In short
Podcast Summary: This American Life - Episode 871: The Thing About Things
Episode Overview
- Theme: Three stories exploring the strange power inanimate objects can hold over us.
- Duration: Approximately 54 minutes.
- Host: Ira Glass
- Production: WBEZ Chicago
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Key Stories
Prologue
Nunzio and His Scooter (8 minutes)
- Narrative: Nunzio buys a dilapidated 1966 Honda scooter at 13, intending to restore it.
- Challenges: He quickly realizes the extensive repairs needed are beyond his means. After years of neglect, the scooter's parts remain scattered.
- Reunion: Years later, he learns that the engine he entrusted to a mechanic was never worked on. Tracking the mechanic down to prison, Nunzio retrieves his engine and, after a year of labor, finally restores the scooter.
- Reflection: His attachment to the scooter represents a deep connection to his youth, illustrating how objects can carry significant emotional weight.
Act One
Ted's Cursed Rock (15 minutes)
- Narrative: Ted, as a child, steals a piece of petrified wood from the Petrified Forest National Park during a family trip and later believes he is cursed as a result.
- Bad Luck: Ted recounts a series of unfortunate events throughout his life, attributing them to the curse of the stolen rock.
- Redemption: Prompted by his daughter's belief in the curse, Ted returns the rock to the park, hoping to reverse his bad luck.
- Outcome: After sending the rock back, Ted experiences a positive turn in fortune, leading to reflections on guilt, responsibility, and the psychological weight of objects.
Act Two
Gregor’s Family and Their Stuff (31 minutes)
- Narrative: Gregor struggles with his aging parents, Milton and Etta, who accumulate excessive belongings, primarily Etta's extensive art collections and sculptures.
- Conflict: The clutter poses safety risks for his elderly parents, and Gregor wishes to move them to a more manageable space.
- Plan for a Museum: To respect Etta’s attachment to her collections, Gregor proposes turning their barn into a museum to showcase her art while still clearing out the house.
- Turning Point: After Etta is offered an art show, the family faces a health crisis with Milton, prompting Gregor to reassess what’s truly important.
- Final Reflections: Etta’s eventual diagnosis leads to a poignant reflection on the nature of life, love, and the legacy of belongings, with Etta finally beginning to let go of her possessions.
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Themes and Insights
- Attachment to Objects: Each story illustrates the emotional bonds people form with inanimate items, highlighting how these objects can define our identities and histories.
- Psychological Impact: The narratives explore how guilt and belief in curses can influence behavior and decision-making.
- Family Relationships: The stories underscore the complexities of familial bonds, particularly as they are tested by aging, memory, and possessions.
- Letting Go: A recurring motif is the struggle to release attachments, both physical and emotional, as a pathway to personal freedom and healing.
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Conclusion The episode "The Thing About Things" invites listeners to reflect on their relationships with objects and the profound impact these connections can have on life choices and family dynamics. Through storytelling, it reveals that sometimes, our possessions have a life of their own, affecting us in unexpected ways.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace. for 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. When Renzo first saw the bike, he knew. It was a little Honda motorcycle from 1966 with an engine so small that officially I think you're supposed to call it a scooter. It was in a neighbor's yard. He was 13. I absolutely remember it. Yeah, it was against the shed. Grass was growing all over it. It was red, but they had not taken care of it. And somebody put flat black paint all over the thing. Tires were flat. There's a couple pieces missing from it. It's funny. So when you see it, it's kind of a wreck of a bike.
1:04Yeah, it's a wreck of a bike with a dream of, I'm going to be the cool kid in the neighborhood with my friends and buddies. His plan was he wanted to ride it around the railroad tracks with his buddies. They would hang out there, or in the woods, with their bicycles, get cigarettes from the older kids, or a beer now and then. This was West Albany, New York, 1975. When Nunzio described this to me, the only thing I could picture was Stranger Things or the film Stand By Me. And then a friend of his brought that film up to describe what it was like. Anyway, so Nunzio pays his neighbor$50 cash with money he earned mowing lawns.
1:40Nunzio wasn't great at school, but even at 13, he had an unusual talent for fixing things and for engines. Like he fixed his own lawnmower engine at that age. And he was excited to get the scooter home and to work on it in this workshop under his parents' porch. When he did, he discovered. Okay, so the engine was seized to come to find out. It was missing the overhead valve assembly. Also, holes in the gas tank, carburetor we needed to be building, battery was shot. So now, you know, I kind of realized, like, I couldn't realistically cut enough lawns to get enough parts to get it running at that age.
2:17Okay, so you're 13. You realize, like, this is going to be a big job. Do you just put it aside? Like, what happens? I set it aside. And it sat there for 24 years. During that near quarter century, he lay in pieces all over the ground, under this porch, he says. But he didn't forget it. He'd think about it now and then. Always intended to get back to the scooter, do the rebuild that he couldn't afford as a kid. It ended up taking him on a much more circuitous route than he could have imagined. Basically, what happened is that in 1999, Nunzio's parents sold the house, He collected all the parts from under the porch and hauled them to where he now live with his wife and his two young kids at the time.
2:58Laid the stuff out in his garage and finally got to work. He started searching for scooter parts. This is 1999 before everything was on the internet, so it took some doing. Says he spent about a year piecing the thing together. Finally got the engine barely running. Realized that he needed somebody to do a proper rebuild of the engine. Found a shop in Schenectady. Put the engine in a cardboard box. Dropped it off. Guy said, great, give me four or five weeks. I'll have it for you. Good as new. I called him like a month later. I'm getting to it. You know, things have been busy at the shop. Don't worry about it.
