TheBanyanTree: every last drop

[Pam James]

I am listening.... I have no grand words... I'm not sure my experiences
have ever been anything close... my son, who lives with me, is almost 30
and doesn't talk to me much at all.  He answers questions, but only if I
don't go over my limit of 3 or 4 at a time.  Then he sighs in exasperation
and his voice is tense.  He hasn't had a real conversation with me in so
long I don't remember....

wow.  I don't think it's necessarily me, as me, it's just me as a person
and he doesn't much like to talk to people.  Actually, I don't know who he
talks to.

Anyway, this isn't about me - I was trying to virtually hug you and let
you  know that I hear you...

On Sat, Feb 20, 2021 at 9:24 PM <tobie at shpilchas.net> wrote:

> It’s Friday (again!), February 19, 2021
>
>
>
> So hello folks,
>
>         I wrote this last Monday and have been mulling over it ever since.
> It may speak more to me than it does to you since, thank God for you,
> you’ve never seen the Brodofsky gene in action. The thing skipped a
> generation with me so I worry like the rest of you, hurting, suppressed
> adrenalin until relief comes in the form of closure, information or
> forgiveness. My mother who is resting her soul had the worry gene and
> sensitivity that was never honored in her family.  I know the sensitivity
> thing. And I used to believe them when sensitive was always pronounced
> along  with its inseparable modifier, "too". "You’re too sensitive."
> That’s advice from those who think they are wise when they tell you to
> toughen up.  Can everyone do that? Toughen up?  But what does it do to your
> soul?
>
>         I wonder about Meyshe. Is it the genetic inheritance or is it
> autism or some combination, or is it the circumstances of his life made so
> much more difficult by being a pariah through no fault of his own and then
> there’s this pandemic which has bloomed and loomed then twisted us, stuck
> in here to grieve after my mom died in October, not able to go out and see
> a world that still exists in spite of our indoor cloistered implosion.
>
>
>         We were sitting at the kitchen table with our cups of tea —
> Meyshe’s plain, mine always with honey. I’d called Meyshe out of his
> sanctum sanctorum where he’d been meditating, or what his version of
> meditation is, which frequently amounts to a two hour nap. He had the sleep
> aid sound generator on to, "babbling brook," and perhaps he’d added frogs,
> crickets, song birds.  It took a while to rouse him, but I wasn’t feeling
> guilty about interrupting him. He’d gotten up at 10:00 a.m. long enough to
> say Kaddish with me — which required him to put clothes on and try not to
> scratch his belly during the prayer. After the last, "Amen," he’d turned
> round and went directly back into his room, fired up the babbling brook
> again.
>
>         It was well past 1:00 P when I called him. It was Presidents’ Day
> so there was no Zooming Art class at 1:00 and though I knew that eventually
> he would get up, if only to go to the kitchen and have lunch, (Example of
> typical Meyshe lunch: one carrot, washed not peeled, one large apple or
> pear, ten minutes at the roasted salted peanuts in the shell trough — OR:
> enormous pile of cold leftover rice, pasta and/or vegetables straight from
> the refrigerator storage container upended on a plate and inadequately
> heated in the microwave — not unheard of to be scarfed cold.)   I knew he
> wouldn’t sleep all day, but too close for me to refrain from analysis, and
> then concern.  Yes, we’re in the endless middle of a pandemic that we are
> told is expanding, much like the universe — as in: we know because we are
> informed of its expansion but we cannot see or feel it since in the case of
> the universe, we are bound by gravity to the earth spinning sweetly round
> and round our sun which is a tiny dot among trillions floating or rushing
> or shuddering or pin balling in vast space and we insignificant life forms
> swarming, gravity bound, on our bouncing baby ball, can only, but just
> barely, fathom an expanding universe on a strictly cognitive level as
> proofs in fields full of equations, but we certainly can't know of this
> expansion with any sensory validation.  And in the case of the endless
> expanding pandemic, we are bound by government order, by even a rudimentary
> grasp of epidemiological principles and by a respectable gob of fear to
> shelter in place, so the world outside this house is almost an abstraction.
>
>         Since my mother’s passing in October we have watched no
> television, let the subscription to the (snickerable) Chronicle lapse and
> have thus successfully removed ourselves from the nauseous tides of too
> much information, so we’ve been existing in our shielded state of too
> little information which has proven for our peace of mind alone to be the
> just right state of no information at all. Given our entrenched isolation,
> the absence of newly minted outside stimuli, I can understand why Meyshe
> might resort to applied unconsciousness via sleep, oversleep, meditation,
> "meditation" in quotes, whatever vehicle can carry him off, carry him away
