December 7, 2017 • 35 mins
During a visit back home, Jonathan’s mother inadvertently admits something that forces him to question his past. In this season finale, Jonathan turns the mic around on himself for one of the more personal episodes of the series.
Credits
Heavyweight is hosted and produced by Jonathan Goldstein.
This episode was also produced by Kalila Holt. The senior producer is Kaitlin Roberts.
Editing by Jorge Just, Alex Blumberg, and Wendy Dorr.
Special thanks to Emily Condon, Emanuele Berry, Pat Walters, and Jackie Cohen.
The show was mixed by Kate Bilinski.
Music by Christine Fellows and John K Samson, with additional music by Y La Bamba, Caspar Babypants, Michael Charles Smith, and Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Yello. Why hello? Now, what kind of greeting is that
You've got your radio voice on? Could you elaborate on
what you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I know in the first second, if I'm being recorded
or on your inflections.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Well, I always talk like this, Jackie. Back to you.
The way you're speaking with me now is never the
way you would normally speak. Okay, wait, hang on a second.
I'm I'm just talking normal, but you're not talking normal.
It's your radio voice. Hey, what's going on? It's still
not It's still not. It's still not. Hey. No, hey
Jackie again, Jackie, No, you wouldn't say him like that.
(00:39):
How's it going? Too much energy?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Hi?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I can tell anyway. It can't be a radio voice
because I do a podcast. It's a podcast voice, all right,
And welcome to the show from Gimlet Media. I'm Jonathan
Goldstein and this is Heavy Wait today's episode, Dina. Hello, Hello, Okay,
(01:19):
so we just got to Montreal. We we What's that?
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Isn't that how you say yes in French?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah? But you just say it once you to say
we we My folks are about to meet us, pick
us up at the airport to take us back to
their place. Where we will be staying for the next
five days, five days, five days, in my childhood home,
in the childhood bed i've not slept in in decades.
(01:47):
My wife, Emily, and I are here for passover, to
sup upon the bread of affliction. Growing up, though, it
was everything of affliction, candy, corn of affliction, road trips
of affliction, bedtime stories of affliction. I moved out when
(02:08):
I was nineteen, but from age one to eighteen, what
I remember most is the vague feeling of worry permeating
the household. Worry that manifested is yelling, yelling through closed doors,
yelling across the kitchen table, my father yelling into a
junk drawer desperately trying to find a working pen, my
mother yelling into a clogged toilet, desperately trying to make
(02:32):
it go down. But more often than not, the yelling
wasn't over anything at all. We were just a naturally loud,
anxious family, a race of nervous giants shrunk into the
bodies of little Jews.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
Man.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
When I move out of here, I'd say in my teens,
I'm going to live like sting, peace and quiet, meditation,
tea and tantric sex, and now after years of oolong
roubis and lemon roubis, I'm home again for my first
trip back with Emily and our five month old son Aggie.
(03:21):
Day one. Here they are my parents. Tyota pulls up
to the airport, pickups and passes us. Try to catch
They don't see us here. We're right here. My mother
jumps out. She runs back towards us, pointing at Aggie's ears.
(03:43):
His ears are exposed.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Hi, Hi, emily ears are exposed.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Both my mother and father where their woolen caps pull
down well past their ears. In younger, stronger days, they
might have stretched those camps right down over their feet,
but they're old now. My mother Dina seventy two, and
my father Buzz eighty three.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
I want to drive slowly, not too fast. I want
to go carefully.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Okay, okay, fine, Well, Buzz is high strung. Dina's intensity
is capable of raising the emotional temperature of any space
she occupies in elevators, walk in pantries, and tiotas. Her
powers are especially acute.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Like a funny feeling in my throat, Like it's like
really emotional.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
It's like a dreamed, you know, It's like a dream Yeah,
it's like such a weird feeling.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I think the weird, elusive feeling my mother is trying
to describe is happiness.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It's just wonderful to see him, But I hope he's
going to be warm enough.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
Did you bring him up a little something?
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Home? Sweet home?