3:32You know, I promise you we'll get to it. I call back in like two, three weeks. Hey, I got it all apart. I need the manual. And I said, okay. Took me like a few weeks to get it. So another three weeks go by. And I deliver it. up there. I said, here we go. Hey, when can I get it? Hey, it's going to take us a few weeks. We've got it all apart. We're working on it. Looking great. More months pass. Finally, six or seven months in, Nunzio says he calls the shop and the phone is disconnected. He drives there. Seems to be permanently closed. Goes to the literal phone book. Remember, 1999. Calls people with the guy's last name.
4:14Finds two relatives, he says, who say they haven't seen him. He knows he should just buy another engine, either a new engine or another old engine from the 1960s from the same model bike, but just can't bring himself to do it. None of those choices were acceptable to me. The most important thing here, for me, was keeping it all original, to have the exact bike when I took it at 13, still today. Why? because it was really a piece of time of me with my friends at that age.
4:59Years go by. He kind of gives up on this engine-less, hopeless bike. Finally, one Sunday night, kids are in bed. He goes online and searches for the name of the guy he left the engine with and learns no wonder he can't find him. The guy's locked up, convicted on an illegal dumping charge. Nunzio figures out where he's doing time and visits him the very next day. So they bring her in there. It's just like the movies. You're sitting at this table, and there's a piece of glass 10 inches between the two. You're not allowed to put your hands over the glass. And he comes out, and he sits at the table.
5:37and the first question he says to me is, do I know you? And I said, yes, I gave you my scooter engine years ago and I want it back. Okay, probably not the answer the guy was expecting. And he said to me, you tracked me down to prison for a scooter engine? I said, yes, I had it until 13 and it's important to me. I want to get it running. He goes, yeah, I have it. And he was extremely helpful, really nice. And he gave me the address, and he said to me, you tell him I sent you there. You tell him you visited me in jail, and you tell him to give that engine right back to you. They got along so well, and then he ended up staying and chatting, he says, for close to an hour.
6:26And when he went and retrieved the engine, it was still in the original cardboard box he'd left it in. And for everything he'd been told on the phone, that they were working on it, it's nearly done, just a little more, he saw nobody had ever touched it.
6:44I found and talked to the guy that Nunzio remembers, the repair shop owner. And for the record, he remembers none of these events from 20 years ago. And at first he insisted that none of it ever possibly could have happened. But then, he talked a little more, he relented a little, and said, maybe it did. Nunzia told me that once he got the scooter engine back, it took a year, meticulously rebuilding it himself, to bring the whole bike back to cherry condition. This project he decided to take on in 1975, he finally finished three decades later. So much work. I had to ask. It's been 20 years. Like, how many times do you think you've ridden it in 20 years?
7:23Oh, I mean...
7:3030? No. 40? That doesn't sound like a lot. No, it's not. The point of the bike was not riding it. Some objects have a power of us. It's special. They make us do crazy stuff. Stuff we probably wouldn't do for another person. For years sometimes. Today on our show, we have stories of people caught in that kind of servile relationship with objects that they supposedly own. But in each of these stories, as you'll hear, the objects seem to be the ones calling the shots. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Thank you.
8:38spotting the signals that others miss, and acting before threats become crises. Recorded future, know what matters, act first. This message comes from Apple Card. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Our Common Nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Ana Gonzalez, through this complicated country.
9:25We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, their poetry, and of course, play some music. All to reconnect to nature and get closer to the things we're missing. Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC wherever you get podcasts.
9:48This American Life Fact 1, a rock and a hard place. So let's start today with an object that a guy got a long time ago. That first meant one thing to him, and then it came to mean something very different and much more important. Aviva de Kornfeld talked to the guy and has this story. When Ted was six years old, his mom had just remarried, and his new dad had this idea for all of them to go on their first big trip as a family, a road trip. He thought it would be cool to take the family on a trip out west. And we stopped at every attraction. We went to the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, and we also went to see the crater in Arizona.
10:30Ah, cool. It was a huge time for us. I mean, for me personally, it was like the first experience I remember going anywhere. The important stop for our story? The Petrified Forest National Park. I remember driving through the forest, and I just, I don't know, I was at that age where I flipped out over everything. Petrified wood is kind of worth flipping out over. It's crazy to look at because it looks like a tree. You can see the texture of the bark and the grain of the wood and the tree rings, but it's a rock. Plus, in the process of becoming a rock over millions of years, the wood gets this rainbow coloring from all the mineral deposits.
11:10So it looks kind of magical. I remember seeing an area that we went to where there were a bunch of different trees laying on the ground, like all in a row. And I remember begging my dad, please, you know. And so I guess I bugged my dad enough that he finally let me pick a piece. I got to pick it. And, of course, I picked a big chunk. How big was it? It was significant. Like the size of a baseball? Is that what we were talking about? Probably more like the size of a football. Oh, really big. Yeah. Yeah. It was pretty hefty. You know, I remember my dad, like, pulling it out of the spot it was in, you know.
11:57So now that tree had a chunk missing. Ted's dad was the kind of guy who had been the rules for his kids. So I remember him saying, OK, well, we're going to put it in the trunk, but don't say anything when we go through the gate, you know. Because you knew you weren't allowed to take it. Yeah, we hid it in the trunk under some clothes. I remember when we got to the hotel that night, we unwrapped it and brought it into the hotel room. I mean, he didn't have to do that, but he made a big deal out of it. And yeah, I remember my mom writing a postcard to my aunt, saying that Teddy, that's what they called me, Teddy.
