TheBanyanTree: Something new has been added

Wed Oct 26 08:31:50 PDT 2022

Great to hear from you.  I've read a few things on your blog and have bookmarked it for future reading.  The housing situation for Meyshe sounds very challenging.  I hope some options open up for him. 

Julie

-----Original Message-----
From: TheBanyanTree <thebanyantree-bounces at lists.remsset.com> On Behalf Of tobie--- via TheBanyanTree
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2022 4:06 PM
To: The Banyan Tree <thebanyantree at remsset.com>
Cc: tobie at shpilchas.net
Subject: TheBanyanTree: Something new has been added

Hello Tree Dwellers all,

	So much has happened to me in the past few years that it would be impossible to catch everyone up. So I won’t try. Well, maybe I will over time, but I can’t count on anything. That seems to be a constant. Kind of Zen, isn’t it. No permanence.

	Since I was ten, or was I nine, I’ve kept a journal. The bookcases are heavy with 200 page five subject spiral binders of my writing…….I doin’t write much about the seventeen gentleman callers, but thoughts, mostly my hair brained ideas. But plenty enough news I suppose. A few years ago I signed on to a quasi literary agency, more like a service: Writer’s Relief. What they do is what I know I’m not going to do….ever….it’s just not in me. They do the research finding the likely publications that would want to publish my pieces. They put together cover letters. They send out the piece to twenty five likely publications. They field the rejections and acceptances. So I’ve got numerous pieces published in a variety of literary journals. Mostly with a readership consisting of the people in the journalism and English departments that publish the literary journal. It’s probably a requirement for graduation: Take Journalism/English 105 B: How to publish a literary journal online. The students posing as editors probably read it. And whoever has a piece being published in it reads it. But they’ll read their own piece and skip the others. Parents of the writers—they’ll read it. So my work is read by maybe 25 people who got lost trying to find another piece that their friend, Nigel, got accepted.  Anyway, Writers Relief keeps track of it all. Would I do any of that? Never have——and that was when I wasn’t as busy as I am now. I’m working harder now than I ever have in my life. Part of that is because I’m alone without support. No family. No partner. Friends distanced because of the pandemic. So I’m it. IT. It can drive you nuts, or it would if I weren’t there already. I’m making it sound funny, but it isn’t. Life is a constant surprise. Would I ever have thought I’d be here, as circumstances are, at 75? (yup. 75).

	Meyshe and I live together. Feyna stopped taking her meds, to paranoid and discarded her friends, got a divorce, moved to Oregon and is only in contact with Meyshe. God knows what’s going on with her. The rest of my family disappeared in ugly ways after my mother died. We got kicked out of the house where we’d taken care of her for fourteen years and this was in the midst of the pandemic. My brother, the successor trustee (don’t ever do this. do not assign one of your children to be the executor. Toxic stuff) ordered us out of the house because he wanted it sold for the money. He didn’t care that we hadn’t even been vaccinated yet. But I held him off. It wouldn’t look very good for him to kick an old woman with her autistic son out on the street in the middle of a pandemic. Maybe even he wouldn’t have been able to live with that……..nah. He’d live with it. He’s smart. He knows how to rationalize. 

	In this swamp of changes I thought I needed to do something more direct than having someone submit my writing and then waiting to see if anything was accepted for publication. So I decided to start a blog. I’m not on any social media. Won’t go on Facebook. I can’t forgive Zuckerberg for helping Trump get elected and hiding behind freedom of the press. (remember shouting FIRE in a crowded theater). I found people to design the blog and then it sat there without a post for months and months while the world popped and bubbled around me. I just posted my first entry to the blog today. The Writers Relief people also had posted an article that was written about Meyshe and me in the Northern California Jewish Weekly in January. He looks so handsome in the photograph. Serious. Sad. Aware. 

	Here’s the blog address: tobieheleneshapiro.com          I figure I’ll post once a week for now.  If you feel like checking it out, go right ahead. 

It’s nearly one o’clock PM and I’m shot. Not much sleep last night.

	OH! And we got a cat! Her name is Tziptkeh. She’s about 9 months old, a calico/tortoise shell mix. Smart.  Beautiful. a kid. destructive. It got a lot better when I accepted that the house is hers not mine. She likes classical music and she likes me to sing to her. And I thought I was done raising toddlers.

Love,

Tobie	

Humans think they're so smart!   But it's taken them 100,000 years to destroy the planet.             THS, 2014

Tobie Shapiro
mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net <mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net>

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