TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 134

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 28, 200000007


Dear Youz Guise,

	This morning we go visit the vault where 
all our stuff is stored.  I am paying a thousand 
a month just to keep it packed away in one place. 
That's how much is stored.  They charge you 
coming and going.  Just to get into the vault to 
retrieve some things is $170/hr. and they book a 
two hour minimum.  This is so they can have three 
movers on duty to help you.  The  place is 35 
miles from here.  We set out early and go with 
our lists of things we need to take out.  They've 
got it all organized according to room and sector 
of room, so we ought to be able to find things. 
But I am not confident.  I have to get a good 
list of things that villainman claimed as his 
that wound up in storage instead of being left 
behind for him.  He wants to charge me ten 
thousand bucks if he doesn't get them.  I wince 
at what he's become.  I wash myself of him time 
and again.  Just wash the scent and spirit of him 
off of my skin and out of my soul.

	Meyshe wants to get a Go set, and some of 
his global music CDs.  Feyna wants her art 
materials and some movies.  I want to get it over 
with.




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Where to stay

	Right after I'd left Dweller, I provided 
shelter by house sitting.  This actually worked 
out well.  No one paid me for sitting house.  It 
was an equal exchange.  I water your plants, keep 
a light on at night, collect your mail, tidy up, 
take care of the pets, and in exchange I get to 
use your kitchen, sleep in your bed, park my car 
in your garage.

	Some places were more ascetic than 
others.  Some were student apartments that were 
messes when I arrived and cleaned up considerably 
when I left.  But a lot of them were places that 
belonged to Harry's friends who were 
astonishingly successful artists and were off to 
live in Spain all summer, or vacationing in New 
Zealand during our winter.  These houses were 
luxurious, awe inspiring.  Tom Holland was one of 
these artists.  He and his wife, Judy, had 
purchased a mansion in Berkeley.  Truly a 
mansion, with an eighty foot living room and a 
cherry wood dance floor on the storey below it. 
Huge bedrooms you could run in, and walk in 
closets that were as big as some bedrooms.  When 
I sat house for Tom and Judy, I was so shocked by 
the elegant surroundings that I could barely live 
in it.  I spent my time pacing the floors and 
being careful of the woodwork.

	At the same time as I was house sitting 
to keep a roof over my head, I was sluffing off 
possessions, clearing my inner closet and 
winnowing out the unnecessary elements of my 
young life.  It was part of the clean sweep that 
I was making connected to divesting myself of 
Dweller and marriage.  I lived out of a suitcase, 
and tried to limit my worldly goods to what I 
could pack in it, plus my cello, my guitar and my 
journal.  A woman of things and aesthetics, I 
attempted to be thingless, a useless futile goal, 
contemplated by people with delusions of 
miniature.

	My name got around to friends, and 
eventually, I really could get by, month by 
month, watching over other people's houses while 
I had no place to live myself.  My contact with 
my family waned.  Another divestment.  I liked 
the idea that for the first time in my life, my 
whereabouts were largely unknown.  At the time, 
the members of my family were distressed that I'd 
broken from my husband and when they did get hold 
of me, they made sure that I knew they felt I 
should come to my senses and go back to him. 
They wanted me doing what the rest of the family 
did: staying with their husbands and wives no 
matter what.  Live in hell, why don't you?  Make 
your nest among the eternal flames.  It makes us 
content.

	This was when my sister and my brother 
joined forces to give me a kitten for my 
birthday.  A purebred Burmese.  Now, where was I 
going to keep this cat?  I saw the gift as a 
hostile act, an act of coercion.  I would stay in 
one place.  I would remain motionless.  I would 
conform to the family pattern, which amounted in 
my eyes to the family crypt.  They wanted my 
independence and searching to be immobilized. 
Here, have a kitten.  It was like giving me a 
baby.  They took umbrage at my assertion that 
giving me the kitten was essentially malicious. 
They knew I liked cats.  What else mattered?

	I named the kitten de Kooning and tried 
to take him with me wherever I went, but that was 
not easy.  Cats are attached to places as well as 
people, and uprooting a cat every few weeks is 
cruel.  It scrambles them.  So de Kooning ran 
away while I was house sitting for a college 
student.  He just ran off.  Years later, I found 
him on the other side of the same block.  I knew 
it was he because he was lying in the middle of 
the sidewalk, unperturbed by foot traffic, and 
when I kneeled by him, I put him to the test.  I 
took out a bunch of pencils and pens from my 
purse.  I started to place them on his pelt, a 
pen on his head, a pencil on his belly, a couple 
of pens on his rump, a pencil on his tail.  He 
just lay there accepting these things, blinking 
his eyes slowly in contentment.  This could be no 
other than de Kooning.  But de Kooning now 
belonged to someone else.  And in fact, by that 
time, I belonged to someone else, as I'd altered 
myself, grown apart from the crazy footloose 
woman who sat houses.  I'd settled down in my own 
house and was carving out my own way to get from 
here to there, not like the rest of the family. 
I had only one foot nailed to the ground.  The 
other one was free.  Free to wander.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net