The Moth - The Moth Radio Hour: Squeaky Wheels

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

In this episode, we take a look into the people and things that flash into our lives, and the indelible mark they leave behind. Hosted by Jenifer Hixson, The Moth’s Senior Director. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Hosted by: Jenifer Hixson R. Eric Thomas pens a satire for his college paper with unintended consequences. Annie Tan stokes the fire of her curiosity, but uncovers a dark moment in her family’s history. Morely McBride comes across a stroke of luck when wandering the streets of New York City. Warren Dahlin makes a friend who stays with him in life and in death.

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. GoodLamoth.org forward slash Houston to experience a live show near you. That's theMoth.org forward slash Houston. From PRX, this is TheMoth Radio Hour, I'm Jennifer Hickson. Today we're going to hear some stories that pivot on something noticed.

Millions of details cross our path each day, most are in consequential, but sometimes our eyes grow wide and we zero in on a detail that changes everything. That's what happened to our first storyteller, our Eric Thomas, when he pulled focus on a small sign in a library. Eric originally told this story for us in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. Here he is alive at the mouth. The first time I went viral was in 2002. Do you know what that means going viral? Yeah, it's that thing where everyone's passing around the same

meme or the same article. We're all talking to each other on the internet at the same time. And that happened to me in 2002. Now, 2002, as you remember, was the Wild West days of the internet. There was no Twitter. There was no YouTube. Very few people were on Facebook. So it was really, really hard to go viral back then.

And I say that, so you'll be impressed. So in 2002, I was a college student at the University of Maryland. And it was a really hard time in my life. I was sad all the time. And I was tired all the time. And I didn't really make any friends on campus. I just went to class. And I didn't all the time. And I didn't really make any friends on campus. I just went to class and I didn't join any activities.

I just occasionally would write movie reviews for the college newspaper. And I did that mostly because I really like free things. And I would go home and I would go to my parents' basement. And for work, I worked at the local, the Baltimore Sun, the local paper in their subscription complaints department. It's a living. And so he would call me if they didn't get their paper

delivered in the morning. And sometimes he would call me if they had complaints about an editorial. I couldn't really do much about that. And sometimes he would just call me because they were lonely. And so I would go in at five and talk on the phone until noon and then I would go to campus and then I would go back home.

That was my life. So I would viral in February. I was in the campus bookstore one afternoon. And February of course is Black History Month. And so they had a display up for Black History Month that said, from bondage to books, Black History Month. And it had a picture of Harriet Tubman and a picture of Colin Powell. And that was that. And I looked up the side and I looked around the store like,

is it about seeing this? And there was like nobody else in the store. So I like looked back at the sign and I like started to get like heated, staring at that sign. I like the sign hurt my feelings. Because it said to me in those few words that the history of black people, the history of my people in this country

could be boiled down to the middle passage, slavery, and whatever it is, the colon pal means to you. Which back then was like complicated, and now it's like interesting. So. From bondage to books, you were a slave, and now you can read. Congratulations. I felt like I was in this argument with this sign that I was losing.

And so I turned on my heel and I left, and as I left, I realized the sign didn't have to have the last word. So I walked across campus to the newspaper office. The campus newspaper office and I said, I'm writing an editorial and they were like, aren't you the movie review guy? And I was like, I've changed. So I wrote about the sign and I decided to frame it as a satire because I wanted to write about the ideas behind the sign as well as my frustration about it and the sign, and I decided to frame it as a satire because I wanted to write about the ideas

behind the sign, as well as my frustration about it, and the sign itself. It was a whole thing. And I called it an idiot's guide to Black History Month, Colin, from Bondage to Books. They had a subtitle. Thank you. And I was thinking of their fans in the house, excellent.

And I don't know why I decided to write it as a satire. I wasn't really sure what satire was, to be honest. I thought you just had to write really, really sarcastically. And so that's what I did. It begins like this. It's another black history month has common gone, good riddance. How long must we pay for the penance of this country's sins against black people? And how much black history is there really?

