TheBanyanTree: Something new has been added

[Teague, Julie Anna]

Tobie, just hear me out. 

There is always Bloomington, Indiana.  Liberal haven, a few decent smallish art museums locally, and bigger ones within an hours drive.  Opera, theater, music, large, year-round farmer's markets, active Jewish community...we've got it.  And I've seen David Sedaris twice, albeit at a larger venue than our local independent book store, of which we have three.  We're not THAT big, but still, in this day and age, three local independent bookstores feels like a win.  Two of them are the old kind of bookstores where books are stacked floor to ceiling in maze-like tunnels of books.  Honestly, I don't know where David Sedaris would've even sat to sign books.  

But my main point is that if you don't require an ocean, you can buy a really nice house here in a nice near-downtown-and-campus-and-on-a-bus-route neighborhood for $350K.  Just saying...we'd love to have you here in our special spot for bleeding heart liberals in the Midwest.  We do have a decent boiled bagel place.  I think they are pretty close, if not quite up to, New York bagels. Definitely do not have all of the great deli schmears, though. There are days I'd almost give it all up for a real New York bagel.  

Speaking of David Sedaris, I saw him several years ago and he was hilarious in that subtle way of his. I saw him again last Spring and he was dark.  Very dark.  Mostly about his father's sexual predation of his sisters, but other things as well.  He was so dark that I left feeling a little icky.  So maybe bumping into him in a local bookstore is not what it once was.  There was a time when one could run into Meg Ryan in the local food co-op.  She dated local legend John Mellencamp for a few years, but they've split up and so it's just us regular people here now.  If you want the inside scoop--from my son who was good friends with one of the Mellencamp boys and for whom Meg Ryan once offered to make a sandwich while he was at the house--John has "anger issues".  My son, who wasn't even sure why Meg Ryan was famous, told me all of this. 

Should I start looking for a house for you to buy? 

Julie



-----Original Message------
From: TheBanyanTree <thebanyantree-bounces at lists.remsset.com> On Behalf Of tobie--- via TheBanyanTree
Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2022 4:35 PM
To: A comfortable place to meet other people and exchange your own *original* writings. <thebanyantree at lists.remsset.com>
Cc: tobie at shpilchas.net
Subject: Re: TheBanyanTree: Something new has been added

Thank you everyone for your encouragement!


	About that article.  I was hoping that other people in my situation would contact me after they read the article. And they did. But mostly, here’s what they said (synopsis)

		"Great idea! Let me know when you’ve done all the work."   (implied: all by yourself)

	Yeah. Way too big a job for one person. Imagine all the government agencies that have to be involved and the funding and the working through bureaucracy after bureaucracy and then if you get that far, the lawyers!!!  ……. the    l  a  w  y  e  r  s…………………………………..

	You know the first and last thing any parent of someone with disabilities thinks of from the moment there is a glimmer of a problem is:  what will happen to my child after I leap off this flying orb (or take a flying leap off this orb).  Seeing as how a Jewish group home is a big IF, I have to have alternatives. The idea I suppose would be to make a group home myself without the officialdom of the government agencies and lawyers  .. nah. Lawyers are always involved. Maybe the government can be quieted by special effects and fancy dancing. This would mean buying a house that can accommodate housemates and coming to agreements with other parents.  And there you have your lawyers, don’t you. I felt the scare of time at my neck and realized I’d better set up a special needs trust for Meyshe. It’s a specialty and you need someone versed in all the local, state and federal rules and regulations and red red red tape to make sure your choices are secure because you’re not going to be here to protect your kid if the legal documents are sloppy. Fearful stuff. The specialist I found charges Five Hundred Fifty dollars an hour, or for the full nine yards (Will, Trust, Coordinating this Trust with the divorce settlement trust, etc.) eight fat thousand dollars.  This money comes out of what? The money to buy a house….which is what I need the lawyer to protect. 

	The buying a house thing is crazy in the bay area. The average — and I said AVERAGE, not "nice" or in a good neighborhood (meaning not scary. Frankly I don’t care about my property values if a Jew moves in next door) so the AVERAGE cost of a home in Berkeley is One Million Four Hundred Thousand dollars.  I keep thinking that if I lived in Alabama I’d be a rich woman for the rest of my life. But I’d have to live in Alabama, or rural West Virginia or Barrow, Alaska. I’ve actually thought about Barrow Alaska as a balmy haven when climate change REALLY kicks in. I do wonder though if there are any world class art museums in Barrow, or whether the lecture circuit comes through or if David Sedaris arrives to great fanfare to read at the local independent bookstore.

	Well that was off subject.

But what was the subject?

	The subject was thank you for your encouragement.

	I wish I could post a picture of Tziptkeh here. It’s not that she’s so beautiful, which she is, but she’s a remarkable contortionist. She also plays fetch. No. Really. I toss little crumpled balls of paper off my bed at night while I’m writing and she leaps in the air to bat them in her desired trajectory (terrific eye/paw coordination) then hurls herself off the bed, tortures it for a while (involving some impressive acrobatics) takes it in her mouth, leaps back on the bed and drops it where I can reach it. Repeat a hundred times.

Okay. I’m done.

Love,

Tobie 

> On Oct 26, 2022, at 8:31 AM, Teague, Julie Anna via TheBanyanTree <thebanyantree at lists.remsset.com> wrote:
> 
> 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	
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> Humans think they're so smart!   But it's taken them 100,000 years to destroy the planet.             THS, 2014
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> Tobie Shapiro
> mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net <mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net>
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"Leave alone de hoss!"
Great Grandpa Goodman Brodofsky (c. 1905) "Leave alone de hoss, Pop!"
Great Uncle Max Brodofsky (c 1932)





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






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