TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 216

Wed May 9 08:44:24 PDT 2007

May 9, 2000000007

Dear My Favourite People,

	Yesterday was the big, final I.E.P. 
(Individual Educational Plan) meeting with the 
school district and all Meyshe's service 
providers, the experts, the therapists, the 
teacher, the director of the school, the lawyer, 
the works.  There were ten people sitting around 
the table.  Meyshe's lawyer, Rick, who has 
protected him so artfully and effectively from 
the district, turned on his tape recorder.  So 
did Mr. Joy, the director of Special Education in 
the Berkeley Schools.  They were at opposite ends 
of the table.  The day was hot.  There was no 
ventilation in the room.  The important people 
had come wearing their business suits, and 
stripped little by little as the afternoon wore 
on.  The meeting was supposed to start at 1:00 
and be finished at 3:30, but of course, it went 
on until 4:30, at least.  There were two pitchers 
of ice water on the table and two stacks of cups. 
Each person went over the goals and objectives 
decided upon at the last I.E.P., about a year 
ago, and each person went over the new goals and 
objectives for Meyshe's transition to his life 
after the public schools' responsibility for his 
education stops.  That would be after he 
graduates from the school, this June.  And then, 
there will be no reimbursement from the district 
for Meyshe's cognitive therapy with the very 
expensive and specialized Dr. Helmut Relinger, 
nor the social skills group, nor speech/language 
therapy, nor occupational therapy.  The Regional 
Center of the East Bay is supposed to take over. 
To be a client of the Regional Center, you have 
to leap through a number of disability hoops. 
And Meyshe leapt well.  So he has a case worker 
who is supposed to coordinate services with 
different government agencies, and provide 
guidance to manage Meyshe's adult life.  His case 
worker is not a creative man.  He does his job, 
but it seems to me that he just plugs the square 
pegs into the square holes and looks in his book 
for the approved posture on each situation.  He 
is not the smartest suit on the rack.  That is as 
opposed to all the other experts who have been 
acquired along the way while Meyshe's been busy 
growing up.

	Some of these people, experts, Meyshe and 
I have known since 1993, when he first came to 
the school.  There are intimate and solid 
relationships with all of them.  We have mutual 
respect.  They have saved Meyshe's life.  All are 
recommending that the services he is getting from 
them be continued after graduation.  But I know 
that the Regional Center is an under funded 
institution, and they won't authorize high 
quality services, just the lowest bid ones.  I'm 
a little scared of what will and will not happen 
after June.  Maybe by then, there will be a 
divorce settlement, and there will be a trust 
fund set up for Meyshe and Feyna.  I will be 
trying to get by with the limited moneys from the 
trust to help Meyshe and Feyna get services. 
There won't be any child support any more.

	Meyshe sat through the entire I.E.P. only 
complaining about the heat a few times.  He 
attended to what was going on, and lapsed into 
doodling on napkins for a while, here and there.

	He said, in the middle of the meeting, 
"I've come a long way.  And I've got a long way 
to go."

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Training the Voice

	"You have such a lovely voice."

	That's what they told me.  And I would think, "Where is the, 'BUT'?"

	"You have such a lovely voice, BUT it squeaks."

	"You have such a lovely voice, BUT it's strained."

	"You have such a lovely voice, BUT it's sure annoying."

	"You have such a lovely voice, BUT can you not sing now?"

	"You have such a lovely voice, BUT you're ugly, too."

	All I could do, actually, was carry a 
tune.  I was not off key.  That's what I thought. 
I wanted a voice that could reach the high notes. 
I wanted a voice that could reach the low notes. 
I wanted a voice with vibrato that had power to 
it and could sing a whole phrase without having 
to take a breath.  I wanted one of those voices 
that could do anything: arpeggios, great leaps 
and bounds, whispering a high C, fading out 
slowly without cracking.  I wanted a voice that 
left people gasping.

	And I didn't have it.

	Maybe what I wanted was a voice just like 
my Grama Fannie's when she sang us to sleep. 
Heaven should shine through in a voice.  A voice 
should be able to conjure a storm, slake a 
thirst, praise a God.

	How was I going to get a voice like that? 
Here, I had all these songs I'd written.  No one 
else could sing them.  What could I do?  For the 
cello, you need training, rigorous daily 
practice.  For ballet, you have to be tortured by 
a dance instructor who beats you if you fail to 
stand on one toe and spin around fifty times 
without getting dizzy, who shames you if you're 
not anorexic, who whips you into shape.  If you 
want to be a beautician, you have to go to school 
and pass exams to get a license.  Why did it not 
occur to me to get voice training?  Because I 
wanted a natural voice, a voice I was born with. 
If I wanted a voice like that, I would have to be 
born again.