We all know the drill, slavery, middle passage, Jim Crow, civil rights, a wreath of Franklin, and Mok blown away, what else do I have to say? Yeah, yeah. It essentially started talking about the sign, but it went on like that for a while. I can't say that I didn't think it was funny. I did. I also can't say that I would write it now, but I didn't know what's that phrase, comedy plus tragedy, or comedy equals tragedy plus time. I didn't have any time. I, Rosa Parks,

didn't sit on that bus so that I could wait around until this got funny. I just started typing. I finished it in like 20 minutes and I sent it in to the editorial staff of the newspaper and they published it. It went to press on Thursday and it was published online as well. The website was a new thing we were trying. It was this sort of rudimentary website. So it was just text and pictures. And it had my email address at the bottom for praise and compliments.

And that's what I thought was going to happen. I thought people would write to me and say, you're very funny and racism is bad. Which is the point of every satire. And at the top, of course, they had the title and it had my name. My name is R. Eric Thomas. Robert Eric Thomas is my full name. And my parents gave me that name, a neutral name,

so that nobody would ever look at a job application or resume and denying me an opportunity because of my race, which is a beautiful and really heartbreaking way of trying to make a world for a person. And it's worked out well for me. I've had a lot of job interviews with racists. But, that's true. But here, it presented an issue because when you're in the wild west days of the internet and you see something you read something that is sort of a satire but doesn't really

written very well and it says that black history is irrelevant and black people aren't important to the history of the country and it's written by a white guy. You might get your feelings hurt. It went to print on Thursday and up online, and by Sunday I had over a thousand emails in my inbox. I thought for a brief moment that I had made it. But then I opened them and they said things like, dear, whitey, and you are a clansman and you should die. And I thought, it might have been a misunderstanding, someone. But at the time I got back to campus on Monday, things

had really escalated. And as I said, nobody knew who I was. And so nobody could vouch for me. So I write a follow-up editorial for the paper that said, L-L-L, I'm black, sorry. for the paper that said, L-L-L, I'm black, sorry. But the paper only printed once a week on Thursday, and we didn't know that you could just put on anything online

anytime you wanted to, because we literally didn't know how the internet worked. So it was just bad. The Black Student Union, of which I was not a member decided to hold a town hall to talk about the whole thing. And I decided to go. Because ultimately, these are my people, right?

This was about the sign at the end of the day, the sign that was on campus that we had to walk by all the time. This was a community issue, and so I was going to go and be a part of the community. So I walk into this huge lecture hall, hundreds of people in there. It's a diverse crowd, but most of the faces in there are black, like mine. And I stood in the back, and I'm not quite sure why,

but somebody just told me to hold back. Because I mean, it's true, like, there is, you don't know me, but there has never been a room that I've walked in that has a microphone in it, including this room that I haven't wanted to get up and just talking to the microphone. But I didn't. And I watched, it's person after person walked up

to the microphone and started talking about how angry they were at this white racist named R. Eric Thomas. Person after person kept talking about how they were furious and hurt that they had to share the campus with this Nazi, this white supremacist named R. Eric Thomas. I was like, I feel very attacked right now. It was very confusing. Everyone was talking about me and nobody was talking about this sign, which was a part of what I wrote. And I turned into the guy next to me, tall, light skinned, black, good looking. And I was like, this is really something, isn't it?

He's like, yeah, this art time, this sounds like a real asshole. I was like, well, he's got some good qualities. His grammar is impeccable. But it continued, nobody was talking about the sign. Everybody was talking about me, and I started to get flushed, and I started to get angry, and I started to feel so isolated, just like I felt in the store.

I didn't understand. I wrote a joke. I wrote a satire, and nobody was laughing. And everyone was angry at me. And I didn't understand why they didn't see that I had done this for us. So I left, because I was frustrated. And I didn't know how to fix it. I couldn't just march up to the front and say,

boy, I got it. It's... Gacha. I wrote what I wrote. I thought, as a joke, I wrote it to make people laugh with me. But the thing is, when I was writing the bus home, I wrote it to make people laugh with me, but the thing is when I was writing the bus home, I realized what should have been plainly obvious, which is that I wasn't laughing.

And I hadn't written what I wrote to make people laugh. I wrote what I wrote to make people angry. Because the sign hurt my feelings in the bookstore. And alone in that store, face to face with that sign, the hurt bloomed into anger. And I wanted more than anything not to be alone in that store face-to-face with that sign, the hurt bloomed into anger. And I wanted more than anything not to be alone in that anger. I wanted to know that I was not the only person that felt this way, the only person that felt oppressed by this sign.