> to suspended animation, neither sensory overload nor sensory deprivation.
> But though I can understand it, even (and unfortunately) sympathize with
> the allure of large time consuming splashes of anesthetized living (great
> advertisement for an assisted living facility!), it looks like, it feels
> like, it carries itself like clinical depression. I am too familiar with
> depression having moved in together with it after a romantic courtship back
> when romance like that mattered so much to me. Now I’m Mom, and though
> Meyshe’s 33, not a kid anymore, he’s not like the neuro normals, so I’m his
> guide, his mentor, his best friend and confidant, his resident wise woman
> and the first hit from a search for, "Personal Jewish shaman near me".
>
>         We sat at the kitchen table with our cups of tea and we played a
> game of Rutabaga, then an ex tempora story telling game using the deck of
> cards:
>
> Five of Spades, my turn:  There was a family of five.
> Two of Hearts: His turn: And then twins were born.
> Nine of Diamonds, my turn: They lived in the ninth district of the county.
> King of Clubs, his turn: The King ruled over their land.
> King of Diamonds, my turn The King in a neighboring country had a long
> standing dispute with the other King over territory …..
>
>         You see how it worked.
>
>         I was putting away the cards and Meyshe said, "I hope I don’t have
> to live through World War III"
>
>         Last night, the day before that and earlier in the day, Meyshe had
> repeated several times, numerous times, that the last four years of Trump
> were damaging to his psyche.  He said that in a variety of contexts and
> wordings. Also, the terrible loathsome, Republican enablers and will they
> prevent anything good from happening, and he hopes all the ice caps will
> not melt in his lifetime. And he commented also on how corrosive his hatred
> of the rich is, and, and, and.  I’d spoken with Meyshe last night about how
> my mother recalled and repeated stories about how this person had slighted
> her, how that "friend" had betrayed her: Sarah Hesse sneered about her "fat
> little polkees" (legs), and Ruth, her sister-in-law, had organized an
> evening of bridge playing,  paired everyone up in fours, sat them at card
> tables, provided snacks and coffee, decks of cards. Four at a table, tables
> all over the living room, spilling out into the dining room which she’d
> cleared of furniture. However, she seated my mother alone on a couch, the
> only person not paired up at a card table, and said to her, "I knew you
> didn’t like card games."  That story, and the story about her, "best
> enemy," who’d been invited to dinner with her husband and after my mother
> had demonstrated some proficiency in something — who knows? I can’t recall:
> cooking a lovely dinner? Solving some stubborn problem, whatever excellence
> she’d exhibited — her "worst friend" commented, "Oh. So you are good for
> something."  I heard each of these stories and dozens of similar ones
> scores of times. And each time she told me one of these stories it was
> evident that she’d exhumed the ancient incident and opened the wound
> afresh. She was re experiencing each slight, each humiliation, each
> infliction of psychic pain as if it had just happened. The stories were
> obsessions that she never let go of. I told that to Meyshe illustrating how
> we can keep pain, worry, anger, regret, hatefulness, shame alive forever if
> we choose, and I didn’t want him to do that. Sure, the Trump years are
> fresh, awful, but they are over now and we have a new president. At some
> point those four harrowing detestable years really can fade and be put to
> rest. At that point he won’t be able to call them back up to renew and
> reenergize its pain, negativity, worry, unhappiness. Please. Don’t let it
> keep you from living a full, loving and productive life.
>
>         So today, when Meyshe suddenly called up World War III and how he
> hoped it wouldn’t happen in his life time, I broke down — from isolation,
> pressure, circumstantial worries of course, but primarily for my son. What
> can I, what must I, do to help him love life not resurrect old pain, stir
> it up as fresh poison. I broke down and cried, sobbing across from him at
> the table. If that moment with the third world war’s seductive trauma were
> to paint a portrait of his life, what kind of a life can that be? He’d done
> nothing to me but of course he took it on as something he’d caused. As I
> was writing this, Meyshe came into the room, turned on the bright light and
> wrote in his own journal. He told me before he left the room that he’d been
> writing about my sobbing at the kitchen table.  Have I given him yet
> another tale of woe he can revive endlessly, expanding like the pandemic,
> like the universe?
>
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> Love,
>
> it is that,
>
>
> Tobie
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> "Pica: a bad cook’s dream guest" THS, 2021
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> Tobie Helene Shapiro
> tobie at shpilchas.net
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