TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 132

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 26, 20000000007


Dear my own,

	Feyna says that Alex has indeed sold his 
condo in Danville (that's through the tunnel, 
east of Berkeley, beyond the east bay hills and 
into the hot valley, which is now cold).  And 
that leaves his condo in San Francisco's Hunter's 
Point.  Hunter's Point is the most dangerous area 
in San Francisco.  That's where all the drive by 
shootings are, and all the gang violence, the 
drug sales, the muggings and rapes.  She thought 
I was going to let her go there and visit him.  I 
told her I forbade it.  Man was she mad.  She had 
all sorts of arguments, rationalizations for why 
it wasn't any more dangerous than some places we 
go for dinner in Oakland, and how Alex says he's 
had no problem in Hunter's Point, but had worse 
problems when he lived in Oakland.  I told her 
that the subject was not up for debate.  This was 
the real world, not something that pilpul could 
fix.  A single, beautiful, young white woman 
walking in Hunter's Point?  I don't think so. 
She was furious.  Especially since I refused to 
engage her in an argument about the plusses and 
minuses of Hunter's Point.  I should go look up 
the crime statistics and show it to her.  But 
then that's engaging in the debate, isn't it.

	This Alex is no good for her.  But she's 
going to have to learn herself.  I keep saying 
that.  That's to assure myself that I'm doing the 
right thing.




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An absolute honour

	It was a given that I would go to 
college.  It was even a given that I would go to 
college right after high school, taking no time 
off for travel, contemplation, a job or just a 
break from twelve solid years of school.  In the 
senior year of high school, we all did our 
research into the various colleges and 
universities that might be right for us.  I had 
to find a good music school.  There was Indiana 
University in Bloomington.  Janos Starker taught 
cello there.  There was of course, Julliard in 
New York.  There was the University of California 
at Berkeley, which had the advantage of 
proximity, but the music department was very 
academic and there was no emphasis on 
performance, an odd little twist for a music 
school.  There was San Francisco State College 
where Laszlo Varga was the cello teacher, and 
there were big names in the department.  But S.F. 
State was only a state college, not a true full 
fledged University, so it didn't have the 
prestige of the other schools.  Why I was worried 
about prestige is beyond me.  It didn't matter.

	I remember looking through a huge 
compendium of colleges and Universities, listed 
alphabetically.  There would be the name of the 
school, the location, the body count, whether it 
was on a semester or quarter system, a run down 
of the tuition, available scholarships and a 
funny little statistic about summer that read 
like this:  summer 12 weeks, or: summer 6 weeks. 
I took this to be the duration of the summer 
vacation, so I kept my eye out for twelve week 
summers.  Actually, it was denoting what sort of 
summer sessions were scheduled.  I was ready to 
enroll in a University on the grounds that it had 
a three month summer recess; forget the rest of 
the data.

	In the middle of all this, my cello 
teacher, Ruth Saphir, told me that there were 
auditions for a Rockefeller grant to the 
University of Washington in Seattle.  It was for 
graduating seniors.  She said Washington had a 
good music department, and Eva Heinitz was the 
cello instructor.  She wanted me to try out for 
this grant which would pay for tuition and books 
for the full four years.  At the time, I was 
working on the Bach unaccompanied cello suite, 
number six, a difficult piece which I had 
performed already at the Junior Bach Festival, 
the first cellist ever to perform the sixth suite 
at the festival.  I loved the work.  And this is 
what Ruth Saphir and I planned for me to play at 
the audition.  The auditions were being held in 
Portland, Oregon, a plane ride of less than two 
hours.  My mother was going to go with me.  I was 
far too naive to manage the event myself.  At the 
time, I fancied that I feared airplanes.  I have 
no idea why.  But I expressed my fears, and my 
mother suggested we take an overnight train.  It 
was February of 1965, and in Berkeley, all the 
cherry blossom trees were explosions of bright 
pink flowers.  In Portland, however, it would be 
cold and rainy.  We booked a sleeper car.  It was 
exciting.  We were ushered to our compartment by 
the porter and I got out my cello to practice. 
As we pulled out of the station, I was playing 
the Bach suite and watching Berkeley grow 
smaller.  There wasn't much room in the 
compartment for bowing, but I was used to 
orchestra performances on small stages with 
cramped space.  I knew just how to draw the bow 
as if I were going to strike another cellist on 
one side and a violist on the other.