12:33Teddy got a piece of petrified wood from the forest. And then, you know, after that, when we got home, I really didn't think about it much. Until one day, over 40 years later, my daughter said, hey, she's a senior in high school. She comes in the kitchen, and she says, Hey, Dad, that rock out in the garden, is that a petrified wood? I said, Yeah. And she said, Where did you get that? And I said, I told her a story. When I was a kid, we went to the petrified forest, and I took it. She says, That's what I thought. She says, I found this interesting article online, and it says that people who have taken petrified wood are cursed.
13:13A light bulb went off. I was like, This could be it. The idea that this petrified wood may have cursed him? This made a lot of sense to Ted. Because he thought he'd been cursed. For years. For as long as he could remember, he'd had very bad luck. No matter where he was or what he did. Couldn't catch a break. Could not catch a break. The bad luck found him when he was at home. We had a house fire when my daughter was two years old. When she was three years old, Hurricane Katrina, the eye of Hurricane Katrina, passed over our city in Mississippi and put six feet of water in our house. The bad luck followed him abroad, too.
13:54I got a bad infection in El Salvador and lost my hearing in one side. When Ted went hunting for bird nests with his friends. We're in the middle of the woods. I fell on a broken root beer bottle. It was like there was nothing else around. And I cut my hand over. I still have a scar. There's more. I hit a deer driving through San Antonio full on and totaled my car. Oh, and the bad luck came for his love life, too. His marriage started falling apart. I think that's pretty unlucky. Are there other things? Yeah, of course. You know, I can give you six, 10, 12 examples, whatever you want. It's something that was with me always.
14:31It followed me everywhere. It was a scourge on my life. It was a shadow that was always with me. if something bad could happen, it would happen. Is it possible that that's just stuff that happened to you and not that you were cursed? I think no. I was cursed 100%. You can ask my friends and family. It was an ongoing joke, you know. You got to call it like you see it. I'm a realist, like seeing is believing. So, if you see a vase on the table, there's a vase on the table. Right? I was cursed. I saw it. So, for decades, Ted lived in fear of the next bad thing happening. And then his daughter told him about that article she'd found.
15:22I couldn't believe it. I read the article. I was like, holy cow, this could be it, you know? And I read the story, and I was like, oh, my God, I didn't realize. That I did such a bad thing. Well, you were so little. Yeah, I was real little. But I guess that doesn't matter when it comes to something like a curse, right? I mean, there's no age funded on it. It's unclear where exactly this idea that petrified rocks curse people came from. I tried to run it down, but no one knows. And it didn't matter to Ted anyway. All he knew was that he was cursed, and he needed to get that wood back to the park as soon as possible.
16:02Handily, he happened to be working at the post office at the time. So the next day, he went to work and grabbed a priority box. Flat rate, because the rock was so heavy. Yeah, my daughter told me, hey, you should write a letter. You should, you know, apologize for it. You know, whatever you have to do, you have to end your curse. So I said, I will. I'll write the letter, you know. Ted carefully swaddled the petrified wood and bubble wrap to protect it and placed it in a box along with his letter. It cost him$22 to ship. A steal if it breaks a curse.
16:38The Petrified Forest National Park has a long history with rock thieves like Ted. In fact, that's why they became a national park in the first place. Local residents worried about the area being totally stripped and petitioned to turn the land into a park to protect it. Years ago, there was a study that found they could be losing wood at a rate of 12 tons per year. And so, for decades, the park tried all kinds of tactics to discourage theft. Vehicle inspections, fines, supervised tours, preemptively gifting people a little piece of wood bought from private land near the park. You might think that park rangers invented the curse as a deterrent, but no.
17:18But somehow, word spread, making Ted just one of hundreds of people who have sent pieces of petrified wood back to the park. Matt Smith, the ranger in charge of processing the returned rocks, says that a rock arrives roughly once a week, often with a letter attached. There are now over a thousand letters in their archive. It seemed strange to me. So many people all came to believe their bad luck came from a rock and felt compelled not just to return the rock, but to apologize and explain themselves? I wanted to read the letters for myself. So I flew out to the park in Arizona. Ranger Matt set me up with a desk and plopped down two big boxes stuffed with letters.
17:59I spent a full day sifting through them. The first letter the park ever received was from a guy in India in 1935. From there, the letters are organized by year, mostly handwritten. The letters have a kind of frenzied urgency to them. Like this one. Please release me. My life is hell. Or this one, which is oddly accusatory considering they're the thief. You should tell people these are cursed before people take them. Sorry. But lots of people go to great lengths to detail their woes. Pages and pages that feel more like a journal entry than federal mail. The list of hardships attributed to the rocks are wide-ranging, including, but not limited to, layoffs, car accidents, robberies, cancer, divorce, a lot of beloved family dogs died, one guy had a failed vasectomy, another fell through the ceiling of his house, and one person's fiancée cheated on them with a Norwegian woman.
18:58There are a lot of mentions of idiot husbands and apologies on their behalf, and tons of people who didn't even take the rocks themselves, but somehow looked at their lives and concluded that everything bad happened because of the rocks their parents or grandparents had stolen, like a weird petrified version of inherited trauma. One woman sent back a rock with a letter in the hopes of restoring her luck, and then promptly sent another letter after she'd realized she'd sent in the wrong rock. In some letters, desperate people describe the ways in which their lives have been horrifically derailed.
19:35And then, at the bottom of the letter, a park ranger who's examined the rock has written a little note in pencil. Wood, not from park. Brutal.
19:50What's striking about reading so many of these letters back to back is how terrible and ordinary the pain they're recounting is. They're describing all the awful parts of life, the parts you know intellectually are on the table, but still feel shocking when they happen to you. I can imagine what a relief it could be to discover you'd been cursed. Because how nice would it be to get an explanation for why it's all so difficult? Plus, it means you just might have the power to undo it.