And so I'd spread that anger accidentally to all these people in this room, but I still felt alone and I still felt unseen, and so I left them alone in that room with their anger. It's kind of amazing what we'll do to reach each other. I published the second editorial that we connect sort of quelled things, although the Black Student Union did feel the need to censure me, which is sort of like an official rebuke. I kind of felt like it should come with a certificate, but it does not. And I received emails, hate mail, four months after that, months. It was incredible. I never heard anything about the sign, though.

I never heard anything from the bookstore, though they did take it down eventually, and beginning in the march because Black History Month was over Thank you That was our Eric Thomas later that year Eric was interviewed on local TV about this incident. You can see a picture on our website, themoth.org. But it seems like eventually everything was forgiven, or at least forgotten, because Eric was named the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper the very next year. Eric is still wielding his pen.

He's an award-winning playwright and a columnist at l.com. His column is called Eric reads the news. His upcoming book, Here For It, will include a version of this small story. When we return, a little girl discovers something about her family while watching a PBS documentary. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX. This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jennifer Hickson.

Our next story is by a special ed teacher. We first met Annie Tan at a story slam held not far from her home in Chinatown. Here's Annie, live at The Moths. My mom has a nickname for me, a bot. In Cantonese, it means busy body, curious, always asking questions. It's kind of got a negative connotation. And I had to suppress that curiosity,

asking all of those questions, because when you're born a kid of immigrants, you're taught a guiding set of principles on which to live on. Keep your head down, learn English, go to school, get good grades, go to college, marry yourself a nice Chinese husband, have kids, buy a big house for yourself and keep quiet. And so these were all the things I learned and everyone around me believed them

because I was born and raised in Manhattan's Chinatown which was bustling with Chinese immigrants and kids of immigrants like me. My mom worked odd jobs and sweatshops and in Chinese bakeries. My dad worked six days a week as a construction worker, and when he'd come back on Sundays, me and my brothers would take turns massaging his back. While doing all of this, I'm also trying to grapple with being both Chinese and American. And so I'm in fifth grade watching a soccer match with my parents and it's the US versus

China. And I asked my dad, who are we rooting for? Gang, I don't got that. Of course, China. But we're here in America, I thought. I couldn't ask that question, though, because when you're growing up here, you know that in that tiny Chinatown apartment, you're not supposed to speak up,

because you're just gonna call as a ruckus, right? But I found my ways to figure out this identity issue. When I was 13, I was so excited to watch a PBS documentary, all about me becoming American the Chinese experience. Before that, I've seen three people who ever looked like me, Jackie Chan, Trini the Yellow Power Ranger, and Mulan, a cartoon character. So I'm so excited to watch these last 20 minutes,

which talks about people marching and protesting, people who look like me, they're holding clever signs in English, they're chanting in English. I'd never even seen anyone in Chinatown march before for anything. What was so big that all of these people would go on the street and risk their identities, their lives? They were marching for this man named Vincent Chin.

Vincent Chin in 1982 was a Chinese American man who was being to death. He was being to death by two white laid off auto workers who assumed he was Japanese during the auto workers crisis in Detroit where Japanese companies were booming and people thought the Japanese were stealing their jobs. They fought the guys chase Vincent Chin and beat him to death with a baseball bat on his bachelor party. Instead of going to his wedding, his wedding guest went to his funeral instead the next week. The two guys who killed Vincent Chin never served the day in jail and paid $3,000 for this man's death. And so all of these groups of Chinese people, Korean people,

Japanese people, Filipinos people are now saying, if this could happen to this guy Vincent Chin, this could happen to any of us. And so they began to rally together. And for the first time for many of them, they came together under the term Asian-American. Asian-American, I'd never heard that term before. Vincent Chin must have been so important if he had brought all of these groups together.

My mom had been to walk into the room as I'm watching this documentary. I'm thinking she's about to yell at me for being lazy on the couch. She points to the screen, she looks at Vincent Chin's photo and says, that's your family. What? I have all of these questions. Who is he? How is he related to me?

Is he like a cousin of a cousin of a cousin? Have I ever met him? No, I haven't met him because I wasn't born yet in 1982. But I'm wondering, like, what happened? I look up at my mom's face and there's just pain and anguish in her eyes. She didn't look like she had wanted to tell me this, but I think she felt she had to tell me. How could I ask all of these questions? How could I ask about a murdered man in our family?

