TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 136

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 30, 200000007

Dear Folks of Tree,

	I lost my car keys, the spare set.  These 
are the ones that I hand Feyna when she wants to 
borrow the car.  The original set have my house 
keys and some plastic membership strips attached. 
They're complicated keys.  Honda.  They can't be 
duplicated easily, and one of the contraptions in 
the set of keys is the remote which opens the 
doors and locks, unlocks the car.  Those cost 
quite a bit to replace.  I'd have to bring my car 
in to the parts department at the Honda 
dealership that sold me my car, and it takes them 
an hour to re-configure another set.  The cost is 
frightening.  A couple hundred dollars for a set 
of keys.  Oy!

	There was a mystery about the lost keys, 
too.  I keep both sets in my coat pocket, my left 
coat pocket.  And I didn't discover one was 
missing until I put my hand in my pocket to 
retrieve my house keys, and noticed that there 
was only one set.  Hmmmm.   I looked on the 
counters in the kitchen.  I looked in the 
drawers.  Nothing.  This was a day that my 
mother's housekeeper and her daughter came to 
clean.  I wondered if they'd seen it.  My mother 
was going out shopping on Sunday, after we got 
back from the foraging in the vault.  The kids 
brought all the stuff in, and then Feyna left the 
keys on the counter.  My mother picked up the 
keys by accident on her way out.  She was already 
up the stairs to the garage, and shouted back 
down at me, "Is it okay if I toss the keys down 
the stairs?"   I thought, "No.  I'll come up and 
get them."  But I said, "Sure."

	Well, I was eating lunch at that point. 
The house cleaner wasn't there yet.  And I just 
forgot that the keys were lying on the floor in 
the laundry room, next to the back door.  I just 
forgot is all.  So when I noticed that there was 
only one set of keys in my pocket, later on, I 
remembered that my mother had tossed the keys 
down the stairs.  That's the first place I 
looked, the foot of the stairs.  Nothing.   It 
got a little crazy, looking in drawers and 
cabinets that they couldn't possibly have wound 
up.  No one remembered picking them up off the 
ground.  So the logical culprit was the house 
cleaner.  Maybe she or her daughter had noticed 
them, picked them up and put them someplace. 
Carmen likes to put things in boxes, or trays. 
We checked all the decorative cups on the 
windowsills.  Nothing.  So I called Carmen, left 
a message saying for her to call us, gave a 
rundown of the situation.  She called back almost 
immediately.  Neither she nor her daughter had 
seen the keys.  Yipes. So it was possible that, 
indeed, she didn't see the keys but that she'd 
swept them up and put them in the garbage.  So 
you know what that means!  I put on the rubber 
gloves and went through the trash.  Nothing. 
There I was rooching through the garbage cans, 
opening up plastic trash bags and sifting 
through, disgusting piece of filth by disgusting 
piece of filth.

	Finally, after exhaustive searches, I 
gave up on the key mystery and put on my calendar 
for Monday to call Concord Honda, make an 
appointment to drive out there on Tuesday (that's 
today) at 9:00, a.m., to have them make the keys 
and charge me an arm and a leg for them.  I 
determined to put the key mystery out of my mind. 
But my mother kept looking under things, standing 
forlornly in the laundry room, shaking her head, 
thinking it through.  I was tired of the whole 
idea.  I'd given up and changed my whole mind 
set.  And life went by.  Last night, my mother 
called me.  She'd found the keys.  They were in 
the pocket of my old retired jacket in the 
closet, right next to my new jacket.  They are 
similar jackets, very similar, just off by a 
shade of purple.  Someone, and I still can't 
figure out who, put the keys in the pocket of the 
old jacket instead of the pocket of my new 
jacket.  I was grateful and elated.  I called the 
Honda people and told them that I'd found the 
keys, and I wanted them to have just about the 
best day on record.  The guy laughed.  I have 
saved a couple hundred dollars!  Maybe I should 
blow it on something?




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Not coming out of the closet

	In tenth grade, I entered Berkeley High 
School.  In the days when I was in tenth grade, 
the Berkeley school system went by the grouping 
of elementary school being kindergarten through 
sixth grade, junior high school being seventh, 
eighth and ninth grades, then high school was 
tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades.  I think it a 
much more natural way to do things than the 
current arrangement which is kindergarten through 
fifth grade as elementary, junior high being 
sixth through eighth, and then a four year high 
school.  Somehow the sixth graders seem unready 
to me to be thrown in with eighth graders who are 
bigger and meaner and well into puberty.  And 
then ninth graders being with twelfth graders 
seems ludicrous: fourteen year olds with 
seventeen and eighteen year olds.  The gap is too 
great.  The predator/prey ratio is lopsided.