	Finally, at twenty two, I admitted to 
myself that if I weren't born that way, I would 
have to get voice lessons.  I had no idea what a 
voice lesson would be like.  What could a voice 
teacher do to train me to be born with a better 
voice?  I was married to Dweller at the time.  We 
discussed voice lessons.

	"What for?  You have a lovely voice."

	"I want a better voice.  I hate my voice."

	Dweller was a pragmatic human being.  If 
he didn't see sound reasons for this silly 
escapade, we would have to delegate the money for 
toilet paper and dog food, light bulbs, things 
that are of some actual use.  The best I could do 
to convince him was to beg pitifully, crawl on my 
knees, promise to mop the floor.  Flattery would 
go nowhere.  Mopping the floor worked.  Then, 
absent of any reference to a good instructor, I 
opened the yellow pages and found a Mrs. Nicoson 
in Oakland.  She sounded humble enough, simple 
approach, no opera.

	My first visit to Mrs. Nicoson was a 
shock.  She wanted to teach me to breathe. 
Jesus, I didn't know I was so fucked up that I 
wasn't breathing right.  We did breathing.  I 
breathed in and breathed out from my stomach, 
from my diaphragm, from the bottom of my lungs. 
The idea was to control where the breath was 
coming from.  Taking a deep breath meant more 
than it had before.  The first lesson, all we did 
was breathe.  Mrs. Nicoson was a sweet old white 
lady with short chopped golden brown and silver 
grey hair.  She was big busted, solid, demure, 
soft spoken.  I was a little intimidated.  What 
if I let loose with all the force of my 
personality?  She might be offended.  Or maybe I 
would just flatten her against the back wall.  So 
I restrained my impulses.  I lowered my voice.  I 
cut back on the passionate reactions and the wise 
cracks.  I squelched.

	But I couldn't hide myself away when I 
sang my songs.  When I sang, lovely voice or no, 
I closed my eyes, drifted far away and released 
all of me into the world.  I became unafraid.  So 
I suppose Mrs. Nicoson got to know me.  Over the 
period of a year, she got some progress out of 
me.  I looked forward to my lessons.  I grew to 
like her very much.  She was motherly, patient, 
stable.  I always knew what to expect from her. 
I learned to project my voice, to sing from my 
solar plexus, from my nose, from my throat, from 
my guts, from my chest, from my ass, from between 
my toes.  I could roll the sound around inside my 
cavernous body.  So many hollow places to use for 
reverberating.  I also remembered to mop the 
floor for Dweller.

	Into the second year of training, Mrs. 
Nicoson took off a day for some tests at the 
hospital.  She hadn't been feeling herself, and 
she shook her head.  At my next lesson, she said 
the results of the tests had come back.

	"Did you find out what it was?"

	"Oh yes, I certainly did," she answered, 
and smiled.  But she didn't tell me.

	Then, the next week she had to cancel my 
lesson because she had to go in for surgery.  We 
would resume in three weeks.  When we met again, 
she told me that the surgery had been a 
colostomy.  The diagnosis was colon cancer.  I 
didn't know what to say.

	"Are you all right?"

	"No.  I'm going to die, but I'm alive now."

	"I'm sorry.  I'm so sorry."

	"At first, I was ashamed of my colostomy 
bag.  But then I went for a dip in the pool at 
the hospital rehabilitation center.  While I was 
swimming, my body made the most perfect little 
bowel movement that arrived in the bag.  I was 
very proud of it."

	Now I tiptoed around her.  I tried not to 
present her with any dilemmas, any difficult 
questions, or certainly any enquiries about her 
health.  Part was to spare her having to tell me. 
Part was to spare me from having to hear it.  A 
month after we'd commenced our lessons again, she 
said she had to go back to the hospital.  They 
had found something new.  She would call me when 
she returned home to teach again.  But I knew she 
wouldn't come home again.  It was the expression 
on her face.  For the next few months, I told 
myself I was going to visit her in the hospital. 
But I didn't.  I distracted myself, avoided the 
whole issue.  I was afraid of the trauma it would 
cause me to see her.  Finally, I braced myself, 
and determined that I would visit her.  I called 
her husband, Nicolas Nicoson, to tell him I was 
going to see her, and to ask for directions.  He 
warned me.

	"You may not want to go.  She doesn't 
look very good.  She's dying, you know."

	I told him I knew, and I was going 
anyway.  The next day, I set out to arrive at ten 
o'clock.  I bought a bouquet of flowers.  She was 
on the fourth floor.  I followed the instructions 
and arrived at the nurses' station.

	"I'm here to see Mrs. Nicoson," I said.

	I got no answer.  The nurse just stood there looking at her charts.

	"I'm sorry," she looked up briefly before 
lowering her eyes again.  "Mrs. Nicoson passed 
away just an hour ago."

	I stood there with my useless flowers.  I 
took them with me on my way out.  What did I do 
with them?

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-- 

Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net