I had nothing to say at that moment and I just decided I'm not going to come front my mother about this. I don't want to hurt her. So I decide to do research, like I done since I was a kid. I start looking up articles online. I find out there's a documentary called Who Killed Vincent Chin. I look at all the New York Public Library branches and I can't find a single copy. But luckily, when I was a freshman in college, the Asian American Alliance greened the movie. The movie featured

heavily Vincent Chin's mother, Lily Chin. Lily Chin went all over the nation on the Phil Donahue show, crying out, I want justice for my son. She's featured at her house in the suburbs of Detroit, feeding her relatives, making fun of the relatives and making jokes, trying to set up the filmmakers of boyfriends, and she was speaking in my native tongue toysanese. At some moments during the documentary, you could see Lollichin trying to hold back her tears,

because at the sight of the cameras, she was always reminded of her dead son Vincent Chin. And I couldn't help but cry myself because this woman looked so much and sounded so much like my grandmother, my maternal grandmother. And she was rallying and she was protesting. She was nothing like any of the Chinese woman I'd ever seen before.

And I thought to myself, I have to find out who Lily Chin is because if Lily Chin is indeed my family and she's related to me, then I have an example in my family of someone who spoke up to be a bot again, to be a busy-bottied curious and be proud of that, you know. So now I'm like I have to find out who Lily Chin is and I have to find out who Vincent Chin is. So I go to the only place where I think I'll get a full answer. The city where Vincent Chinn lived and died Detroit. And I take an eight hour megabus to Detroit. My friend picks me up and I ask her if we can go to Forest Lawn Cemetery to see Vincent Chin's grave. We, she drives us, and we find Vincent Chin's name

on a tombstone, Lily Chin's name on a tombstone, and Lily Chin's husband's name on a tombstone. They are no longer ghosts. They are right below my feet. And I'm finally going to know how these people are related to me, and why does it mean so much to me? I go the next day to my relative's house. We're eating 12 dishes of meals.

I'm looking through 30 photo albums of my family. I see pictures of my mom and dad with matching perms in the 1980s. And so I ask my relatives, can you help me make a family tree? I want to know more about my family. So we start with my grandmother's line. My grandmother had a brother and nine sisters. The second sister on this list is Lily Chin. So now I know Lily Chin is my grandmother's sister.

Lily Chin is my mother's first aunt. And Vincent Chin is my grandmother's sister. Lily Chin is my mother's first aunt, and Vincent Chin is my mother's first cousin. So I asked my eighth-grade auntie, Batihu, what happened to Lily after Vincent Chin died? She tells me, well, when Vincent died, Lily was all alone in Detroit. So your grandmother and I, Lily's sisters, flew to America from China to support her.

Your mom and dad had married in China, so your dad came soon after. They all found work in New York, and that's how your family ended up in Manhattan's Chinatown. I thought about this for a while. My grandmother had brought my parents to America from China, which had a one child policy at the time, and I am the second child of three. If Vincent Chin had not been killed, Lillyshin may never have been alone in Detroit. My grandmother may never have flown to America to support her.

She may never have brought my parents to America, and I may never have been born. That knowledge that my life was now precious to me. And I only knew this because I dared to be a bot. Curious, asking questions after 10 years of trying to find this answer. And so every single day of my life now I march on just like Lollichin, my great auntie did, just like the thousands of people who marched for my cousin Vincent Chin. But that message as a kid, that lesson I learned so well, to not speak up, it's always in my head. And I constantly have to stop that voice, that voice that tells me, don't go on that

bowhorn, Annie. Don't go to those protests. Don't write those articles. Don't make your boss angry. Don't fight for your special education students. And I tell that voice every single day, no, I have to, I have to fight, because my cousin Vincent Chin did not die for nothing. My great auntie Lily Chin did not go all over the nation and speak out for nothing, and

I was not born for nothing. Thank you. That was Annie Tan. In addition to being a teacher, Annie is also a student. She's learning Cantonese so she can write a book about her family's history. Annie has definitely followed in her Aunt Lily's footsteps and is pretty fearless in voicing her concerns when she spots injustice. In regular conversation, Annie's soft spoken, but when it counts, when she needs to be heard like at a protest or a march,

she's famous for having a voice so clear and booming, she barely needs a bullhorn. I've heard her hail a taxi once and that is no joke. To see a picture of Annie and her family and learn more about Vincent Chin, visit theMoth.org. Our next story comes from Morley McBride. She told it at a story slam in Brooklyn, New York, where we partner with Public Radio Station WNYC.

