Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Seeds of Hope - The Fig Tree & Morley’s Garden

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

“Eugene’s fig tree is the best-known tree in the neighbourhood.” We’re all about gardening on the podcast this week, with two Dave and Morley stories about the act of faith and hope that goes into creating a garden.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the Apostrophe Podcast Network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. We have two Dave and Moralee stories for you today, both of them stories about gardening and the act of faith and hope that is planting a garden. As Audrey Hepburn once said, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. In the first half of the show, a story about Dave's neighbors, Eugene and Maria, and their fig tree. In the second half, a story about Morley and her garden. But we're going to start with this one, a story I think about at this time of year. This is the fig tree. this time of year. This is the fig tree. So on Thursday night, a few weeks ago,

Dave sat down to write a letter that he knew was going to be difficult. Dear Tony, he began. That part was easy enough. Dear Tony, he wrote, his heart sinking as he stared at the expanse of empty white paper left on the page. Now what do you say? You say it straight, that's what you do. He bent over and he began to write, dear Tony, I'm worried about your father. Dave stared at those six words and then he crumpled the page, threw it in the air, caught it, and without turning to look, drifted it over his shoulder towards a wicker garbage can on the far side of the room. He twisted in his seat to see how he had done. Not even close. He sighed, retrieved the paper, came back to his chair, and began again. Dear Tony, it's still chilly here in the mornings, but by noon most days, spring seems to be poking gamely about. We had a female warbler at the feeder last weekend,

and a cardinal's been hanging around your father's backyard for weeks. And he thought, this is ridiculous. Who cares about the weather? What do birds have to do with anything? Dear Tony, he's writing the letter in his head now. Dear Tony, I'm worried about your mother and father. Dear Tony, I thought I should write to you about your parents. Dear Tony, last fall after Eugene's birthday party, you asked me, no, you asked us.

Dear Tony, last fall after Eugene's birthday party, you came to our house and you asked us if we would keep an eye on your parents. It's been a long winter. Dave ran his hand through his hair and he stood up. This was like treason. He poured himself another drink. It was none of his business. No, it was his business. Tony lives in England, London, England.

He's in insurance with Lloyd's. Tony's parents, Eugene and Maria, are Dave and Morley's next-door neighbors. Tony left home and moved to London well before Dave and Morley moved into the neighborhood. And until Tony's anxious visit last fall, sitting right there, right in their kitchen, no, standing over there by the kitchen door, getting right to the point, I'm worried about my parents. Until that visit, Dave had barely met Tony. They had shaken hands over the backyard fence. They had talked briefly in the driveway, once on the sidewalk. But for all that, Dave felt he knew Tony. Because Dave has lived beside Eugene and Maria for almost 20 years.

And when you're good neighbors, you know all about each other's family, regardless of where everyone lives. And Eugene and Maria are good neighbors. Eugene, the 89-year-old vegetable gardener. Maria, the 92-year-old cook. Maria, whose happiness when she is cooking for people is only surpassed by the happiness she feels when she's feeding them it's a feeling of contentment that settles upon her like God's mercy a feeling that arrives whenever there are hungry people sitting at her table whenever she's carrying plates and platters back and forth across her kitchen.

Maria was born with a twisted right leg so that when she walks, her right knee brushes her left knee, her legs briefly forming the letter K with every step, her body pitching from left to right as if she were on the deck of a ship. left to right, as if she were on the deck of a ship. Maria and Eugene, her husband Eugene, the gardener. There isn't a square of sod left in Maria and Eugene's backyard. The whole yard has been turned for Eugene's vegetables. In the summer, this is where Maria gets everything she cooks.

Fat red tomatoes and large yellow potatoes, sweet and hot peppers in every color you could imagine, yellows, reds, and greens, long skinny beans, rough chard and rapini, garlic buds the size of apples, sweet basil, pungent rosemary and mint and dandelions for salads and soft juicy grapes for the wine Eugene and Maria barrel and store in juice bottles and pop bottles and old vodka bottles and any bottles they can get their hands on. Rich red wine that smells like a distant field of violets bottled and lined up in the cellar Eugene dug under the back stairs 37 years ago. The grapevine twists out of the ground by the garage as thick as Eugene's calf and