	We went to the dining car for our dinner, 
and when we came back, the porter had pulled down 
the beds from the wall and folded back the 
blankets so we could climb into bed without 
having to yank the sheets around.  It was really 
quite elegant.  I felt pampered, celebrated, 
catered to.  I took the top bunk near the window. 
I lay there in my bunk, wide awake, listening, 
thinking, anticipating the audition.  I wondered 
how I would get to sleep, but the ride was 
hypnotic.  The rhythmic 
click-ka-clack-ka-click-ka-clack drummed in my 
ears. The swaying of the train and the sound of 
the wheels rolling over the tracks put me to 
sleep.  I woke up in the middle of the night. 
Outside, the earth was covered with a thick layer 
of white, and the snow fell against the window as 
we sped toward Portland.  I was ecstatic.

	We stayed with my aunt Selma, my father's 
older sister, as believable and sane a woman as 
my father was incredible and insane.  We arrived 
mid day and the audition was in mid afternoon. 
My memory of the audition, itself, is fuzzy.  I 
can see a cleared area where the auditioners had 
to play and an elevated stage where the judges 
were situated.  I closed my eyes and sank into a 
trance, a trance with Bach.

	A month later we were informed that I had 
been awarded the grant.  The honour completely 
escaped me.  I was oblivious to any sense of 
having been rewarded for something.  I was too 
wrapped up in my own self denigration to enjoy 
any triumph.  I did not glow.  What I did was get 
out of the way any more deliberations over where 
I would be going to college.  It was now decided 
for me by Mr. Rockefeller and his stupendous 
grant.  Even though I had won the grant, the 
University's music department required that I 
audition for them, too.  These auditions were to 
take place in Seattle, and this time, we flew.  I 
was irked by having to audition again, knowing 
that I was accepted with a prestigious grant. 
But I dragged my cello to Seattle to the campus 
of the University and I played the Bach 
unaccompanied cello suite number six again for a 
row of important people in their music 
department.  There was Dr. Chapel, the conductor 
of the University orchestra, and Raymond Davis, 
the principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony who 
would be my cello teacher, as Eva Heinitz was on 
tour.  I was afraid of Ray Davis.  He was not a 
woman, and he was not the famous Eva Heinitz that 
Ruth Saphir had told me all about.  I knew 
nothing of Ray Davis.  He sat there judging, as I 
sat there playing.  I thought I did miserably.  I 
heard nothing but errors, and when I packed up my 
cello, strapped the case to the dolly and dragged 
it away across the quadrangle, I nearly cried 
because I'd done so poorly.

	I heard someone running behind me.  I 
turned around.  It was Ray Davis.  He raced up to 
me, shouting, "Wait!"  I gazed at him 
incomprehensibly.  He delivered a breathless 
speech.

	"I'm so excited about teaching you this 
fall!  I want you to go back home and gain 
weight.  Get good and strong, and come back ready 
to work.  I'm ready to work for you.  We'll do us 
proud!"  and he shook my hand, brimming over with 
enthusiasm and warmth.

	It changed my whole vision of life in 
college.  "By the way," he said, "That 
Rockefeller grant was intended for graduating 
seniors from college, not from high school.  But 
they gave it to you anyway.  Do you know how good 
you are?  Do you have any idea?"  I didn't know, 
and I had no idea.  I dared not let all this in. 
Maybe something terrible would happen to me if I 
allowed myself to be happy about this, about 
anything.  Tradition was that whenever I felt 
good and powerful, pleased with myself and my 
world, my father would do something to make me 
sorry I felt that way.  It was his way of 
punishing me.  So I didn't allow myself to be 
happy.  But it was impossible to feel sad.



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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net