The theme that night was happy. Here's Morley McBride. So, I used to think that you're 20s for the most tumultuous time in your life, but turns out totally wrong, because right around the corner from your 20s are your 30s. And my 30s hit me with an unexpected and pretty debilitating case of anxiety. Up until that point, I felt like I always had some sort of like inner confidence, almost like a pilot light that just gave me some sense of certainty that things would be alright. But then on the sudden one day it was like the storm clouds rolled in, that light went out and there was nothing, just an empty space where had once been. And I felt totally paralyzed, lost my own thoughts.

I would just ruminate endlessly about tiny details and second guess any decision that I made at all. So during these rough patches, I found myself kind of looking out to the world for signs that, you know, things were going to be okay. And these signs included dramatic moments, like when a rainbow seemed to frame the finish line of a marathon I was running, or even just little daily moments, like when you go down to the subway and the train arrives right as you get there, and it stops with a doors centered right on you. I found real comfort in these tiny moments. But when, sort of during the point of rock bottom-ness,

a feeling this way, I went out for a run one afternoon and made this sort of impulsive stop at the farm stand on my way home and bought a bag of spinach, because why not? And this bag of spinach was huge. It was like the size of a toddler, really. It had roots and rocks and dirt and sand and everything in it. And it only cost a dollar, fresh, fresh produce in New York for a dollar. I was delighted, delighted by the deal.

And lucky for me, I actually only had a dollar. I hadn't planned on going food shopping while running, so I used that like really crusty emergency dollar bill, but you probably have stuck in your shoe somewhere. So anyway, bought the spinach, headed home, and laid down on the couch to rest. And as online there, my mind begins to wander and I'm thinking, how am I going to eat all that spinach? That's an awful lot of spinach. I always buy too much produce and I always go as bad before I get a chance to cook it, and it goes bad before I get a chance to cook it, because I don't cook enough at home, because I work late,

and produce is usually so expensive in New York, you know. That spinach was so cheap, because it was so dirty. And I can't even wash it to make it more convenient to cook, because if it gets damp, it's just gonna go bad faster, and I can't wash it in dry, because I don't have a salad spinner, I don't have a salad spinner, because I'm not married.

I'm not married. I'm single. I'm in my 30s. I've been to nine weddings in the last nine months. And that's when you get all your kitchen shit lined up. Quizzards, kitchen aids, colories, salads, but no, I've seen it all. If I were married, I would have that stuff. But would I live in New York now and kitchens are so small here?

Where would I put all that stuff? My microwave already blocks my biggest cabinet. Do they even make smaller versions of these things? How am I going to eat all that spinach? Eventually, I fall asleep. This spin cycle finally quieted by dreams. When I wake up, I hustle out of the house because I'm meeting some friends for a movie.

And as I'm crossing the street, you know how in New York, people leave things that they don't really want on the curb, like an old mattress or a stack of books or like a gap blazer from the late 90s. Well, I'm crossing the street and you'll never guess what is sitting on a stoop, actually sort of a stone wall across the street for me, but a miniature salad spinner. But a miniature salad spinner. I'm not kidding, a salad spinner for one. It's sitting all by itself, not around other things, not part of an impending trash collection. It's sitting on a clean wall across the street for me on this random Saturday, just waiting for me.

And I see it, and I've never even seen as many salads as I've been ever for. I didn't know if they made these things. And it's tiny. It fits in the palm of my hand. I mean, it's actually really adorable. And upon seeing things, free things on the curb, a younger version of me would be like, oh, that mattress looks so comfortable.

Well, this blazer fit me. But having lived in New York for a couple of years now, I'm more like, ugh, bedbugs, I know you're in there. So as I finally trained myself to do, I acknowledge this amazing sad spinner and just walk on. And I get to the end of the block and I stop cold in my tracks because my stomach is on fire.