winds down the back fence and over a grape arbor. This is where Eugene sits during the long summer afternoons when the sun is high and his back hurts. This is where he sits when all he has to do in the world is wait on his vegetables, tilting back on an old kitchen chair, watching the wasps dive bomb the grapes that he breaks open and rests on his knees, smoking his parodies, small dark, Toscano-style cigars that are no bigger than a pencil stub but can last Eugene for over an hour. But it's not the grapevine that holds the place of honor in Eugene's garden, not in Eugene's mind. Halfway down the yard,

halfway between the garage and the back door within easy spitting distance of his chair under the grape arbor is Eugene's pride and joy, his fig tree. His fig tree, which is easily 30 feet high and produces real figs right in the middle of the city, figs that are soft and green and pulpy and sweet. Imagine for a moment that you're Dave. Imagine you could look out your kitchen window and watch him standing on a ladder, picking fresh figs out your window. It's a miracle.

Imagine standing in your backyard on a Saturday in August with a buzz of the cicada filling your head. And imagine Eugene calling you over, in Italian probably. Eugene's English is still, after 50 years, rudimentary. But if he saw you, he'd call you over. Even if he didn't know you, he'd call for sure, because there is nothing, nothing in the world that makes Eugene happier than to have someone come into his backyard and pick a fig from his tree and eat it while it's still warm. He turned 89 years old in November. It's the fig tree that keeps him alive. Eugene's fig tree is the best known tree in the neighborhood. Everyone knows

about the tree. Everyone knows that Eugene grew it from a cutting that he brought from his father's farm in Calabria, wrapped in a piece of linen and hidden at the bottom of his trunk. And everyone knows that every October, before the first frost, Eugene digs a trench in his backyard three feet deep and three feet wide and 30 feet long. And when he's finished digging the hole, he carefully bends the branches of the tree close to the trunk and ties them in place. And then he digs around the roots until they're loose and free of the earth. And then he pushes the tree over and lowers it into the trench with ropes. The leafless bound tree looks like a skeleton lying in the hole. The root ball looks like a giant head. Eugene, like a grieving relative,

as he covers it first with planks and then with warm earth, he buries the tree. And when he's finished, except for the disturbed earth, you wouldn't know anything was there. And there is where his fig tree spends the winter bound and buried underground and out of sight if he left it standing it wouldn't survive the frost so it winters below the frost until the warm april afternoon eugene digs it out and stands it up and cuts the branches loose the burial and the resurrection of Eugene's fig tree have marked the seasons in Dave's neighborhood for nearly 50 years. Eugene and Maria came to Canada from Italy after the war.

Eugene arriving via America via New York City. He landed on New Year's Day in 1948. One in nine brothers, he came to find a life. He sent for Maria a year later. She landed at Pier 21 in Halifax, Christmas Eve, 1949. Eugene landed a job in a restaurant as soon as he got to Canada. By the time Maria arrived, he had a job in a mattress factory. He worked on a machine that shaped the springs. Worked 11, 12 hours a day. It was hard work, but he stayed at it for 10 years. And then he went to the Rothman's company, packing cigarettes. That was his best job. Soon they were able to buy the house. He kept working hard, but he lived for

his garden. And now Eugene is 89 years old and his legs aren't what they used to be. Three years ago, Eugene and Maria moved into the basement for the summer. They didn't plan it like that. There was a heat wave at the end of July, and on the second night, Eugene slept in the basement bedroom because it was cooler in the basement, and Maria joined him the next night. They moved the television down the night after. It was already a kitchen down there and a bathroom with a tub. They could walk right out into the garden. They had everything they needed. They moved back upstairs for the winter. But they were both relieved the following May to move back down. They didn't need stairs in their lives anymore. So this autumn, when it was

time to move upstairs, they delayed a few weeks. And when they finally went up, they went up reluctantly. Neither of them saying anything about it, however. Neither of them wanting to admit the house was too big for them. Neither of them wanting to admit the house was too big for them. Neither of them wanting to say how heavy they felt whenever they had to climb the stairs. And then one afternoon in the middle of January, Eugene said, it would be warmer downstairs, you know, closer to the furnace. They moved back down after dinner. Dave didn't notice anything until the middle of February,

and then one night he realized he hadn't seen them for weeks. At first he thought maybe they'd gone away, and he started to watch. Every night at 9, the lights clicked off abruptly as if they were on a timer. If they'd gone away, they would have told us, he said, and he went over to check. They didn't answer the bell.