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Walking through the door, I'm a twelve year old again,
home from school and looking forward to zoning out with
petticoat junction. I'm a sixteen year old rushing to the
bathroom to gargle out the smell of cigarettes. I'm a
forty eight year old, a grown ass man with a
grown ass ass. Parenting a newborn leaves a person with
(05:25):
no time for squats. So don't judge Alex so nice
in here plate. I can't believe it. So normally the house,
a modest, semi detached bungalow, has a certain storage unit,
bombshelter vibe, walls of toilet paper, a cold room full
of canned fruit, cocktail needle points of biblical scenes, and torreadors,
(05:50):
all leaned up against the walls for fear of pounding
in a nail and regretting it forever. But today the
place looks positively sparse, So I just don't open.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
A closet or the chore everything I'll tumble on your
head because when you've heard you guys are coming. I
threw everything into the closets and hid them.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
My mother grabs Aggie and heads upstairs for a diaper change.
Emily and I trail behind.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
I want him to be.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Fresh and clean.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Oh you're so sweet, You're so sweet, my angel.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Where the frige is the bag? The friggin bag contains
the friggin diapers that my mother bought for our visit.
It turns out it's on her lap.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
I kept a bill because I wasn't sure if you
want me to return them or not.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Would you be able to return to use diapers? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
You know me. I could return anything. I could return anything.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
You know that, Johnny, I do know that returning stuff
is what my mother lives for. She sees it as
a staring contest, a game of chess, but with yelling.
I remember once going along with her as she returned
a shirt she'd bought for my father two years earlier.
(07:07):
It's missing a sleeve, she told the cashier, holding up
the article of clothing. The cashier turned it around and around.
It's not supposed to have sleeves. The cashier finally said,
it's a poncho. A poncho, my mother repeated, as though
it were a foreign word, which, in her defense, I
(07:28):
suppose it sort of is. I don't care what it is.
It's factory defective and my husband can't wear it. Whenever
she'd get this way, I'd adopt a stance meant to
convey filial loyalty, peppered with a touch of what Vietnam
Vets call the thousand yard stare. I've stood next to
(07:52):
my mother through countless exchanges, arguments, spectacles, and stinks. But
this is the first time I've stood by her side
as she diapers my son.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Oh look how much peepee he has? Oh, you made
a lot of pepi baby. See that's how I knew
you were sick. When you were a baby, Johnny, you
weren't peeping.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
What was wrong with me? As a kid, it was
easy to be embarrassed by my mother. One time, a
popular boy named Jeordie showed up at our house. I
wasn't home, but my mother answered the door with her
hair on fire. My hair's on fire, she screamed. The
next day in school, Jeordie showed the whole class how
(08:35):
she screamed it. He wiggled his fingers in the air,
looking as though he was about to fall to his knees.
That night, I asked my mother what had happened. It
was the barbecue, She said, your father wasn't home, and
I was so in the mood for barbecued lamb chops.
It seems that while examining the chops for signs of spoilage,
(08:57):
she leaned her hair sprayed boufont too close to the grill.
While this explained the fire atop her head, it did
not explain why she answered the door while nursing a
fire atop her head. Growing up, this kind of stuff
happened all the time, so I was always on high
alert for humiliating emergencies. Being back home again, I feel
(09:18):
the old muscle memory kick back in. What that smells?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Something's burning?
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Did you turn on the heater? Did you touch the heat? Though,
it turns out that one of the rag dolls my
mother had been hoarding somehow landed onto one of the
old lamps she'd been hoarding and had begun to burn.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I could have had a fire because I was so
careless for a shim.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
The day plays out as a series of minor disasters averted.
In the morning, my mother loses her cell phone. We
find it in the night table. In the afternoon, a
screw to my father's glasses falls out. We replace it
with a twist tie. At dinner, a waiter charges my
mother for or potato. She claims she didn't order, but
(10:02):
after ten minutes of Camp David's style negotiations, it's dropped
from the bill. Before bed, my father can't find his passport.
Why do you need a passport? I ask? You always
need a passport, he says. We find it in the
night table. In the past, having someone witness all of
(10:22):
this would have made me feel anxious, But now having
Emily here makes me feel like I have an ally.
Turning to her in the midst of some crisis is
like looking directly into the TV camera and winking at
the audience.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Doggy Day two.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
After we put Oggie to sleep, Emily and I lie
in bed. I ask for her thoughts and reflections on
the trip so far. Oh, come on, come on, no comment?
How could she resist? Look at how my mother acts
with Aggie, I say, trying to get Emily going, I
(11:11):
saw her put a pocket mirror under his nose while
he was sleeping to see if he was still breathing.
After every spoonful she feeds him, she asks, if he's choking.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
You realize, though, that you say all that about Aggie
now too, like just a tiny little cough, and you
are doing it.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Is he breathing?
