The Thing About Things | This American Life | Episode 871

Key Takeaway

Choose one object you keep out of guilt, nostalgia, or “someday” thinking, and take one restorative action today: return it, repair it, donate it, or deliberately assign it a new home. The point is not minimalism for its own sake. Both Ted’s returned rock and Eda’s gifted bottles show that a concrete act of repair or release can help reconcile the meaning we attach to possessions with the life we want to live now.

Episode Overview

This episode examines the strange power objects can hold over people. One man returns a petrified-wood rock he believes has cursed him, while an aging artist and her family confront a house overwhelmed by collections, art, memory, and the approaching realities of illness and death.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Thing About Things | This American Life | Episode 871 from This American Life. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hey there, it's Ira. Uh, here before the new episode starts. In case you missed the, uh, little update we dropped in the podcast feed last week, I'm going to summarize it here quickly. It's been a year since we launched our This American Life Partners Program. And, uh, the good news is it's going great. People who signed up as Life Partners now pay for almost 25% of our budget. Which is huge, and and sincerely thanks to all of you who signed up. But looking ahead, we need that number to be 50%.

That's what will protect us and keep the show going in the current environment where it is just harder to bring in advertising revenue and where the federal government, uh, no longer funds public radio, which affects the stations who run our show and pay us money to run our show. So, here's my short pitch on why you might consider becoming a Life Partner if you haven't already. I'm guessing, uh, that what you probably like about our show is that we find great stories. Big and small with, you know, feelings and funny moments and, uh, picture of the world and everything else that makes a good story.

And what I would say is the thing you like is surprisingly expensive. For every story you hear in our show, we run at many more stories that go nowhere, that we abandon at different stages of the process. And in the stories you do hear, we labor over each step of making those as a team. We do draft after draft. We're adjusting how, you know, people get introduced into the story and how the story unfolds and which parts to linger on and which to speed through. Then of course there's fact-checking and scoring with music.

This is not how most podcasts are made. Of the 400,000-plus podcasts that are being made right now, most of them are, you know, they're interviews or they're conversations without all those extra steps. We would like to believe that there's still a future for this old-school way of making a show. And we see that future with your help. And, you know, you get stuff when you sign up. You get bonus episodes. You There's a greatest hits archive that you get in your podcast feed. You get to listen without any ads.

But you don't have to want that stuff. You just need to want the thing that you're going to hear after I'm done with this message. New stories made with care. Sign up at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. Again, thisamericanlife.org /lifepartners. When Nunzio 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 a shed. Uh, grass has grown all over it. It was red, but they had not taken care of it and so many put flat black paint all over the thing. Tires were flat. Um, there was a couple of pieces missing from it. It's so when you see it, it's kind of a wreck of a bike. Yeah, 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 beer now and then. This is 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. 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. Nunzio 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, come to find out. Uh, it was missing the, uh, the overhead valve assembly. Also holes in the gas tank, carburetor needed rebuilding, 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.

Okay, so 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 I I set it aside and it sat there for 24 years. During that new quarter century, it 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 in 1999, Nunzio's parents sold the house. He collected all the parts from Nunzio's porch and hauled them to where he now lived with his wife and his two young kids at the time. Laid the stuff out in his garage and finally got to work. 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 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 4 or 5 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. You know, I promise you we'll get to it. Um, I call back in like 2 3 weeks. Hey, I got it all apart. I need the manual. I said, "Okay." Took me like a few weeks to get it.

So another 3 weeks go by. And I deliver it up there. So here you go. He went, "Can I get it?" He said, "It's going to take us a few weeks. We got it all apart. We're working on it. Looking great." More months pass. Finally, 6 7 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. Finds two relatives, he says, who say they haven't seen him.

He knows he should just buy another engine. Either 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, I would say for me was keeping it all original. To have the the exact bike when I took it at 13 still today. Why? Because it was a really a piece of time of of me with my friends at that age. Years 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, um, they bring you 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 and the first question he says to me is, uh, "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, um, "You tracked me down to prison for a scooter engine?" I said, "Yes, I had it since I was 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 visit me in jail and you tell him to give that engine right back to you." They got along so well. Nunzio ended up staying and chatting, he says, for close to an hour. And when he went and retrieved the engine, it was still in the original cardboard box he'd left it in.

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. I 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, talked a little more, he relented a little and said, "Maybe it did." Nunzio 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? Oh. I mean, 30? You know, 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 that'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, this is This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. This American Life, Act One, 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.