20:27I talked to a few different rangers about this phenomenon, people stealing and returning their rocks. And they were all surprisingly blasé about the whole thing. They don't want people to steal rocks, obviously. But it turns out the amount they're losing every year really isn't that big of a deal. Over time, they figured out that they're not actually losing 12 tons of wood per year. Plus, people returning rocks? That's just more work for them. The rangers can't determine where exactly in the park the rocks came from, so all the returned rocks just get tossed into a pile. Ranger Matt took me to see it.
21:03It's big, maybe 15 feet wide, a few feet tall, with rocks of all sizes. How many individual rocks do you think are in this pile? I have no idea. I guess if I had, I don't know,$20 ,000,$50 ,000, something like that. People are crazy. Look at this one. I know. If I were going to steal a rock, I would take that one. The little pretty ones. I won't, though, because it's really not a good time for me to be cursed. No, no, nobody wants to be cursed. Yeah. Have you ever gotten a letter from someone after they returned the rock saying that the bad luck and the curse had been lifted? No. No, I never have.
21:41God, I never even thought of that. No, nobody's written back and been like, hey, by the way, you know, everything's better now. I mean, if it is for them, I love that. I wanted to ask, did anything change after you sent The Rock back? I got so lucky that I can't even talk about it. Actually, he could. Couldn't resist. After Ted returned The Rock, he came into a lot of money unexpectedly. He also stumbled into a great below-market rate deal on a house. He did get divorced, but that too felt like good luck. Ted doesn't know for sure if returning the rock is what changed his luck, because that was actually just one part of a much broader reckoning for him.
22:26But whatever it was, he says it worked. These days, his luck has turned around so much that his whole job is based on having good luck. He goes to estate sales and flea markets looking for treasures and sells them online. Like this one time, he's poking around at a sale in an old house and found an old, cool-looking duck call. You know, for hunting, a duck call? You know, weren't you willing to it? He bought it for$9 and posted it to a hunting Facebook group. Within an hour, he got a message from a guy who said, call me right away. So Ted did. He said, this is a very special duck call. I'm a collector.
23:05And he said, I'm willing to give you$5 ,000. Oh my God. You started the story cursed, and now you're just riding your good luck. Yeah, pretty much. I think so. These days, Ted feels better in all kinds of ways. Like things have been put right in his life. Like the rock, which is back where it belongs. He'd felt guilty about taking it. That's true for a lot of people. The vast majority of the hundreds of letters I read mentioned guilt. Most people felt bad about having done the wrong thing and just wanted to try and make it right. A lot of the letters come from people at the end of their lives doing a little psychic housekeeping before they go.
23:47Some of the letters are so simple, like, what else can I say? I was wrong and I'm sorry. Or, I don't regret much, but I regret taking this rock. I found Ted's letter in the archive, too, handwritten. He says, I pray that the return will deem forgiveness from God, the petrified Forest National Park, and the people of the United States of America. And he apologizes. That big pile of returned rocks, the rangers have a name for it. It's called the conscience pile, which I find kind of moving. We make mistakes, and so often our attempts to make things right fall short. But I think if you're the kind of person who takes the time to mail a rock back to a national park years after taking it, you're probably on the right track.
24:51If you go to Kornfeld, it's one of the producers of our program. Thanks to Ryan Thompson, who noticed some of the letters on display on a trip to the park, and then made a book of the letters called Bad Luck, Hot Rocks. That's how we first heard about the story. Coming up, Donna the Goldstein leaps in to help a family who are not entirely sure they want or need his help with the stuff they own. That's in a minute, Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. Support for This American Life comes from BetterHelp. Most FSA dollars expire at the end of the year, so it's time to use them or lose them.
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Read the full transcript
26:50This is American Life and Myra Glass. Today's program, The Thing About Things. Stories of objects that, in one way or another, become our bosses. It's like we are doing their bidding. It's like we're working for them. We arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2, a few hundred of my favorite things. You know, sometimes our attachment to things can be a real problem. You definitely can get too attached. Jonathan Goldstein is a longtime contributor to our show. His own show, Heavyweight, is back now with new episodes after a long hiatus. and one of the new episodes is about some parents whose stuff has become a problem for their kids.
27:31As always, on Heavyweight, Jonathan jumps in to help. What I love about this particular story is how it unfolds over time, over years actually, and then arrives at the end. These moments that, I don't know, I don't want to say too much about this. You should just hear them. Here's Jonathan's story.
27:52All right, you ready? You're rolling? You got levels? Me, me, ma, mo, moo. Okay, go. This is Gregor. Gregor is one of my oldest friends, and today he's coming to me with a problem. I'll take it from the top. Okay, so I have two parents, Milton and Etta. Etta and Milton are both pushing 90, and Gregor's problem is that they refuse to move out of their house. It's the same three-story Victorian Gregor grew up in. He was 12 when the family first moved in. He still remembers the excitement as they unloaded boxes from the moving truck, or moving trucks. You know, normal people move with, like, a big, giant 18-wheeler moving truck.
28:37I believe when we moved, we had six moving trucks. One for the family's belongings. The other five for the collections. Some people collect coins. Some people collect comic books. Gregor's mother, Etta, collects collections. She has, like, maybe 200 egg beaters. Antique egg beaters. She has, do you know what a bisque knotter is? No. In occupied Japan, people bought these little figurines where the head would wobble back and forth. Like a bobble-headed doll? Something like that. Anyway, she probably has 2 ,000 bisque knotters. Then there are the 19th century weaving looms, the handmade baskets, the medieval scythes.