	So tenth grade for me was the first year 
of high school, and the first year in which I got 
to take a variety of elective classes.  That is 
to be read as: classes I liked.  I was joyous.  I 
went over the class offerings.  And this was in 
the days before the tax revolution in California, 
when the schools were so much better funded.  It 
showed, too.  Now you can take Spanish and maybe 
French, not sure.  Then, there was a choice of 
Spanish, French, Mandarin, German, Russian, 
Latin, Greek and I think there was American Sign 
Language taught.  Maybe I'm dreaming.  The music 
department was an actual department with many 
courses to take: music theory, music history, 
orchestra, choir, band, baroque orchestra.  And 
there was an art department, too.  These were the 
places I hung out.  Music and Art.  They were my 
homes, a safe place, somewhere I actually 
belonged, where my heart was and where my talents 
lay, where I was recognized by my gifts and 
rewarded instead of punished for them.

	The first elective I took was an art 
class.  It covered a broad spectrum of art media: 
drawing, painting, assemblage, ceramics.  Every 
colour was represented.  You know, I don't 
remember the teacher.  Not at all.  I remember 
the room, and I remember some of the students in 
the class.  Most of all, I remember Mark Farmer. 
He was another tenth grader.  He was tall, had 
close cropped dark brown hair and very thick 
eyebrows which graced his very white face in such 
contrast that his eyebrows were his most 
prominent feature.  He had deep dark eyes, even 
if perhaps they were blue, they were deep and 
dark.  He was talented.  Whatever he put his hand 
to opened for him.  He loved to make art. 
Everything he did was recognizably his.  It had 
his signature.  We got along.  We always wound up 
doing our work near each other, and we'd trade 
stories, complain about breadth requirements. 
Why, for instance, were we two, who were meant 
for the arts, required to take math, algebra and 
geometry?  Why did we have to take so many 
semesters of science?  It's not that we felt we 
shouldn't have to take any science at all, just 
not so much.  Years and years of it: Biology, 
Zoology, Chemistry.  It wasn't fair.  After all, 
were the scientifically oriented required to take 
several years of art and music?  It would have 
been good for them.  We joked about how we didn't 
fit in, and we adored our exile together.

	Mark and I were plagued by a gaggle of 
girls who found our weak spots and teased us. 
Grammar and correct speech was one of the topics. 
So they slung slang around us, made us cringe. 
"Oh, Tobie, Mark, those drawings are gems." 
Believe it or not, "Gem", was slang for "cool". 
"Cool" was slang for, "hip," and, "hip," was 
slang for experienced, "with it".  "With it," was 
slang for well informed, up to date, capable, 
understanding what was going on.  They threw it 
all at us.

	They also called me, "Jewgirl," and Mark, 
"faggot".  These were the words that really got 
to us.  "Jewgirl" was said in mean jest.  They 
knew that I wore my Judaism proudly and thought 
they'd undo me a little.  I was undone.  I took 
it seriously.  You don't joke around about 
Jewgirl to a daughter of the holocaust.  And, 
"faggot," was said to cleave Mark in twain.  I 
don't know whether they knew or even suspected 
that he was really gay, though "gay" wasn't a 
word yet.   No one was out of the closet then. 
Everyone was intimidated and shamed, beaten into 
pretending to be heterosexual.  He was like a Jew 
in hiding.  No one should find out.  And here 
were these base and crude Neanderthalish females 
calling me, "Jewgirl," and him, "faggot."  They 
could not have been more accurate.  Nor more 
hurtful.  At that time, I was only peripherally 
aware that there was such a thing as a 
homosexual.  I barely comprehended what 
heterosexual meant.  Sexuality was a dark and 
dangerous thing, heavy with humiliation and 
subjugation, associated with my father's 
pathology, lethal, contorted, and distorted.  I 
knew what Mark was, and we never spoke about it. 
He never spoke about my being Jewish either.  But 
we both accepted each other.  I would  have 
selected the beautiful young men for him, if I'd 
had half a concept of his situation.  Both of us 
were born that way, and we had an unspoken pact 
to protect each other.

	The females jeered at him, "faggot," they 
taunted, as they rounded the corner of the table. 
I reached out and put my hand on his hand.  We 
stopped drawing.  Touching Mark didn't have the 
same fear attached to it as touching another boy. 
I felt safe with him.

	The teacher directed us to get out a 
large piece of paper and with a number one 
pencil, we were to draw a portrait of someone 
else in the class.  I chose to draw a portrait of 
Mark.  He drew a portrait of me.  The lines I set 
down on my paper looked like Mark.  I was 
surprised that so few lines could form a 
likeness.  I gave the portrait to Mark.  After 
that year of art class, Mark disappeared from my 
life, and I disappeared into the music 
department.  Our paths didn't cross.  But when we 
were both seniors, with our yearbooks in hand, we 
bumped into each other in the central plaza.  I 
asked if he wanted to sign my Olla Podrida.  He 
handed me his.  I handed him mine.  We wrote 
short love notes.  I asked him if he was going to 
go to college.  He said, "If I live that long." 
I found out many years later that he'd killed 
himself shortly after high school.  It only shone 
on me at that later date what tremendous 
obstacles he faced.  Much more formidable than my 
obstacles being Jewish.  He was up against the 
whole world.  And he couldn't have changed for 
his life.

	Damn those girls in art class, and damn everyone like them.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net