They couldn't hear it from the basement with the television on. Dave came home. He was still fretting the next night. It's not right, he said. Something's wrong. He was worried. He had, after all, told their son that he would keep his eye on them. Tony had told him he thought they should go into a home or a senior's residence, somewhere where there were other people, somewhere where there was a staff to watch them.

He called on them by the back door the next night after supper. Eugene squinted at him over his glasses. He hadn't shaved for several days. He looked alarmingly old, shuffling back to his chair. Maria said, are you hungry? But she didn't get up. She didn't even try to put anything on the table. Dave worried about them all March, calling every few days, dropping in on weekends.

They always seemed tired, worn out. Dear Tony, I'm worried about your parents. He finished the letter, but he didn't mail it. For two weeks it sat by the cash register at the record store. Last Saturday when he woke up, he could tell it was going to be a glorious day. He could tell before he got out of bed by the way the sun was coming through the curtains, by the way the air felt warm and light on his face. Suddenly last Saturday it was spring. He made coffee and he brought it upstairs to bed and he read the paper,

He made coffee and he brought it upstairs to bed and he read the paper, heard Sam run downstairs, heard the door slam. When he finished his coffee, he would go out to take Arthur for a long walk. When he stepped into the backyard, he took a long lungful of air. It felt wonderful to be alive. It felt wonderful to be outside without a jacket. He looked around his yard and smiled, and then he looked next door, and he almost fell over. There was Eugene, perched at the top of his ladder, threading a rope through a pulley he'd rigged to the side of his house. He was leaning

out precariously, reaching further than he should have, and there at the bottom of the ladder holding it steady was Dave's son Sam. Dave's first impulse was to drop the dog's leash. Arthur, stay, he said. He was about to jog around the fence. He was about to ask how he could help, but before he took a step, his good sense stopped him. Eugene had asked Sam to help. He could just as easily have asked Dave. He had the help he wanted. Someone who would let him be in charge. Someone who would let him climb the ladder.

It took the two of them two hours to uncover the tree, 20 minutes to pull everything else out of the hole. There wasn't only a fig tree in there. Eugene had also buried his fuchsias, his geraniums, a passionflower, and a bougainvillea. Dave went back inside where he wouldn't be seen and stood by the kitchen window watching his son working, watched him lifting the plants out of the grave, watched him lugging them the length of the backyard and lining them by Eugene's back door. It was like spring itself had been buried in Eugene's backyard, like spring had been lying in that hole waiting like a mummy under its bandages of snow for Sam to lift it out and set it down and

breathe it to life. They had the tree up before noon. It came out of the ground with one fig still clinging on a high branch. They stood it up and packed earth tenderly around the root ball, if only, thought Dave as he watched, if only he could bury an olive grove. Sam was home for lunch with a $20 bill in his pocket. I was working for Eugene, he said. Dave went over soon after to admire their work. Eugene sitting in his chair smoking, Maria coming out the door, are you hungry, she asked. On Monday, Dave tore up the letter he had written to Tony. He wrote a new one on Tuesday night. Dear Tony, he began, there has been a cardinal in your father's backyard for several weeks, trying to convince

us all it was spring. This weekend it finally had something worth singing about. Your father and mother were in the backyard for the first time since October. It has been a long winter, and as I watched your father working, I thought, how much he has become like the fig tree that he loves so much. The winter was difficult. We haven't seen much of him since Christmas. Like his tree, he spent much of the winter underground. Last fall, you asked if the house might be too much for Maria and Eugene.

An hour after you left, your father came over and said, my son wants me in a home and we're not going. I didn't mention our talk. I don't think you need worry about them right now. He got the fig tree up on the weekend. He had a friend over helping him out. I can see Eugene through the window as I write this. He's sitting in the yard. He looks tired but happy. Dave paused over the next line. How do you sign a letter like this to a man you hardly know? Sincerely, he decided. Before he signed it, he read over what he had written and then he looked over at Eugene. He just lit one of his little cigars. He was waving madly at Maria, trying to

get her attention. Maria was at the far end of the garden working on the grapevine with a pair of pruning shears. Dave smiled and looked back at the letter in front of him. I will go and visit them after supper, he added. They always make me happy. I will write again soon. Love, he wrote. Love, Dave. Thank you.

applause Love, he wrote. Love, Dave. Thank you. That was the fig tree. We recorded that story back in 2000. We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with another Dave and Morley story, so stay with me. Welcome back. Time for our second story now. This is a story we recorded in 2012 at the North Peace Cultural Center in Fort St. John, British Columbia. This is Morley's Garden.