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Can he sit like that? Can he touch that thing?
Can he eat that? Can he do that? Is he
supposed to be doing that?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
What's wrong?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
What's wrong?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
What's wrong? What's he doing? What's he doing? Is he choking?
What's wrong?
Speaker 4 (11:40):
You do a lot of that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I can see to Emily that maybe I do just
a little of that kind of thing. But I wasn't
even in the parking lot of the ballpark of aDNA Goldstein.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
You one day you dropped, you dropped Aggie off, and
you called me right afterward because you were so worried.
Do you remember this?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
I do remember this. It was Aggie's first week of daycare.
He shares a babysitter with two little sisters, But on
that particular morning, when the babysitter opened the door, she
was alone. She told me the girls were napping in
another room.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
You called me and said she was there alone. She
said they were in bed. I don't know. Maybe she
killed the whole family, and now she's going to kill Oggi.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And you weren't joking.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Like you knew it was a crazy thought, but you
needed me to tell you she didn't kill their family.
She's not going to kill Aggie.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
I did not need you to tell me that.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
And you're misremembering you were freaked out.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
You were freaked out. I thought I was very stoic.
You called me and.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Said, I think the nanny is gonna murder our child,
and that she murdered the whole family.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
That we do daycare with. I don't consider that stoic.
Speaker 5 (13:05):
All right.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
I mean, I'm just imaginative. That's one way to look
at it. Yet another way to look at it is
that I'm also crazy, just like my mom. Well, set
my hair on fire and open the front door. In
(13:27):
the days after Ougi was born, I couldn't stop thinking
terrible thoughts. Things I couldn't speak, not even to Emily.
With this new overwhelming love for my son came new
overwhelming fears for his safety, his heartbreaks to come, for
his old age, his loneliness, so I started seeing a therapist.
(13:48):
I explained how worry was the lingua franca of my childhood.
I wasn't allowed a paper route because it was a
good way to get abducted, no barefoot in because of
rusty nails. And I didn't even learn to swim until
junior high because water that's where people go to drown.
Worry and fear were how my mother communicated love. I
(14:10):
said to my therapist with a shrug, But love is love.
The important thing is that we feel it. But my
therapist's response troubled me. She said that love was the
transcendence of fear, that you might even say fear was
the opposite of love. Sitting at my childhood desk with
Aggie's toys scattered at my feet, my therapist's words returned
(14:33):
to me. If I was becoming my mother, would AGGI
someday become me? Someone weighed down by fear? And worry?
Was our genetic line nothing more than an inglorious chain
of Russian dolls? Should my therapist save the notes from
our sessions so I can send Aggie to her at
a discounted rate. I didn't want my son becoming me,
(14:55):
and there were only two people who could help me
understand how I became me, wh who charged New York
therapy rates that might leave me bankrupted before I'm cured?
And the other my mother day three. As a child,
I felt trapped and embarrassed by my mother. As an adult,
(15:17):
I came to be amused by her. It's only as
a freshly minted father visiting home for the first time
that I'm beginning to see that I am her.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
How much you pay for apples seventy but I'm desperate?
Speaker 1 (15:33):
This is what we normally talk about. Where to get
the best price on paper plates? Where to get the
best price on honeydew melon?
Speaker 5 (15:40):
Dina?
Speaker 3 (15:40):
What do you pay for a bottle of water.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Twenty four for a dollar eighty eight?
Speaker 5 (15:46):
Bottle water.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Cox twenty four for six forty nine?
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Will you pay for a loaf of bread? But after dinner,
after Aggie's gone to sleep, my mom and I sit
down at the kitchen table to have a different converse station.
Emily is reading in bed, and my father's watching TV
in the basement. It's just us. Hello, Hello, go ahead
and talk here. I am Why do you say here?
Speaker 5 (16:13):
I am?
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Well?
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Where should I say there?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I am?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Tonight? I want to talk about the fear, that thing
my family lives inside, like a snowsuit with a broken
zipper that can no more be removed than our own flesh.
I want to talk about the nameless thing that binds
all Goldstein's, that ignites us, propels us, and ultimately paralyzes us. Well,
I think about this stuff now, because you know, I
(16:39):
have I have a I have a son, and I think,
but I think he's so beautiful.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
And I saw those blue eyes like no horas Bay's eggs.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
My mother's not talking crazy talk, she's talking Yiddish.