And I'm like, WTFT-F, that is my salad spinner. So I turn around, I raise back up the block, grab the salad spinner, run it back to my apartment, straight to the bathroom, throw it in the bathtub, draw a bath, squirt, dish-watching detergent, generously all over it. And I'm like, take that, you little fuckers. And the next morning, the next morning, I wake, and I clean the salad spinner off an earnest and I'm, you know, retrieving it from the bathtub. And I'm sort of marveling at its existence and how it came to me. And as I clean my fingers run across, I sort of notice its brand name and my fingers run

across subtle embossing on the top of the lid. And do you know what that little salad spinner's name was? Triumph. It was a tiny salad spinner for one named Triumph. Now, turns out I use that thing all the time. They're really useful. You should get one, even if you're single. But most importantly, that little thing

brought me so much hope and so much joy in a time where I really was digging deep and couldn't find it anywhere. It became like a mini mascot almost. It was sort of this, just the ultimate talisman for me. And it now sits on my kitchen windowsill prominently as sort of a reminder of, you know, you're having faith in an optimistic future because you never know what might come your way when you need it the most. Thank you. That was Mory Lee McBride. Mory is a design strategist. A few years after this story, Mory Lee moved out of New York City and back to Colorado, where she got a place with a lot more space.

So she got herself a matching, large triumph salad spinner and a husband. To see a picture of triumph, the tiny salad spinner for one. You can visit themoth.org. Everyone out there listening with a story starting to brew in your heart, we want to hear it. Please pitch us your story by recording it right on our site, themoth.org, or call 877-799-Moth. That's 877-799-6684. The best pitches are developed from Rothschild's all around the world. My name is Elaine Ausley. I became a published newspaper columnist at the age of 12, primarily because the editor didn't know how old I was. He told my aunt when she delivered some news to the paper that he needed a columnist

for the neighborhood that happened that I lived in. The paper was a weekly and it ran neighborhood columns. He said, did you know anybody there? And she said, yes, she did actually. Her niece lived there. And he said, I think you should like to write. And she said, oh, I'm sure she would. He said, well, have her, you know, follow the format for these neighborhood things and send a copy in. And if I like it, I'll print it and we'll go from there. I did. He did. And I went for, oh, I wrote it for two years. And she got to the dimension that I was 12. And the only time I saw the man was when I took my copy in and he'd smile and wave.

And then one day when I brought it in, I think I was, by that time I was 14. He said, Oh, how's your mother? And I was puzzled. And my mother, he says, Yes, your mother Elaine. I said, No, no, my mother is Omega. I'm Elaine. And he looked at me kind of funny and he said, How old are you? And I said, I'm 14. He says, Oh my God, how old were you when I hired you?

I said 12, and he just thought that was the funniest thing. So he decided since I had so much seniority, maybe I ought to come in on Saturdays and help out. So I started writing Obeds and and weddings at the age of 14. And here I am. Let me see how many years older, 67 years older, and I'm still writing. So it helps to have an agent even if you're 12, especially if you're 12. Remember you can pitch us at 877-799-Moth or online at themoth.org where you can also share these stories or others from the Moth Archive. After the break, a man's dream to work with teenagers does a 180 when the Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX.

You're listening to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX, I'm Jennifer Hickson. Our final story is from Warren Dallan. It was Warren's long-held dream to work with kids, but then they were budget cuts and things changed. He told this story at the Cutler Majestic Theater in Boston, Massachusetts, where we partner with Public Radio Station WBUR. Here's Warren Dallin. I graduated from college and after a year I finally got my dream job as an adolescent psychologist

and a child psychologist in a private treatment center for adolescents. And it was not only that, my girlfriend from five and a half years and I decided to get married. And then we put a down payment on a beautiful little farm in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. My life was absolutely perfect. That lasted for a month. The great Commonwealth of Massachusetts lasted its wealth, and all of the schools were closed, and I lost my job.

I didn't know what I was going to do. I went back to the state hospital where I had worked for a year in the Occupational Therapy Department in the hopes that a job would open in the psych department and never did. But the superintendent, Dr. Mora, was glad to have me back. He was wonderful. And he said, I'm sorry, we gave you a job up. But you know, there's a job I think you'd like.

And it's open because nobody wants it. That sounded incredibly appealing. But I needed a job. He told me that while I was gone, they took all of the older people who lived in various back wards in the hospital and moved them all to one building, it was the new geriatric unit, and I said yes, and he got me some keys, and as I walked through that my long tunnel under Chestnut Street on the way to Dexter Building, I felt like in the words of John Updark

that I'd given birth to a black hole. I opened the door of the ward, and I don't think anybody who's ever been there will ever forget the smell of a back ward in a state mental hospital in the 60s. The first person I came upon was this beautiful woman with tight, curly silver hair and fire in her eyes. And I leaned over and I said, good morning.