Some people love spring. Some love summer. Some even love the cold, dark nights of winter. Morley travels with those who believe these lingering days of autumn are the sweetest days of the year. I love mornings like this, she said, staring out the kitchen window at the blue, thin sky. she said, staring out the kitchen window at the blue, thin sky. But it is a perilous partner, autumn, for if winter is the warm hearth and summer sweet sorrow, if spring hopes eternal, autumn is the season of wistfulness.

For autumn is an idler, holding on, holding on, holding on like the last leaf holding on to the bare branch. And it conjures up the lingering emotions, which of course lead right to the path of wistful things, which too often lead straight to melancholy. If you pointed this out to Morley, she'd agree with you. That's true, she'd say. But I like the sadness of it. Never feels really sad. And she's right. If autumn is the season of sadness, the dawn of regret, it is sweet regret, brushed by sadness, maybe, but not by sorrow.

Autumn may be a horse clip-clopping down a cobblestone alley, but that's a poet sitting in the saddle. And he has a bottle of wine in his pocket, said Morley, and probably a bag of roasted chestnuts. So on a recent Saturday morning, after she'd made her coffee and stood by the kitchen window and said, I love mornings like this, Morley went happily out the back door and set about the wistful, autumnal business of digging up her garden, putting it to sleep for another year. She was wearing a baggy pair of khakis and an old sweater, a canvas jacket and canvas gloves. She looked like a pro, though if you asked her, Morley would tell you that she is the most amateur of gardeners. I don't know a thing about it, she'd say, having a clue. She'd been out there

for an hour, maybe two, digging in the dirt, loading up the wheelbarrow, pulling things out, and throwing them in the compost. She started in the corner by the garage with the impatience, the corner where she had the vegetable patch when the kids were small, or tried to. The vegetable patch never worked out. She still has the bottle of orange oil somewhere, maybe in her basket of tools. She leaned back on her thighs and flipped a shaggy root ball into the wheelbarrow. She thought vegetables might be a way to engage the kids. And she was right. She thought vegetables might be a way to engage the kids.

And she was right. Stephanie would fly home from school, run into the backyard, and check to see if something had happened in the six hours she'd been away. Stephanie had been obsessed. For some reason, the only thing that came that year was yellow peppers. Nothing else. Not even zucchinis. Go figure. And the peppers came slowly, painfully slowly. Gardening was supposed to be soothing. It wasn't soothing that year. All Morley did that year was frat. Mostly she was fretting that harvest wouldn't come soon enough to sustain Stephanie's

interest. She tried eggshells and coffee grounds, carted them out to the vegetable patch every morning feeling foolish about it. She did it because her grandmother did it. Her grandmother would walk out in her robe and curlers after breakfast, spread eggshells and coffee grounds on the garden, and drop toast crusts around for the birds. And her grandmother had a beautiful garden. To be safe, Morley added crusts. And then the ants appeared. Right out of the blue.

One morning she got up and there were ants all over the peppers. An infestation. Someone told her orange oil would do the job. And orange oil was organic and safe. Back then, organic and safe seemed like an important thing. The most important thing. Of course, everyone believes that at the starting line. Everyone begins the race organic and safe.

We all believe in our hearts that poison is for wicked witches and chemical companies. The kind of folks who don't care about children and pets and God's good earth, let alone butterflies, believing that our garden will be now and forevermore, so help us God, organic and safe. Until comes the autumn of the aphids, the summer of the squash bug, the moment of the bean leaf beetle,

and a switch flips and there you are, just like everyone else, smuggling home jars of Raid from the hardware store, sneaking shamefully into your organic garden early in the morning when no one will spot you. Who cares about the butterflies when you're up to your knees in aphids? The butterflies aren't your problem. The only thing you care about are the cutworms. And if you see one more cutworm, just one, you are going to Central America next winter to one of those countries you've read about, and you are scoring some DDT, and let's see how the cutworms feel about that. Yeah, that's pretty much how organic gardening goes. Anyway, Morley was just getting going.