Speaker 5 (16:56):
So Bay's eggs.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah, what does that mean?
Speaker 5 (17:00):
Bad O?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
I shouldn't hurt them. The bad eye, the evil eye,
the belief that merely saying something positive is enough to
invite evil forces to snuff the good thing out. So
even bringing up a normal son to mom question about
good parenting is enough to attract the eye. On the
day of my bar Mitzvah, my mother carefully sewed a
(17:23):
red ribbon into my underwear. In this way, she reasoned,
should the evil eye turn its gaze upon me, I'd
be protected by my underwear. Why do you think you
do that evil eyed stuff? It's what you say, it's cuckoo.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
I know it's cuckoo, but I can't help it.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
But then that's just a superstition. I don't know everybody
does it. I've never met anybody who puts red ribbons
in their own I'm saying I personally have never met
anyone who does that. So I can't say everybody puts
red ribbons in their underwear. But what what is it
supposed to be? Warding off? But what is the evil eye?
(18:06):
I don't know. This is how conversations with Dina often go.
The derail hit dead ends. So when I ask her
why was our home the way it was? I expect
more of the same, But instead my mother grows quiet.
(18:31):
I worry, Yeah, I do too.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
I'm afraid of this, afraid of that. Well, I was irrational.
I wasn't thinking right, and I have a chance to
redo my a little bit.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Not with you, but with Augie. She stops talking and
stares into her lap for a while. We just sit there.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
I look upon this as a second chance. I want
to correct my mistakes, Johnny, I want to redeem myself.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
That's it. My mother doesn't usually talk this way if
something's causing her grief. She returns it to the store,
sends it back to the kitchen, and so talk of
second chances and redemption. The words sound weird coming out
of her mouth, and I don't know how to respond.
Where's all this coming from? I ask? Are you thinking
(19:28):
of something specific? It's too painful. I don't want Maybe
if you talk about it, you won't talk about it.
I don't think it could be anything. Then I can't.
I can't talk about it. Don't press me, please well,
I don't want to force you. I don't want to
make you feel bad. I am ashamed of myself. Let's
(19:50):
change the subject, and with that the conversation ends. I'd
gotten to my mother for answers about my childhood, but
instead she has left me with questions I didn't even
know I had. What had happened that was so bad?
She couldn't even talk about it? What was she so
afraid to tell me? After the break, I find out, Hello, Hello,
(20:20):
So mom's upstairs with Emily. Do you have any insight?
Day four? I sit down with my father to see
if he has any idea what the second chance is
that my mother's talking about. He's hesitant to talk because
that goes against his strategy of staying out of the drama.
In fact, most of my childhood memories of him are
(20:41):
of a man in bed napping with a large volume
of World War II history splayed open on his chest.
This retiring nature might be the secret to having stayed
married to my mother for more than fifty years. What
is the thing that she is carrying around with her?
Speaker 3 (20:57):
She's a very private person and she feels she doesn't
want to be intruded upon. Don't take it the wrong way, so.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
You have no inkling. You don't know what's going on.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Doesn't even discussed with me. I don't know what guilt,
I don't know what she's talking.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Don't find it odd or intriguing in a way.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
It's a touchy subject for her, and she's very reluctant
to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Talk about it. What's the it?
Speaker 3 (21:21):
I don't know. You have to ask her, and she's
going to shut down. She's going to shut down.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
This means she'll try to change the subject or start
to yell. But today I don't care. I just want
to know what the big secret is. I wonder what
it is? I say to Emily, who knows? She says
while brushing her hair. So many things about your mom
are a mystery to me, like why is the kitchen
faucet always running full blast? And why does she keep
(21:50):
offering me paper towels. I think she says, you should
just let it go, but of course I can't. What
had my mother done that she wanted a second chance at?
Was it for the time she bought me a shirt
for my birthday that she later admitted was actually a dress?
(22:11):
Did you want to redo the time she dropped me
off at a birthday party and hollered out the car window.
Have fun? But if you get diarrhea and someone's on
the toilet, just making the bathtub diarrhea is not a
time for pride. Of course I now see the wisdom,
but as a child, her words were a source of shame.
(22:33):
I need to know. So I invite my mother out
for a Sunday stroll with Oggie and me. Maybe if
she can just relax, it'll come out like diarrhea.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
We'll talk.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
What should I say?