Ira Glass and Connie talk to the guy and has his story. When Ted was 6 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 the crater in Arizona. Oh, cool.

Uh It was a huge time for us. We We were 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 the age I was that age where I flipped out over everything. Petrified wood is kind of what he's 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. So, it looks kind of magical. I remember seeing an area that we went to where there were um 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 uh let me pick a piece. He 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're talking about? Yeah, probably probably more like the size of a football. Oh, really big. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty hefty. You know, I remember my dad like pulling it out of the spot it was in. You know, so now that tree had a chunk missing. Ted's dad was the kind of guy who would bend the rules for his kids. So, I remember him saying, "Okay, well, we're going to put it in the trunk, but don't say anything when we go through the gate, you know." Mhm, cuz 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's room. I mean, we didn't have to do that, but you made a big deal out of it. And yeah, I remember my mom writing a postcard to my aunt saying that "Teddy" that's that's what they called me, Teddy. "Teddy got a piece of petrified wood from the forest." And then I 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, you know?" And I said I told her the 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." When she a 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 2 years old, when she was 3 years old, Hurricane Katrina I Hurricane Katrina passed over our city in Mississippi and put 6 ft of water in our house. The bad luck followed him abroad, too.

I 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 open. 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. It 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 I think no. Uh it's I was cursed. 100%. You can ask my friends and family.

It's 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. Mhm. 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. I 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 I guess that doesn't matter when it comes to like something like a curse, right? I mean, there's no age limit 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. Handily, 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 you know, whatever you have to do, you have to end your curse." So, I said, "I will. I'll I'll write the letter, you know." Ted carefully swaddled the petrified wood in 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 the curse.

The 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. But 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. I 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 fiance cheated on them with a Norwegian woman.

There 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 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.

And then, at the bottom of the letter, a park ranger who's examined the rock has written a little note in pencil. Would not from park. Brutal. What'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. I 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. It's big, maybe 15 ft wide, a few feet tall, with rocks of all sizes. How many individual rocks do you think are in this pile? Um 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 one that one. pretty ones. I want though cuz I 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. God, I never even thought of that. No, nobody's written back and be like, "Hey, by the way, you know, um everything's better now." I mean, if if it is for them, I 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. But 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, where where you used to blow into 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." And he said, "I'm willing to give you $5,000." Oh my god. You started this 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. Some 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. Jonathan Goldstein is 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, Jonathan 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. This American Life, I'm Ira 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 two of our program.

Act two, 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 long-time 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. As 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 at these moments that I don't I don't want to say too much about this. You should just hear them. Here's Jonathan's story. All right, you ready? You're rolling? You got levels? Me, may, 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 Edda. Edda 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. I 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, Edda, collects collections. She has like maybe 200 eggbeaters, antique eggbeaters.

She has Do you know what a bisque nodder 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 nodders. Then there are the 19th-century weaving looms, the handmade baskets, the medieval scythes. Edda Ehrlich is an artist, and her collections are the source of her inspiration. Edda 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 10 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. I I 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 Edda. The practical thing is uh 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 Edda in the house. And 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, Eda has thousands. Wine bottles, perfume bottles, old decanters, bottles washed up from the bottom of the ocean. As well as being an artist, Eda 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, Eda places a message in the form of a Zen-like riddle. I turn my noose to tightrope use and madly dance upon it. Isn't that gorgeous? 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 Eda 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 that kind of be struggling with here. very, very sharp. That is exactly, exactly true. These works which talk about being stuck with the grasping level, I suffer from that.

Uh I could leave tomorrow. This is Gregor's dad, Milt. If the taxi pulled up right now, you would 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, he'd get in. Uber driver. But I don't get attached to furniture and bottles and stuff. 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, you know, 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. Find stuff. Her only requirement is if if I find something, it has to have what she calls charm. As for Milt, what he's charmed by, exceedingly charmed by, is Eda. 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 Eda dance all night. He just doesn't understand her being so chained to her belongings. I'm stuck. But um I am not coming up with a solution that's any better, am I? Yeah. Huh? Except dying, That's not a solution. No, it's not a solution for Greg. He's left holding the whole thing. Of Milt and Eda's 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. Yeah. Don't tell him I said so. Inaction is a choice. Not doing anything, something's bound to happen sooner or later. And to just sort of watch the second hand sweep around the clock face until somebody's dead is the most passive and weakest possible way to exist. And it just feels like, you know, the Damocles 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 Eda can't let go, Gregor wants my help in pulling off a most extravagant work-around. One that will allow Eda to both keep her stuff and still move out. The plan of action that Gregor wants to present to her, What if you don't get rid of your possessions, and we make a museum of your stuff? Gregor explains to me the details. It seems that in the 1960s, Eda 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 Eda B.