So when the ants appeared, she went to the gardening store and she got orange oil, not Raid. And she applied it the way the guy at the garden store had told her to apply it. And then she went in for lunch. And then an hour later, she came out full of hope. And her pepper plants were scarcely standing. They were brown and droopy and barely alive. And all she could think was Stephanie would be home from school in an hour. So she rushed back to the garden shop. And she bought new plants.

Ones with peppers on them, bigger than the ones she just murdered. And she got home and got them in the ground just before the kids got there. It was the miracle that Steph had been anticipating. The peppers almost doubled their morning sales. And you know what happened? Stephanie didn't even notice the miracle of the peppers almost double their morning salves. And you know what happened? Stephanie didn't even notice the miracle of the peppers. And you know why? Because there was a pile of dead ants in the backyard. Stephanie and Sam spent what was left of that day trying to save the ants.

Now when that didn't work out, they were out trying to attract the remaining live ones into their aunt hospice. And that's when Mary Turlington appeared. Not back then, not during the massacre of the Peppers. I'm talking about the recent Saturday now, when Morley was in the backyard resting on her haunches, thinking about the peppers. And she looks up, and there's Mary, all fresh from tending an altogether different sort of garden. Mary, her neighbor, is, well, Mary's many things. And among the many things she is, Mary is a scrapbooker. She prunes her collection of mementos with a topiary intensity.

Most people take pictures of their family. Mary actually prints them. She prints them and mounts them and frames them and turns them into books and wall displays. And Mary had spent that morning running her hands through the rich loam of her son Adam's adolescence. Adam, who just left for college. I wanted to do something special, said Mary. said Mary. But what she really wanted to do, or what she wanted to do that Saturday morning,

was show someone what she had done. And there was Morley on her knees in the garden, obviously not busy. So Morley put down her trowel and got off her knees and set off for her neighbors with a sense of impending doom. Not, as it turns out, unjustifiably. By the time Morley had left the Turlington's, an hour and a half had passed, and she had not only seen Adam's memento book, she had seen his photo montage, his memory box, his report cards, and watched a one-hour video tribute. When it was finally over, Morley leapt up. Sit down, said Mary. There's a video for each of the twins. When she did leave, Morley felt both relieved and resentful, but most of all, guilty. Morley had pictures, of course. She'd taken pictures along the way, but she had no idea where they were. In boxes, she thought.

For the last few years, she hadn't printed anything. They were all on the computer, or maybe in the camera, though she wasn't sure where the camera was, or the boxes, for that matter. She was back in her garden now, sitting at the picnic table that sits under the pear tree, thinking that the morning which had begun with so much promise had disappeared. This wasn't the way she wanted the day to go.

This wasn't wistfulness. This was melancholy. She sat back and wiped her forehead with the back of her gloved hand. She went inside and made tea. There was one last section to do, the corner at the back. She had given it to Sam the summer he was nine. She had bought him a garden set for his birthday, a real one with a real shovel and a real rake, not plastic. And he had insisted on planting everything with his die-cast Tonka backhoe. He'd be given a bean at school, one single bean, at the Earth Day celebration. It was like a fairy tale. He planted it in a Dixie cup,

and when it sprouted, he brought it home and replanted it with his Tonka backhoe. It did way better than any of her carefully attended to plants. Way better. Her beans were stringy and tough. His were fat and juicy. When she asked him why, he said he spoke to his plant every day. Plants need love, he said.

Also, they need carbon dioxide. So if I run out of words, I just breathe on it. words, I just breathe on it. He also pees on it, said Stephan Ames. That was an accident, said Sam. It took years, but slowly Morley learned how things worked. She learned the deal-breaking importance of the sun. She learned that from the sunflowers. For three summers, she had planted her sunflowers along the garage in the shade, and she couldn't figure out why they never grew. And then one day they were in the car sitting at a stoplight, and just before the light changed,

Stephanie said, isn't that what you're trying to grow? And there was the craziest sunflower you have ever seen growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Morley moved hers from beside the garage to beside the house where they got more sun. And ever since, she has grown mammoth sunflowers. Each August, she delights in their prayerful passage from towers to penitents as they slowly bow their heavy-headed way back to the earth. The September Saturday they roast sunflower seeds has become a family festival. Morley was back outside now. She was in the back corner of the garden, pulling dead bits from under the rhododendrons. One summer, she kept finding stashes of stuff back there. Little piles of vitamin pills and cooked vegetables.