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Learn to take your robble?
Speaker 5 (22:50):
So tell me?
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So, do you find walking with Hoggie relaxing?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Very relaxing? So nice? It's a pleasure, my little friend.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
To start things off. I lobber an easy question, cocktail
party stuff. What's your first memory?
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Kindergarten? And we lived on Colonial four h three nine Colonial,
And I remember my father used to play peinockle and
he had a thumb that was the nail like the
thumbnail was very cut off, and all of a sudden
I thought of it, and I started screaming and crying
and carrying on. I'm worrying. Oh, I remember, how old
(23:38):
are you must have been four or five.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
So an early memory is being at kindergarten and remembering
your father's thumbnail and starting to cry. What was it
that upset you about it?
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I read about it because it wasn't like a regular thumb.
I was worried crazy.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I tried a guide her towards happy red inniscences, but
all her memories are awful. Rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, her
mother slapping her in Woolworth's for whining about a balloon
she wanted, waking up in the middle of the night
to find a wall in the kitchen covered in moths.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Then I remember my mother's pressure cooker in that house
hits the ceiling and pea soup was splattered everywhere, all
your memories.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Let's hear another memory. With the small talk exhausted, I
trepidaciously bring the subject back around to the do over.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
I don't know, Johnny. I don't want to talk about it.
I don't want to remind myself the way I felt.
Doesn't conjure up good memories. Please, and that's the.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
End of it.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I don't want to go into details.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Nonetheless, for the rest of the day, I can't stop
myself from asking for details, I asked, as she puts
away the breakfast dishes.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
I have nothing more to say, Johnny.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Leave me be, I ask, as she cuts coupons while
watching Judge Judy with Emily in broad strokes.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Alone, Please Emily take him off me?
Speaker 1 (25:17):
And while she peels boiled eggs for lunch, Leave me alone.
Later we all sit down for dinner and with it
some wine.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
What's wrong with me?
Speaker 1 (25:27):
I think I'm off my rock. My mother rarely drinks wine.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Oh my god, how did I get like this?
Speaker 5 (25:36):
Mom?
Speaker 1 (25:36):
You just had a glass of wine. As she drifts
off into an inebriated slumber, I give it one last try,
can I Is there anything you need to tell me? No,
any secrets to reveal No, I was getting nowhere day five?
(26:03):
All right, you want to change him? What? It's our
last day, and I've decided to give it a rest.
I stop asking weird questions and we all just hang out.
We talk about the price of things, We yell from
room to room, We search for lost cell phones, and
grow pleasantly bored with each other's company. Overall, it's pretty nice. Well,
(26:28):
while putting Aggie down for a nap, my mother has
a question for me, Sonny, what was it.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
That you were hoping to get from me? Oh?
Speaker 1 (26:38):
I really did just want to be able to have
a conversation, that's all I'm not. I don't want to.
I don't want to cause your distress.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
You're not causing distress.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
It's it's what it was.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
And I don't even want to talk about old, painful stuff.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Who was sweet?
Speaker 3 (27:03):
What?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
She lays Aggie down, She stands over the crib. She
starts to say something, but then trails away. What are
we saying? All right, I'm gonna turn it off. Then
I was not adopted. I had no secret twin, and
(27:26):
my mother had no secret family. There were no murders,
no affairs. It turns out that my mother's big secret.
The thing that was so hard for her to say
was that she was sorry for a lot of things,
some small, some not so small. Some I remember, some
I don't, calling me names, screaming at me a lot.
(27:48):
How she could have been nicer to my girlfriends, How
she used to pull my hair, hit me. Hitting kids
was like the hula hoop. Back then, I say, a fad.
Everyone did it. It wasn't right, she says. Back then
people didn't know better. I say, I should have known better.
She says, I forgive you. I say, I don't forgive myself.
(28:12):
So I forgive her again, and I mean it, And
then I turned the recorder back on.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
I love you, honey. You made it a little easier
for me.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Thank you. I love you too much. When you become
a parent, your whole life changes, but you forget that
some things stay the same. I'd been so focused on
becoming a better father that I forgot I was still
(28:50):
a son. And maybe learning to be a better son
is how you become a better dad. Anyway I want
him to be. On the last morning of our visit,
my mother and I head to the park. As a kid,
the park was someplace I usually went with my grandfather
or father. One of the only times I remember going
(29:12):
with my mother, two collies appeared out of nowhere and
began chasing us. I remember we separated and the dogs
chased her while I hid behind a tree. I look
around the playground from my own childhood with her. I
knew most things were out sandbox because someone could have
peed in there. Same for the swings, monkey bars, teeter totters,
(29:33):
and merry go rounds. But then something surprising happens. Picking
Aggie up out of the stroller, my.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Mother says, I'll take him down the slide.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
He's never he's never gone down the side.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Come with Bobby Henney. We'll go down the slide together.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Okay, you're gonna go with him down the side. Well,
what do you think I'll put himself? I didn't. You're
not afraid to go down the slide.