Airlake 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 hantavirus, has all the makings of a classic cockamamie scheme. But this is just the beginning. For his plan to build a museum to work, Gregor will need his siblings on board. So, as his emotional envoy, I begin by phoning a sister, Lexi. Lexi is the level-headed one of the three, and I want to get her read on the plan. I mean, is it realistic that he'll be able to turn the barn into a museum like that?

Perhaps this plan is a bit half-baked, but I figure I might have more luck getting Gregor's brother, Dmitri, on board. Dmitri'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 Dmitri 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. Dmitri is a martial arts instructor who has kickboxed his way across Thailand. He'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. like, "Hey, you want to jam?" And I was like, "Uh okay." So, I went up actually jamming with Larry Graham and Prince for like 20 minutes. What? That was one sentence. Before Dmitri can launch into his next sentence, I jump in.

So, uh your brother, Gregor, Yeah, I'm familiar with him. He has this plan, which maybe you're also familiar with. Um when I'm finished rehashing Gregor's museum plan, Dmitri offers a laundry list of issues. There's a 99 to 100% chance of getting Lyme disease walking out of your part of the barn because it's high grass, a lot of deer. Um 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 in and the roof and the whole house burned down in the And along with his friend Theo's trouble, there was also his friend Sonam'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 and like just horrifying stuff. But for Dmitri, 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 Eda's problem can't be solved by physical means. Instead, he thinks the problem has to be attacked at its psychological root.

She needs to learn how to let go. And for this, Dmitri has just the solution. Well, maybe maybe hypnosis. It stopped her from smoking, which is probably a more powerful psychological and physical addiction than collecting things. Eda was a pack-a-day smoker, a habit she hung on to for nearly 30 years. Our friend who was a hypnotist said, "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. Hm. He was an interesting person, too. His name was Sol Feldstein. He actually had one of his highballs was like hanging out of his head face, and like it was like a sort of early commune hippie thing, and like 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 to jump 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. Fully convinced that Sol Feldstein is the solution to all of our problems, and that museums belong in a museum, Dmitri and I say our goodbyes. We're sliding in on part two.

Johnny discusses post talking to Dmitri. Here we go. I need to tell Gregor that I like Dmitri'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 Rae Baldwin, I don't want to be seen playing favorites. Do Do you think you're that 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, Demetri seemed to think that it would that it could help. Okay, so the two of you should go see a movie together. Going to movies is Gregor and my thing. Clearly, I'm jealousy. I need to keep my arguments away from Demetri 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 Demetri, hi. Um 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? Sure, I just think that you know, there's no harm. There's certainly no nothing to lose. It takes 15 or 20 minutes and she's proven that she's very susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, 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 bonhomie, I decide it's a safe space to cautiously share my one secret boyhood longing. And along the way, I I could get hypnotized. That is something, too. Yeah, 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 Why would someone do that on purpose? What is it It turns out that that hair loss is more of like an act of willful insolence often. And a cry for pity. to love my hair. Well, if you loved it so much, why did you get rid of it?

First of all, I find that offensive. And And Gregor, chime in here because I'm sure you're equally offended. No, Demetri used to be bald as an egg and then he willed it back on. I think if we did it at the same time with my mother, we get a two-for-one deal. Package deal. I'm just saying it's science. If you read the New England Journal of Medicine this week. With Gregor and Demetri 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. So 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 Eda is stuck with her house full of crap. And Gregor is still at an impasse. But things are about to change. Gregor tells me that Eda has been offered a show at the Carter Burden Gallery in Manhattan. Eda 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 Eda 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. Uh do you want to Do 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 was like, "You're a beautiful woman." You're beautiful. Thank you. That's very nice to hear at my age. Her ego was buffed from many sides, everything going great. Hello. 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. At the end of the night, Gregor approached him. Well, Father, what did you make of that? Oh, it's very nice. 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. On the drive home, Milt conked out. When the family couldn't rouse him, they realized he wasn't just sleeping, but completely unconscious. Eda 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. In the waiting room, Eda 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." How do you know when the Damoclean 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 Eda'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. Hello. Hi, it's Gregor and 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 painfuller the better. I want to talk with Eda about the night of the art opening and the way it affected her thinking about remaining in the house. I I won't be able to stay here alone. Either I will become ill or Milt will become ill and I and I need somebody to help me. There is a new little piece in my head that says things are going to change. In the aftermath of the art show opening, as Eda's new reality sunk in, another plan began to take shape, one that Eda 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 don't really gave very few things away, you know, to my best friend or to the kids or something like that. Uh very few. Very very few. Do you think it's at the beginning of something? Uh more more of this to come?