29:20Etta Ehrlich is an artist, and her collections are the source of her inspiration. Etta sees beauty in everything, and in her hands, everything becomes art. She'll sculpt lint from the dryer. She'll put googly eyes on a splatter of dried bird poop. My mother has been unbelievably prolific in making art for like the last 35 years to a degree where now the living room is like full to the brim with a million pieces of art, and every week she probably makes five or ten more pieces of art. None of this would be a problem, except that a large cluttered house is becoming increasingly dangerous for Gregor's elderly parents.
29:58I fear the more conventional fears. I fear my mother falling down a flight of stairs, or my father. I mean, there's all kinds of dark things that can happen in a house full of staircases. And so, Gregor wants to move his parents into a smaller apartment, something more manageable. That's his plan. Yeah, that's his plan. But that's not my plan. This is Etta. The practical thing is we can't be in the house too much longer. I'm 88. Yeah. But to move out of the house isn't simply a question of selling the furniture. It's, my God, what do we do with all this? All this, all the collections, is what's keeping Etta in the house.
30:43And of all her many collections, of all her milking stools and antique rolling pins, It's her collection of fragile, colorful bottles that is perhaps the biggest impediment to moving. By Gregor's estimate, Etta has thousands. Wine bottles, perfume bottles, old decanters, bottles washed up from the bottom of the ocean. As well as being an artist, Etta is a Buddhist, and her bottles are not just bottles, but a series of meditations. Because on each of the bottles, in fancy fonts and careful calligraphy, Etta places a message in the form of a Zen-like riddle. I turn my noose to tightrope use and madly dance upon it.
31:26Isn't that gorgeous? That's very nice. There you go. You want me to give that away for nothing? Other inscriptions are, Stop schlepping your old being into the future, or, We cling to illusions of control. After hearing a few, I start to recognize a theme. All the bottles bear messages, imploring one to let go. Yet Etta is incapable of letting go of the very bottles doing the imploring, or much of anything else. There is a little bit of a paradox, or there's something to kind of be struggling with here. Yes, Jonathan, you're very, very sharp. That is exactly, exactly true. These works, which talk about being stuck with the grasping level, I suffer from that.
32:16I could leave tomorrow. This is Gregor's dad, Milt. If the taxi pulled up right now, you would jump in. I'm ready to go, yeah. I'll stop you there. He's never taken a taxi in his life. But if I pulled up right now, you'd get it. Uber-duber. I don't get attached to furniture and bottles and stuff. And I'll just reinforce that point that while my father may posit that he's a Taoist and not attached to anything, he is very much complicit, relentlessly bringing home the raw material through which my mother turns the art out. When was the last time you brought something home, Milt? Yesterday. I'm always interested in what she's doing, and I often find the raw materials walking around in the woods or anywhere to find stuff.
33:04Her only requirement is if I find something, it has to have what she calls a charm. As for Milt, what he's charmed by, exceedingly charmed by, is Etta. Milt is a poet, and after over 60 years of marriage, he still writes poems about her, rhapsodizing about the way she creates art, or cooks, or the way she dances. Milt says he can watch Etta dance all night. He just doesn't understand her being so chained to her belongings. I'm stuck. But I am not coming up with a solution that's any better, am I? Yeah. You know? Except dying. That's not a solution. No, it's not a solution for Greg. He's left holding the whole thing.
33:54Of Milton and his three kids, Gregor is perhaps the one most ready to serve. The child, his parents hand a to-do list when he comes to visit. I mean, he talks mean, and that's because he has meanness in him. I'm not saying he doesn't, but he's also a very kind, giving, generous, loving person. Yes, he is. Yeah. Don't tell him I said so.
34:25Inaction is a choice. Not doing anything, something's bound to happen sooner or later. and just sort of watch the secondhand sweep around the clock face until somebody's dead is the most passive and weakest possible way to exist and die. It just feels like, you know, the Damoclean sword of mortality is coming and all we're going to do is sit here and watch Rachel Maddow until it cuts our head off. And so, because Etta can't let go, Gregor wants my help in pulling off a most extravagant workaround, one that will allow Etta to both keep her stuff and still move out. The plan of action that Gregor wants to present to her?
35:06What if you don't get rid of your possessions and we make a museum of your stuff?
35:14Gregor explains to me the details. It seems that in the 1960s, Etta and Milt bought a 200-year-old farmhouse with no running water or indoor plumbing. Gregor's plan is to convert the barn into the Etta B. Ehrlich Museum. Convincing one's mother to downsize by way of a feral farmhouse museum that, by Gregor's own admission, is probably a breeding ground for the Hanta virus, has all the makings of a classic cockamamie scheme. But this is just the beginning.
35:55For his plan to build a museum to work, Gregor will need his siblings on board. So as his emotional envoy, I begin by phoning his sister Lexi. Lexi is the level-headed one of the three, and I want to get her read on the plan. Is it realistic that he'll be able to turn the barn into a museum like that?
36:22perhaps this plan is a bit half-baked but i figure i might have more luck getting gregor's brother dimitri on board dimitri's never been afraid of a scheme that runs a little pink on the inside so i give him a call we haven't spoken since i moved from new york where dimitri lives to Minnesota. I hate to see a Minneapolis area code when you call. It makes me sad. Your business doesn't bring you to Minnesota, I'm guessing. It does sometimes. I interviewed Prince for a cover story. Everyone warned me to be very careful with Prince. He's very touchy. Dimitri is a martial arts instructor who has kickboxed his way across Thailand.
37:02He's also a journalist who interviews celebrities. So I went there, waited all day for the interview. And a musician who had a song go platinum three times in Belgium. He was like, hey, you want to jam? And I was like, okay. So I wound up actually jamming with Larry Graham and Prince for like 20 minutes.