Speaker 5 (29:54):
Why would I be afraid?
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I don't know. Okay, be careful, yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
On my nervis, I wasn't afraid.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Be careful. I don't know. My mother hands me back
Aggie and holding onto the railing, she carefully climbs the
steps to the top of the slide. When she gets there,
I climb up too, and hand Aggie back to her
with hesitation. She positions them onto her lap and I
(30:23):
run around to the bottom of the slide to await
their arrival.
Speaker 5 (30:26):
And you stand there and catch us in chase bad for.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Me, And then Dina lets go.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
You're gonna go down.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Whoo whoo. He's having fun. Huh, so much fun in fact,
that my mother decides to do it again. And so
again she climbs up the steps, all three of them,
to the top of the ladder, and from the grand
(30:56):
height of three and a half feet, my mother and
son descend the toddler slide once more, sliding sliding down
the snide. Oggie loves it, so they do it again
a third chance, a fourth, and even a fifth. Then
(31:19):
we move on to the bouncy caterpillar, the rope bridge,
and the swings.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Swim swingy Oggy's going swingy, the itsy bitsy spider win
up the water.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Parenthood is like a redo of your own childhood, and
grandparenthood is like a redo of that. That's all life is,
learning and relearning the same lessons over and over all
of us, like those itsy bitsy spiders crawling up endless
water spouts, trying to make just a little more progress
each time we set out. There's comfort in knowing that
(32:00):
no one ever gets it right, no matter how many
chances we get. But hopefully at least a few things
go right, a few purely kind gestures somehow get through,
And for everything else we ask for forgiveness, And if
we're lucky, we'll receive it, and if we're luckier, we'll
(32:20):
forgive ourselves too.
Speaker 5 (32:27):
Horrors.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Now that the vernitures returning to its.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is scheming
with the damaged.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Pole, take this moment to dissolved, if we meant it,
if we tried, but felt.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Around for far too empty from things that accidentally talk.
Eavyweight is hosted and produced by me Jonathan Goldstein along
with Khalila Holt. The senior producer is Caitlin Roberts, editing
by Jorge just Alex Bloomberg and Wendy Tour Special thanks
(34:04):
to Emily Condon, Emmanuel Berry, Pat Walters, and Jackie Cohen.
The show is mixed by Kate Bolinski, music by Christine
Fellows and John K. Sampson. Additional music credits for this
episode can be found on our website Gimbletmedia dot com
slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans
courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by
(34:25):
Hailey Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. This is
our last episode of the season, but we're already looking
for stories for season three, so if you have one,
email us at Heavyweight at gimletmedia dot com. And if
you see fit phunch in some stars for us on iTunes.
Thanks for listening. Oh oh sign
Speaker 5 (35:04):
M
Yello. Why hello? Now, what kind of greeting is that
You've got your radio voice on? Could you elaborate on
what you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I know in the first second, if I'm being recorded
or on your inflections.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Well, I always talk like this, Jackie. Back to you.
The way you're speaking with me now is never the
way you would normally speak. Okay, wait, hang on a second.
I'm I'm just talking normal, but you're not talking normal.
It's your radio voice. Hey, what's going on? It's still
not It's still not. It's still not. Hey. No, hey
Jackie again, Jackie, No, you wouldn't say him like that.
(00:39):
How's it going? Too much energy?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Hi?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I can tell anyway. It can't be a radio voice
because I do a podcast. It's a podcast voice, all right,
And welcome to the show from Gimlet Media. I'm Jonathan
Goldstein and this is Heavy Wait today's episode, Dina. Hello, Hello, Okay,
(01:19):
so we just got to Montreal. We we What's that?
Speaker 4 (01:23):
Isn't that how you say yes in French?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah? But you just say it once you to say
we we My folks are about to meet us, pick
us up at the airport to take us back to
their place. Where we will be staying for the next
five days, five days, five days, in my childhood home,
in the childhood bed i've not slept in in decades.