My name is Warren. And she looked up and she said, my name's Mary. And she brushed out laughing. And I laughed too, and we talked for a little bit. And what I didn't realize, I couldn't feel it, but the teetonic plates in my soul and my body were moving and reshaping in the most amazing way. The next person I came across in the bed was a, she was, looked like she was in a coma. Her hands were totally contracted to the point where her fingers, nails were growing into her palms.

And her hands were infected, and her eyes were clamped shut, and it crusted shut, but like blepharitis. But I learned early on that you always, always talk to a person as though they are 100% there, and special. And so I leaned over and I said, my name is Warren, good morning. And now she told me later that she loved to eat drops. So she already knew my name was Warren. But she turned her head and she said,

in this little high squeaky voice that was very quavory, which I grew to love so much, she said, good morning, Warren! And I said, wow, I'm so glad to meet you. She said, I'm glad to meet you too. Will you open my eyes? Oh, I was terrified. I didn't know how. And I told her that.

And she said, of course you do. She was so encouraging. She said, just go in the bathroom. Get a little cloth, put some warm water on it. Put it on my eyes. You'll pop them right open. And I did what she said. And I opened one eye and oh my god she these gorgeous blue eyes. And she looked at me with one eye and she said, there you are! She had the most incredible sense of humor. And I was changing and I didn't know it. I was going from one world to

another and I had no idea. I got up to the nursing station and warm welcome from the nurses. They were so glad I had someone take them the job. I pulled the first shot and it was Mary's. And my God, I'm still shocked. She was 107 years old. She was born into slavery in South Carolina. And I will never be able to thank her enough for what she has done for me in terms of how much she's changed me. The second person, Annie Eliasin, the social worker wrote wonderful notes on each person.

Sarah was such a good social worker. She said that Annie was a, neither woman had any family. But Annie was a concert pianist. Well, I learned about her. Every morning, I just loved going, I love these people. It sounds unprofessional. You're not supposed to love your patients.

But between you and me, I think it's unprofessional if you don't love the people you work with. And I thank you. I come in 20 minutes early every morning and I soak Annie's hands in warm water and I very slowly try to bring her fingers open without hurting her, which is very difficult. Took two weeks to get her fingers open wide enough so that we could finally clip her nails and the nurses could medicate her hands. And then they worked with her eyes to resolve that problem, and she was doing well. I love coming in every morning she would tell me about Europe.

And I couldn't believe that those Nali twisted hands had danced across keyboards all over the major capitals of Europe. I love the stories about Europe in the 20s and the 30s. And one day I went in and she said, you know, I've been thinking a lot. And last night I made a decision. I said, what's that, Annie?

She said, well, before you came, I didn't really have a future. But I think now I do. And I've decided not to talk about the past anymore. Oh, I was so disappointed. I loved the stories. And I said, what are you going to do, Annie? She said, well, I'm going to be your spy.

And I said, my spy? What? She said, well, there are things that happen around here. You know I love to eat drop. And I hear things and see things now. But on the weekend or at night, and if you knew about them, you're the kind of person who could do something about it. And imagine if we worked together, we

could really change this place and make it better. Well, it sounded great to me. Let me give you an example. I went to work with her one morning, one Monday morning, and then I rushed down to rounds and the nurses were reading a report, and they were lamenting the fact that there was this woman who, every so often, she did these episodes of terribly disturbed.

She'd be all upset. She was nonverbal, so she couldn't tell anyone what was wrong. It was so sad. And I knew what was wrong. And Annie had told me that the night before she was eavesdropping, and the family had come into visit this woman. And when the nurses left, the family very severely verbally abused this woman until she just broke down. And I said to the nurses, gee, maybe there's a correlation between the visits from the family and the fact that this woman gets upset because they couldn't know that Annie had told me. And they said, oh, gee, maybe we'll look,

well, that was the last time that woman was ever abused. And Annie and I helped ever so many people, so many people, but really she helped me more than anything. She was so encouraging and she said you have to go back to school. And I knew she was right. And I finally enrolled in Metropolitan College at Boston University, an occupational therapy, it was renowned, Alice Sheifers, she's a renowned occupational therapist who taught this course in consultation in nursing homes. Now, I have to tell you, this is a stretch for someone who is an adolescent psychologist. But I loved it.