37:22What? That was one sentence. Before Dimitri can launch into his next sentence, I jump in. So your brother, Gregor. Yeah, I'm familiar with him. He has this plan, which maybe you're also familiar with. When I'm finished rehashing Gregor's museum plan, Dimitri offers a laundry list of issues. There's a 99 to 100 percent chance of getting Lyme disease walking out of your car to the barn because it's high grass, a lot of deer, getting poison ivy. So there's also like horrible black mold because, as you know, the farmhouse burned down when my albino baker friend Theo stayed there and lit a fire and the roof and the whole house burned down.
38:01And along with his friend Thea's trouble, there was also his friend Sonim's trouble in that cursed place. My friend, who spent 25 years as a Buddhist monk under the Dalai Lama, had to use a broom to fight off a very large raccoon that was in the house and was, like, growling at us. Like, just horrifying. But for Dimitri, even more daunting than the rabid raccoons is changing his mother's mind on the matter. Whenever he's tried to clear space in his parents' home, it refills overnight, suggesting Etta's problem can't be solved by physical means. Instead, he thinks the problem has to be attacked at its psychological root.
38:36She needs to learn how to let go. And for this, Dimitri has just the solution. Well, maybe hypnosis.
38:47It stopped her from smoking, which is probably a more powerful psychological and physical addiction than collecting things. Etta was a pack-a-day smoker, a habit she hung on to for nearly 30 years. Our friend who was a hypnotist said, oh, I can hypnotize you. And she went into the session thinking, this isn't going to work. The whole time the hypnosis was going on, she was like, this isn't working, this isn't working. And then she walked out and never smoked again. He was an interesting person, too. His name was Saul Feldstein. He actually had one of his eyeballs was like hanging out of his face.
39:17And like it was like a sort of early commune hippie thing. Having grown up on TV sitcoms of the 1970s, I'm well aware of the power of hypnosis. Hypnosis gave Fred Flintstone the self-control to stop eating Brontosaurus burgers. It gave the Fonz the confidence that jumped Snake Canyon on his motorcycle. As a boy, I always wondered what it would feel like to have my full potential unlocked through the hypnotic arts. He was very successful as a hypnotist. Wow. Unlike building a museum, hypnosis requires neither time, effort, nor those awful stanchions that snap back with that loud thwacking sound that make everyone turn around and stare at you.
40:04Fully convinced that Saul Feldstein is the solution to all of our problems and that museums belong in a museum, Dimitri and I say our goodbyes.
40:21We're slating in on part two. Johnny discusses post-talking to Dimitri. Here we go. I need to tell Gregor that I like Dimitri's idea much better than his, but I need to tread lightly. From Cain and Abel to Stephen and Alec Baldwin, I know how competitive brothers can be. And unlike the Lord, or Alexander Ray Baldwin, I don't want to be seen playing favorites. Do you think you're, like, hypnotism has a role in this? Well, I hear that, like, your voice went up an octave when we started talking about hypnotism and you got excited about hypnotism. Well, Dimitri seemed to think that it could help. Okay, so the two of you should go see a movie together.
41:03Going to movies is Gregor and my thing. Clearly, I'm arousing some jealousy. I need to keep my arguments away from Dimitri and grounded in the merits of hypnotism. This whole barn thing as the symptom. But through hypnosis... Why are you saying it with, like, the weird accent on the word hypnosis? I mean, do you think that hypnotism has something to offer here? My short answer would be absolutely not. I think it's a waste of time. Hypnosis. Hypnosis. Hypnosis. Hi, Johnny. How are you? Hey, Dimitri. Hi. I've got your brother Gregor on the line with me. We've met. Hi, how are you? Can you make the case to your brother?
41:51Sure, I just think that, you know, there's no harm. There's certainly nothing to lose. It takes 15 or 20 minutes, and she's proven that she's very susceptible to hypnotic suggestions, so why not try it? I agree with all those points. My main feeling is that getting someone to stop a behavior like smoking is much, much easier than getting someone to change their personality, which is harder to hypnotize someone out of. That may be true. I wouldn't disagree there. Swept up in a wave of brotherly bonamy, I decide it's a safe space to cautiously share my one secret boyhood longing. And along the way, I could get hypnotized out of something, too.
42:28Yeah, a lot of stuff. Yeah. And immediately regret it. What do you mean a lot of stuff? I mean that smug smile they could work on. We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time. Being more able to look people in the eye. Not always hide behind a microphone. Actually, you know, there is, all joking aside, there is a new hypnosis that works on what's called voluntary baldness syndrome where they realize that a lot of men are sort of doing it on purpose. Why would someone do that on purpose? Well, it turns out that hair loss is more of like an act of willful insolence often and a cry for pity.
43:01I used to love my hair. Well, if you loved it so much, why did you get rid of it? First of all, I find it offensive. And Gregor, chime in here because I'm sure you're equally offended. No, Dimitri used to be bald as an egg, and then he willed it back on. I think if you did it at the same time with my mother, we can get a two-for-one deal. Package deal. I'm just saying, it's science. If you read the New England Journal of Medicine, it's a big deal. With Gregor and Dimitri aligned and friends again at my expense, I set out in search of the one-eyed hippie hypnotist Saul Feldstein. But it turns out Saul died in 2019 at the age of 91.
43:40So I reach out to other hypnotists, all of whom pretty much hang up on me once I explain the project. So hypnotism is out. The museum is out. I'm stuck with my crap personality, and Etta is stuck with her house full of crap. And Gregor is still at an impasse. But things are about to change.
44:08Gregor tells me that Etta has been offered a show at the Carter Burden Gallery in Manhattan. Etta is an outsider artist, so the offer of her own exhibition feels like finally, at the age of 88, she's being invited inside. The show, with its formal invitations and coat check, feels like validation. It's the kind of opportunity Etta has always hoped for. And for Gregor, it feels like an opportunity for her pieces to find good homes outside her home. The show opens on March 21st, 2019. Gregor and I make a plan to speak the morning after so he can tell me how it went. When we speak, what Gregor tells me is that things that night took a wild turn.