(01:47):
My wife, Emily, and I are here for passover, to
sup upon the bread of affliction. Growing up, though, it
was everything of affliction, candy, corn of affliction, road trips
of affliction, bedtime stories of affliction. I moved out when
(02:08):
I was nineteen, but from age one to eighteen, what
I remember most is the vague feeling of worry permeating
the household. Worry that manifested is yelling, yelling through closed doors,
yelling across the kitchen table, my father yelling into a
junk drawer desperately trying to find a working pen, my
mother yelling into a clogged toilet, desperately trying to make
(02:32):
it go down. But more often than not, the yelling
wasn't over anything at all. We were just a naturally loud,
anxious family, a race of nervous giants shrunk into the
bodies of little Jews.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
Man.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
When I move out of here, I'd say in my teens,
I'm going to live like sting, peace and quiet, meditation,
tea and tantric sex, and now after years of oolong
roubis and lemon roubis, I'm home again for my first
trip back with Emily and our five month old son Aggie.
(03:21):
Day one. Here they are my parents. Tyota pulls up
to the airport, pickups and passes us. Try to catch
They don't see us here. We're right here. My mother
jumps out. She runs back towards us, pointing at Aggie's ears.
(03:43):
His ears are exposed.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Hi, Hi, emily ears are exposed.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Both my mother and father where their woolen caps pull
down well past their ears. In younger, stronger days, they
might have stretched those camps right down over their feet,
but they're old now. My mother Dina seventy two, and
my father Buzz eighty three.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
I want to drive slowly, not too fast. I want
to go carefully.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Okay, okay, fine, Well, Buzz is high strung. Dina's intensity
is capable of raising the emotional temperature of any space
she occupies in elevators, walk in pantries, and tiotas. Her
powers are especially acute.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Like a funny feeling in my throat, Like it's like
really emotional.
Speaker 4 (04:35):
It's like a dreamed, you know, It's like a dream Yeah,
it's like such a weird feeling.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
I think the weird, elusive feeling my mother is trying
to describe is happiness.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It's just wonderful to see him, But I hope he's
going to be warm enough.
Speaker 5 (04:52):
Did you bring him up a little something?
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Home? Sweet home?
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Walking through the door, I'm a twelve year old again,
home from school and looking forward to zoning out with
petticoat junction. I'm a sixteen year old rushing to the
bathroom to gargle out the smell of cigarettes. I'm a
forty eight year old, a grown ass man with a
grown ass ass. Parenting a newborn leaves a person with
(05:25):
no time for squats. So don't judge Alex so nice
in here plate. I can't believe it. So normally the house,
a modest, semi detached bungalow, has a certain storage unit,
bombshelter vibe, walls of toilet paper, a cold room full
of canned fruit, cocktail needle points of biblical scenes, and torreadors,
(05:50):
all leaned up against the walls for fear of pounding
in a nail and regretting it forever. But today the
place looks positively sparse, So I just don't open.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
A closet or the chore everything I'll tumble on your
head because when you've heard you guys are coming. I
threw everything into the closets and hid them.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
My mother grabs Aggie and heads upstairs for a diaper change.
Emily and I trail behind.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
I want him to be.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Fresh and clean.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Oh you're so sweet, You're so sweet, my angel.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Where the frige is the bag? The friggin bag contains
the friggin diapers that my mother bought for our visit.
It turns out it's on her lap.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
I kept a bill because I wasn't sure if you
want me to return them or not.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Would you be able to return to use diapers? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
You know me. I could return anything. I could return anything.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
You know that, Johnny, I do know that returning stuff
is what my mother lives for. She sees it as
a staring contest, a game of chess, but with yelling.
I remember once going along with her as she returned
a shirt she'd bought for my father two years earlier.
(07:07):
It's missing a sleeve, she told the cashier, holding up
the article of clothing. The cashier turned it around and around.
It's not supposed to have sleeves. The cashier finally said,
it's a poncho. A poncho, my mother repeated, as though
it were a foreign word, which, in her defense, I
(07:28):
suppose it sort of is. I don't care what it is.