I loved it. And I would come back in the morning and I'd tell Annie, it was an evening course. I'd tell Annie about the class that she had a million questions. What did you learn? Tell me what you learned. And she was so encouraging. I finally applied to Boston University

and was accepted at Sajin College in the OT program. And when I told Annie, oh, she said, oh, by jingles, that is great. No one uses the term by jingles anymore. I wish they did. But three months after I began the program, I got a call from Sarah, the social worker, and she said, one, I thought you'd want to know that Annie passed away comfortably in her sleep last night. I went to the funeral, we interred her at a pop-as-grave on Cross Street in Foxboro,

and we stood there with Sarah and myself, and the brave digger and the chaplain, and that was it. Although I didn't leave her there, she's here with me right now at the stage of the Cutler Majestic Theater. I had a hard time with Neuronatomy at school, and I called the State Pathologist Dr. Flashman.

I knew him, and I'd worked a little with him. And I said, if I came in the summer, and could you, I'd help you out and volunteer, but in the meantime, could you teach me neurology, and you're at an oranatomy, and he said, oh, that would be great. I'd love to do that. Come on in tomorrow. So I did. And he did the most precious thing. He held a human brain in his hand. And he said, before we start, I have to tell you that the ones who were memories in this tissue, this was the remnants of a person's personality.

It is a sacred object, and you have to treat it with deep reference. Don't ever forget that. And I never would know what I forget him. And he made a little machine with a wire that we cut the brain up into quarter inch slices like a tomato. Now they call, I think they call it an MRI and you don't have to kill the patient to

do the research. But he would hold each slab in his hand and then he'd describe the different structures and their functions and that was wonderful. And then he'd write down for himself any anomalies that he'd see in the tissue, never knew who the patient was. And he'd put the whole thing together, I would rather put the whole thing together, it was part of my job. And I'd tie it up into cheesecloth.

And then I'd very slowly and deliberately lower the brain into the femaldehyde. We had these large mayonnaise jazz from the kitchen. They were perfect for this. And I screwed the top on to the mayonnaise jazz one late August and very hot August afternoon. And I turned the jar round on the shelf. And there on the two inch masking tape was the name. Ernie O'Hasson.

And I had realized I just cut up my friend's brain. I'm still shocked at my reaction. I wasn't sad. In fact, I was overwhelmed and overjoyed. I just all I could think of was if her being there and saying, oh, by jingles, I am ever so glad you did that. What did you learn? Tell me everything you learned.

She was wonderful and she changed me forever. As did Mary. I had a board member years later when I ran an agency on aging and from 90 years of wisdom, she lost her best friend and she actually came back to work as a volunteer after the funeral. I don't I can't imagine losing a friend after 90 years and and I said I said Margaret What what was what was your friend like and she kind of looked up into space and she smiled and she said She was like someone you'd put on a gold chain and and we're around your neck and

For the rest of my life, I've had this invisible gold chain in honor to people like Mary and Alice and Dr. Flashman and some of my students, Sean and Micah, my god, my family, people, sometimes that I just meet, what you do, if you don't know what to do, you just braille that invisible gold chain and they'll tell you what to do. And together you can make the world a better place. Thank you.

That was Warren Dallin. By jingles, what do you say we all add him to our golden necklaces? He's definitely on mine now. After many years working with senior citizens, Warren finally got to work with young people as a college professor, where he's told the story and many others to his lucky students for almost 40 years. If you visit our website, themoth.org, you can see some photos that Warren recently took of the places he mentioned in the story.

You can see Foxboro State Hospital, where he first fell in love with his job, person by person. It has now been renovated and is condosed, by the way. And also, photographs of the Humble Cross Street Cemetery, where Annie and many of the other patients are buried. I asked Warren if he could get me a picture of a brain in a giant mayonnaise jar, but he reminded me what his teacher told him that brains are sacred. They hold the person's whole personality and memories and should be treated with respect. So here's to all the brains out there listening along.

That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. Bye, Jingles. Your host this hour was Jennifer Hickson. Jennifer also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the most directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Janess and Meg Boles, production support from Timothy Luley. Most stories are true, is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from the Christian McBride Trio, Matthias

Rookt-Aschel, Rafik Batia, and the Martin Hayes Cortet. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Mothradio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and everything else, go to our website, TheMoth.org. you