Yeah. Yeah, it has to be. It 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 Eda'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 that's really nice. Why 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. You know what I mean? It It could be interpreted sometimes as like it's 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.

That's as much as I'm authorized to say. Even 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." That Hallmarky nonsense that you tend to spout at the end of these. You You feel comfortable just saying something like that to someone? Telling me about my dying mother. you were going to take it the wrong way. What's the What's the right way to take that? I think sometimes you um sort of make yourself resistant like, "Oh, I don't matter.

I'm just the the fly on the wall to watching the human condition as, you know, Uh-huh. people live and die and suffer and babies are born and old people are lowered into the ground. Oh, when the dirt hits the coffin, that reminds me of my sponsor." I think you just you you use the thing to remove yourself from what's actually going on. Okay. 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." Over the next couple years, Eda continues to slowly search out the right homes for her bottles. Whereas in the past, Eda was only able to give away a few, Gregor estimates that she hands out about 100. 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 Eda who receives 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 5 days, and the consensus was that it wasn't a matter of months, but of weeks. In what felt like only days, Eda went from carrying laundry up the stairs to needing to be carried up the stairs herself. With Eda'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 Eda's old office, and Gregor wakes up at sunrise and sits at Eda's bedside in silence.

He speaks with her, makes her comfortable. He tells her it's okay to go, that everything is okay. And I stayed there for 6 weeks, 8 weeks, and sort of did the bedside vigil as she slowly uh died. In those final weeks, Gregor saw a change come over Eda. 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, you know, cheat you out of that one." That was always kind of a sort of joke, sort of real thing.

Um 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?" And she's 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.

The words on the bottles had finally sunk in. In the end, Eda 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 Eda, 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 feel 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. Like you do something that remains in the world. I think of her a lot. Do you still carry with you your mother's love?

Do you feel it? I carry her with me. I 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'd be nicer if that truck weren't backing up." And I can hear her being like, "Why are you so rotten?" You know. "What is wrong with you?" I mean, that's that type of thing.

You 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 Eda's death, Milt remained in that very same house. It's Demetri 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 Eda's hand. When the box arrives, I unravel what seems like yards and yards of bubble wrap. Eda 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, Eda 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 Dimes Store 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. My 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 Eda inscribed on one of her final bottles, all important matters are invisible. Jonathan Goldstein. That story is part of the new season of his show, Heavyweight. It was produced by Phoebe Flanigan with help from Kuwei Lin 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 1 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.

Our program was produced today by Aviva De Cornfeld. People who helped put the show together today include Pia Benen, Michael Tess Solange Garber, Cassie Halle, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Katherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Robin Reed, Nadya Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, and Marisa Robertson Textor. Our managing editor is Sarah 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 to you that if you like our show and listen to it a lot, please consider signing up as a This American Life partner.

Do 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/life partners. Thanks this week to Life partners Fabian Frey, Kathy D, Anastasia Ragland, and Nancy Beroult. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Ira Glass. After just 1 week making maybe 1,500 home-made AI videos, he's quitting Sora. It was a scourge on my life. It was a shadow that was always with me. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

I can't afford not to buy it. Fantastic plastic drastic little reduced industrial strength organic prune juice. All you can eat at the buffet bar. A no money down on a brand new car. It's just It ain't nothing but a fine stuff. Life is not about blame. Whenever I feel like I can't get enough, I got to sit on the shelf. It's just stuff. Next week on the podcast of This American Life. As of this year, refugees are basically not allowed into the United States. Except for one lucky group.

Oh, yeah. Now, we're all coming over. Yeah, we'll see you soon. Wow. On our way. Around the corner. Winners and how they made themselves winners. We get to know them. That's next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.