44:53Do you want to explain? Sure. I flew into town for my mom's art opening. Okay, we're here at the art opening. It's a pretty good crowd. Everyone's eating wine and cheese. And it's great, but it's so loud. It was almost like a cartoon version of my mom's success story in that, like, some stranger guy came up and was like, you're a beautiful woman. You're beautiful. Thank you. It's very nice to hear my age. Her ego was buffed from many sides, everything going great. Oh! Gregor's dad, Milt, on the other hand, wasn't having as good a time. He spent most of the evening in the corner, nibbling on crackers.
45:37At the end of the night, Gregor approached him. Go, Father, what did you make it up? Oh, it's very nice. It was a little bit exhausting. He seemed like, even though he sometimes talks in a quiet voice, he was especially quiet. Like, I could hardly hear him. I don't know. On the drive home, Milt conked out. When the family couldn't rouse him, they realized he wasn't just sleeping, but completely unconscious. Etta began yelling, wailing Milt's name. He was driven to the hospital where the EMTs lifted him onto a gurney. The doctors thought he might be having a stroke, but they couldn't say for sure.
46:17In the waiting room, Etta turned to Gregor and said, you might as well order the dumpsters right now, meaning you win. empty out the house. Because if Milt isn't coming back to it, that's it.
46:32How do you know when the Democlean sword of mortality isn't just dangling above you, but actually falling? How do you know when it's time to pick up the remote, turn off Rachel Maddow, and finally act? The night, a milestone in Edda's career, was meant to symbolize a turning point, and it was, just not the kind she was hoping for. Milt was eventually sent home from the hospital, but his collapse signaled a change for Gregor, too. For so long, he'd been saying, maybe it's time, but maybe it was time to stop saying maybe.
47:15Hello? Hi, it's Gregor and Jonathan. Oh, and I thought this was a scam call. How do you like that? How are you? Well, I wouldn't be so sure it's not. We haven't finished the call yet. Right. So what's the pitch? Johnny wanted to dredge up a bunch of painful family issues. Oh, sure, why not? The painfuler, the better. I want to talk with Etta about the night of the yard opening and the way it affected her thinking about remaining in the house. I won't be able to stay here alone. Either I will become ill or Milt will become ill, and I need somebody to help me. there is a new little piece in my head that says things are going to change.
47:58In the aftermath of the art show opening, as Etta's new reality sunk in, another plan began to take shape, one that Etta came up with. Her idea is to pair each of her message-on-a-bottles with the right person. In this way, each one will find the right home. I now have a whole shelf full of stuff that I'm now earmarking to give away. That's something that you've not normally done? No. I only gave very few things away, you know, to my best friend or to the kids or something like that. Very few. Very, very few. Do you think it's at the beginning of something? More of this to come? Yeah. Yeah, it has to be.
48:43It has to be. I take it very seriously when I think of giving a person a bottle. I have to think, would it be good for that person? Okay. Now we're rolling. All right. A few weeks later, I call Gregor to see how Etta's bottle drive is coming along. So she called me this morning saying, I thought of the perfect person to give the perfect bottle to, but I'm afraid it's going to hurt his feelings. Okay. She wants to give you a bottle. She wants to give... Okay, well, that... Wow, that's really nice. Why would that hurt my feelings? You know, if you give someone a bottle that says, like, I wish, like, I was present, then it's sort of an implication that you're not present.
49:28You know what I mean? It could be interpreted sometimes as, like, a sort of a criticism. So I don't know how you'll take it. Well, did she tell you what my bottle says? That's as much as I can say at this point. It's as much as I'm authorized to say.
49:48Even though I should know better know how Gregor will dangle this knowledge over my head like a cat dancer my curiosity gets the better of me and so I keep asking Gregor what the bottle says which he uses as an opportunity to dissect my personality All I can say, he says is that it addresses some of your deep-seated issues Despite all your insights about other people, you sort of tend to remove yourself from the collective and put yourself in the position of, like, journalistic observer. Uh-huh. When you have these insights, you know, your dime store insights you bolt on at the end of things where you're like, maybe we all need someone to run to.
50:27That hallmarky nonsense that you tend to spout at the end of these. What a jerk. You feel comfortable just saying something like that to someone? Telling me about my dime store? No, see, I knew you were going to take it the wrong way. What's the right way to take that? I think sometimes you sort of make yourself resistant like, oh, I don't matter. I'm just the fly on the wall to watching the human condition as, you know, people live and die and suffer and babies are born and old people lowered into the ground. Oh, and the dirt hits the coffin. That reminds me of my sponsor. I think you just, you use this thing to remove yourself from what's actually going on.
51:03Okay, all right. You're like, you know what would really make this thing sing? Now let me just get a shot of you throwing your art off the bridge That's what we need to finish this
51:20Over the next couple years Etta continues to slowly search out the right homes for her bottles Whereas in the past Etta was only able to give away a few Gregor estimates that she hands out about a hundred During this time Milt is in and out of the hospital with cardiac issues ranging from fainting spells and high blood pressure to an actual heart attack. But then, in the summer of 2021, it's Etta who received some bad news. Two years after Gregor and I first spoke, Gregor phones to tell me his mother has been diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctor found nine metastases in her brain. They went to three different hospitals in five days, and the consensus was that it wasn't a matter of months, but of weeks.
52:06In what felt like only days, Etta went from carrying laundry up the stairs to needing to be carried up the stairs herself.