One night after dinner, she saw Sam slip surreptitiously out the back door and watched him kneel by the rhodos and begin pulling stuff out of his bulging socks. and begin pulling stuff out of his bulging socks. It was about an hour later, as she was finishing up, and she had her hands deep in the dirt, that she found something hard. She dug around it a bit, the hard thing, and when it was loose, she tugged on it and pulled it out. A metal mud ball.

She brushed it off. It was a small, yellow backhoe. That night at supper, she said to Sam, I found something of yours. She had washed it off, and she was pretty proud of herself. It was the sort of thing that Mary might have put in one of her memory boxes. She thought Sam was going to love it. He didn't care. He didn't ignore it. He looked at it. He smiled. He said, I remember that truck. But he didn't take it. He just left it on the table. Later that night, she walked by Sam's bedroom and saw his collection of comic books on his bureau.

And it occurred to her that he had saved what he wanted to save, and that he had a whole life ahead of him to take pictures if he was going to be a picture-taking sort of guy. Next afternoon, she was giving the garden one last soak, and she went out to move the sprinkler, and she saw Sam coming down the driveway, and she said, could you give me a hand? And she pointed to the hose and said, pinch it so I can move the sprinkler. And as he walked over and picked up the hose, she said, you know, the key to good sprinkling is the hose, not the sprinkler. You buy a good hose, an expensive one with brass connectors,

and you can get a cheap sprinkler. The fancy rotating ones are unreliable. Sam just stood there waiting patiently until his mother was holding the sprinkler in her hands before he let go. When the water hit her, she froze for an instant, and then she dropped the sprinkler and jumped back, but it was too late. She was already soaked, and he was already running for the house. And so she stood there, dripping and laughing and wondering if she would ever learn. And thinking this as she went inside, thinking that Mary may have her boxes and her books, but she had her garden.

Her memories were planted in a backyard scrapbook. And while it would certainly fade away, it would only fade in autumn when fading was its job. in autumn when fading was its job. When the apples were ripe, the geese had taken wing and her sunflowers were dipping their golden heads. That was Morley's Garden. All right, that's it for today. But we'll be back here next week with two more Dave and Morley stories, including this one. He got up and he cracked the door to see what was going on. The duck had pushed one of the hotel towels up against the edge of the tub and had fashioned a sort of nest. It seemed content as Dave slipped into the bathroom. It's nice in here, isn't it, said Dave.

Wah, said the duck. Dave checked each doo-doo in the bathroom, but there was no ring there either. He filled up the tub with water and he lay on the bed wondering what he should do next. The duck seemed to have settled comfortably ever since it had made its nest. Dave cracked the bathroom door and he shrugged as the duck waddled into the bedroom. It began pecking at the carpet. Dave got some corn chips from the minibar and left them in a pile near the television. He could feel a wave of panic building again. Morley would be furious if she knew where the ring was, he thought. He got up and he looked at the duck. This isn't about us, he said. It's about my wife. If I feel like this, he said, imagine what my wife would feel like. I'm doing

this for her. He put the duck back in the bathroom and a do not disturb sign on his door. And he went to the hospital. And when he came back at dinner time, there was duck slop everywhere, but still no ring. He opened the bathroom door and he phoned room service and ordered himself a beer and a half a dozen oysters on the shell. When the duck saw the oyster, she ran across the room and sat at his feet. So we ordered her a dozen and they watched the early news together. After the news, he went through the latest mound of duck dirt.

Her production was beyond belief. At this rate, he figured the time from bill to butt couldn't be more than 24 hours. He ordered another dozen oysters and they watched The Simpsons. Dave had seen the episode, but the duck seemed to like it. That's next week on the podcast. I hope you'll join us. In the meantime, if you want to find out more about the podcast or listen to other episodes, you can go to our website, vinylcafe.com. We've got lots of information there. And don't forget, we've now reopened

the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange and the Arthur Awards. So if you want to nominate someone for an Arthur, or if you want to submit one of your stories to the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange, you can now do both of those things. Remember, there are only two rules for the Story Exchange. The stories have to be true, and they have to be short. The rest is up to you. So start writing and send them in. You can send them to vinylcafeatvinylcafe.com. That's vinylcafeatvinylcafe.com. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the Apostrophe Podcast Network. The recording engineer is someone who spends most of his year underground, Greg DeClewt. Theme music is by Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis,

Greg DeClewt, and me, Jess Milton. Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now.