All this is colourful, 
but he wasn't.  I have nothing against the guy.  Just nothing for 
him.  It didn't work out.  He walked me to my car and noticed I had a 
handicapped parking placard hanging in the window.  "Oh!  You use 
your mother's, too!"  he said, matter of factly.  I corrected him. 
"It's mine.  I have a seizure disorder and cervical disc disease." 
He apologized.  The thought that someone completely abled would 
borrow his mother's handicapped sticker to take advantage of the 
perks made me shake my head.  I would never do such a thing.  Anyway, 
I wrote to him after our date, and told him, sweetly, but not 
flabbily, that it would never work out, we were in two different 
worlds and it was nice meeting him, but no.

	He has since written me two e-mails pleading his case.  I 
wish he wouldn't.  It's demeaning.  If someone tells you no, why 
would you want to talk your way back into it?  Wouldn't it make for 
an uneven and uncomfortable relationship?  Again, I have to say, I 
don't get it.  Do you?




 
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj


Thinning and thickening of the blood

	For the first two years of my life, I got acclimated to San 
Francisco weather: never very hot, often foggy, never extremely cold, 
no snow, seldom a show of thunder and lightning.  Then we moved to 
Hyattsville and then Silver Spring, Maryland, and the skies had very 
different things to offer.  We arrived in the fall of 1949.  In the 
fall, back on the east coast of the United States, the trees are 
losing their leaves and it starts getting blustery.  Then a couple 
months later, the cold sets in, becomes bitter and I was getting all 
wrapped up in several layers of clothing just to go outside.  To 
protect me from the cold, my mother dressed me in long underwear, a 
regular outfit on top of that, waterproof boots, and then a thick 
coat with cumbersome mittens.  There would be a hood on the coat, and 
I'd have to wear a scarf.  I could waddle around.  I remember my arms 
not being available to use.  They just stood out straight from my 
puffy sides.  Outside, as little as possible of my face would be 
showing.  Then everywhere we returned inside from the winter chill, 
the heat would be turned up to eighty five and you'd have to disrobe 
or be sweaty and miserable.  Maybe we didn't have it right, with our 
clueless San Francisco habits.

	Another new thing that happened in winter was snow.  The 
first time it snowed, my mother brought Dana and me to the window and 
we saw the white spots floating down to the ground, building up and 
covering things.  It was magical!  She dressed us up and took us 
outside to lick the sky.  She showed us how to make a snow ball, and 
how to roll a snow ball on the ground to make it bigger and bigger, 
until it was a sizeable boulder.  I was too young to aim, but my 
sister wasn't.  She pelted me with snow balls and I watched them 
explode against my thick jacket.  After a while, the snow that had 
landed on me turned into water, and I'd get soaked and shiver.  Then 
my mother took me inside near the heater, took off the boots, the 
jacket and snow pants, the mittens, the scarf, the clothes that were 
all wet, and she'd make me hot chocolate with marshmallows in it.  I 
know that her utter devotion didn't register on me as some choice, an 
elected behaviour that she could have passed on, in favour of keeping 
us inside, providing us with paper and crayons, and skipping the 
giant load of laundry, the wrapping and unwrapping of toddlers, the 
warming of freezing fingers and toes.  My mother was there to take 
care of me.  I expected it, relied on it.

	It wasn't until I was a little bigger that I learned how to 
make snow angels, or a snow fort, snowmen, how to stomp a traceable 
path in the fields of white, then try to step exactly where I'd 
stomped before on my way back.  The mittens we wore were made out of 
rubber on the outside and had a synthetic lining.  When they got wet, 
they stank, a particular rank smell of chemicals that I'll never 
forget.  One year, when it got icy, my mother slipped and fell, 
practically broke her coccyx, and was exquisitely sore for almost a 
year.

	The other extreme was summer.  The air was heavy with 
moisture; we swam through the pall of humidity, our clothes sticking 
to our bodies.  And then, the most surreal thing occurred.  The 
moisture in the air would suddenly precipitate into rain, and there 
would be a violent summer thunder storm.  We'd be washed with hot 
water, chased by lightning.  We'd count the seconds between the 
lightning and the thunder to estimate how far away the lightning was. 
Everyone had lightning rods fixed to the tops of their houses.  Tall 
metal spikes that were grounded in the earth to distract the 
lightning from striking where we didn't want it to strike, and then 
funneling it to the ground.  These storms could be scary, much too 
severe for a little girl to handle unafraid, no matter how much 
science my father poured into us.  The fat streaks of rain would 
pound the roof and make loud music.  The wind would rattle all the 
windows.  Anything not fastened to the house would flap around in the 
storm.  The thunder would shake the house, the lightning would 
illuminate the whole sky.  Then it would stop, and be sunny again. 
Time to go out and play.  The transformation of the sky was 
unpredictable and always surprised me.

	Then there was the summer heat.  We lived in a tract 
development.  When the house was being planned, my parents had 
choices they could make.  They chose air conditioning over a porch, 
not a common selection.  This meant that on hot days, we had a lot of 
new friends who came over to visit.  At night, the heat didn't 
dissipate.  Rather, it stayed unbearably hot.  I'd lie on top of my 
bed trying to find a spot on the sheets that was still cool, and I'd 
press my leg, or my arm, my cheek, my belly against that cool patch 
until it was warm like the rest of the bed.  My mother would come 
into the room and go from my sister's bed to my bed washing our backs 
with rubbing alcohol which would chill deliciously as it evaporated 
and keep us cool for a minute or two.  That is what the fumes of 
rubbing alcohol do to me, bring me back to my sweltering bedroom in 
Silver Spring, with my mother pouring alcohol on my back and 
spreading it around, the evaporating fumes rising through my nose to 
my brain.

	When we returned from Maryland in 1956, seven years after 
we'd left, I was used to the weather back east, and prided myself in 
being able to take the heat of Indian summer, not feel too terribly 
cold in winter, and scoff at the puny weather systems that blew 
through the bay area.  What?  Nothing life threatening?  But a couple 
years of the bay area retrained me.  My blood thinned out.  I lost 
the subcutaneous layer of blubber that insulates a true easterner.  I 
am again a San Franciscan.
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net