52:18With Etta's illness, Gregor decides to move in, the whole family does, into the big packed house they grew up in. A hospital bed is set up on the main floor in Etta's old office, and Gregor wakes up at sunrise and sits at Etta's bedside in silence. He speaks with her, makes her comfortable. He tells her it's okay to go, that everything is okay.
52:44I stayed there for six weeks, eight weeks, and sort of did the bedside vigil as she slowly died.
52:56In those final weeks, Gregor saw a change come over Etta. In the years running up to her death, she would say things like, listen, there's a rolled up rug in the attic that's worth a lot of money. Make sure that they don't cheat you out of that one. That was always kind of a sort of joke, sort of real thing. But when the actual room of death and dying was happening, that stuff didn't really come up. It felt more like she was at peace with a lot of stuff. And a lot of the stuff she told me, she would be laying there with her eyes shut but smiling. And I'm like, you know, Mom, what are you thinking about?
53:38And she was just, just with her hand, she would indicate that she's, like, dancing by just flowing her hand in the air. It felt like a great death.
53:51The words on the bottles had finally sunk in. In the end, Etta could dance out of the world gracefully, no grasping. It's the living who are left to grasp. Since my mom died, it feels like it's harder to throw things out than I thought. This is Gregor's sister Lexi again. Like Etta, Lexi is an artist. And like Gregor, she's surprised by how, after all the years trying to get her mom to let go of her stuff, she herself is finding it so hard to let go of that very same stuff. it just feels really hard to like her art it feels it's like a part of her yeah but it's not her yeah i had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day who is of course really you know grief stricken and he was saying why do people make art and he thinks the reason people make art is so that they're not forgotten when they die.
54:55Like you do something that remains in the world.
55:00I think of her a lot. Do you still carry with you your mother's love? Do you feel it? I carry her with me.
55:12I mean, in the way that, you know, when I experience something, I can't help but hear my mother's voice making fun of me for my description of what I'm experiencing. I might be describing something, telling her about just some quotidian thing in the day. You know, this is a nice sunset, but it would be nicer if that truck weren't backing up. And I can hear her being like, why are you so rotten? What is wrong with you? I mean, that type of thing.
55:55You can try to move your aging parents out of their house. You can treat death like a to-do list with items to check off. But ultimately, you can't control how people live or die. Even after Etta's death, Milt remained in that very same house. It's Dimitri and his own family that move in, so that Milt doesn't have to be alone. And over the next few years, Gregor, in fits and starts and with disregard for what anyone thinks, continues to work on the museum. Only, it's become less about a full-fledged museum open to the public and more of just a place to honor his mom. And then one day, Gregor texts, saying he found a sealed box in the Victorian with my name on it, written in Edda's hand.
56:41When the box arrives, I unravel what seems like yards and yards of bubble wrap, Etta had taken great care. The bottle is a beautiful blue, the blue of a childhood toy. It's curvaceous and feels good in my hand. Upon it, Etta laid out her words to me. I would love to live like a river flows carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. See what I mean? I do. But how dare she? I'm kidding. Cue the outro music. Cue the Dime Story Insight. Whether it's to a museum in the wilds of upstate New York, or to a landfill, none of us knows where we're flowing. In the face of that, we need to learn how to let go.
57:32My feeling about what comes after death is constantly changing. I don't have a spiritual practice, so all I have is a feeling. And my feeling today is that bodies are vessels, Just like colorful bottles are vessels. Just like podcasts and houses packed with stuff. And all of art is. It's all just stuff. And stuff can be beautiful. But it's there to help us get closer to the non-stuff. Because, like the words Etta inscribed on one of her final bottles, all important matters are invisible.
58:23Jonathan Goldstein. That story is part of the new season of his show Heavyweight. It was produced by Phoebe Flanagan with help from Khalilah Holt and Stevie Lane. If you do not know Heavyweight, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. I have to say one great episode to start with is Jonathan's original season one episode that's called Gregor, about his friend Gregor, who you just heard, who in that episode is on a mission to get justice from the pop star Moby. It's just stuff. It ain't about a thing. Just stuff. Life is not about playing. Never I feel like I can't get enough. I got to say to myself, it's just stuff.
59:04Our program is produced today by Aviva de Kornfeld. People who helped put the show together today include Fia Benin, Michael Comite, Suzanne Gabor, Cassie Halley, Seth Lynn, Tobin Lowe, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Robin Reed, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rummery, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Switala, and Marisa Robertson-Texter. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Emma Munger. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. A reminder that if you like our show and listen to it a lot, please consider signing up as a This American Life partner.
59:39Do it for the stuff you get or do it simply because you want to help us keep making the show the way we do it now. Join at thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. Thanks this week to Life Partners Fabian Frey, Kathy D, Anastasia Ragland, and Nancy Berrault. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tony Malatia. After just one week, making maybe 1 ,500 homemade AI videos, he's quitting, Sora. It was a scourge on my life. It was a shadow that was always with me. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
1:00:36With organic prune juice. All you can eat at the buffet bar. No money down on a brand new car. It's just stuff. It ain't love but fang the stuff. Life is not about blame. Whenever I feel like I can't get enough. I got to sit on the cell. It's just stuff. It's just stuff.
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From the publisher
Three stories about the strange power inanimate objects can hold over us.
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- Prologue: Nunzio gets caught in a kind of servile relationship—with a scooter. (8 minutes)
- Act One: Ted was six when he first picked up a rock from the Petrified Forest National Park. Nearly 50 years later, he really wishes he hadn’t. Aviva DeKornfeld talked to him. (15 minutes)
- Act Two: Heavyweight host Jonathan Goldstein leaps in to help a family, who are not entirely sure they want or need his help, get rid of their stuff. (31 minutes)
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