It's factory defective and my husband can't wear it. Whenever
she'd get this way, I'd adopt a stance meant to
convey filial loyalty, peppered with a touch of what Vietnam
Vets call the thousand yard stare. I've stood next to
(07:52):
my mother through countless exchanges, arguments, spectacles, and stinks. But
this is the first time I've stood by her side
as she diapers my son.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Oh look how much peepee he has? Oh, you made
a lot of pepi baby. See that's how I knew
you were sick. When you were a baby, Johnny, you
weren't peeping.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
What was wrong with me? As a kid, it was
easy to be embarrassed by my mother. One time, a
popular boy named Jeordie showed up at our house. I
wasn't home, but my mother answered the door with her
hair on fire. My hair's on fire, she screamed. The
next day in school, Jeordie showed the whole class how
(08:35):
she screamed it. He wiggled his fingers in the air,
looking as though he was about to fall to his knees.
That night, I asked my mother what had happened. It
was the barbecue, She said, your father wasn't home, and
I was so in the mood for barbecued lamb chops.
It seems that while examining the chops for signs of spoilage,
(08:57):
she leaned her hair sprayed boufont too close to the grill.
While this explained the fire atop her head, it did
not explain why she answered the door while nursing a
fire atop her head. Growing up, this kind of stuff
happened all the time, so I was always on high
alert for humiliating emergencies. Being back home again, I feel
(09:18):
the old muscle memory kick back in. What that smells?
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Something's burning?
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Did you turn on the heater? Did you touch the heat? Though,
it turns out that one of the rag dolls my
mother had been hoarding somehow landed onto one of the
old lamps she'd been hoarding and had begun to burn.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I could have had a fire because I was so
careless for a shim.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
The day plays out as a series of minor disasters averted.
In the morning, my mother loses her cell phone. We
find it in the night table. In the afternoon, a
screw to my father's glasses falls out. We replace it
with a twist tie. At dinner, a waiter charges my
mother for or potato. She claims she didn't order, but
(10:02):
after ten minutes of Camp David's style negotiations, it's dropped
from the bill. Before bed, my father can't find his passport.
Why do you need a passport? I ask? You always
need a passport, he says. We find it in the
night table. In the past, having someone witness all of
(10:22):
this would have made me feel anxious, But now having
Emily here makes me feel like I have an ally.
Turning to her in the midst of some crisis is
like looking directly into the TV camera and winking at
the audience.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Doggy Day two.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
After we put Oggie to sleep, Emily and I lie
in bed. I ask for her thoughts and reflections on
the trip so far. Oh, come on, come on, no comment?
How could she resist? Look at how my mother acts
with Aggie, I say, trying to get Emily going, I
(11:11):
saw her put a pocket mirror under his nose while
he was sleeping to see if he was still breathing.
After every spoonful she feeds him, she asks, if he's choking.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
You realize, though, that you say all that about Aggie
now too, like just a tiny little cough, and you
are doing it.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Is he breathing?
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Can he sit like that? Can he touch that thing?
Can he eat that? Can he do that? Is he
supposed to be doing that?
Speaker 1 (11:35):
What's wrong?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
What's wrong?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
What's wrong? What's he doing? What's he doing? Is he choking?
What's wrong?
Speaker 4 (11:40):
You do a lot of that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I can see to Emily that maybe I do just
a little of that kind of thing. But I wasn't
even in the parking lot of the ballpark of aDNA Goldstein.
Speaker 4 (11:55):
You one day you dropped, you dropped Aggie off, and
you called me right afterward because you were so worried.
Do you remember this?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
I do remember this. It was Aggie's first week of daycare.
He shares a babysitter with two little sisters, But on
that particular morning, when the babysitter opened the door, she
was alone. She told me the girls were napping in
another room.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
You called me and said she was there alone. She
said they were in bed. I don't know. Maybe she
killed the whole family, and now she's going to kill Oggi.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And you weren't joking.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
Like you knew it was a crazy thought, but you
needed me to tell you she didn't kill their family.
She's not going to kill Aggie.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
I did not need you to tell me that.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
And you're misremembering you were freaked out.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
You were freaked out. I thought I was very stoic.
You called me and.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Said, I think the nanny is gonna murder our child,
and that she murdered the whole family.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
That we do daycare with. I don't consider that stoic.
Speaker 5 (13:05):
All right.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
I mean, I'm just imaginative. That's one way to look
at it. Yet another way to look at it is
that I'm also crazy, just like my mom. Well, set
my hair on fire and open the front door. In
(13:27):
the days after Ougi was born, I couldn't stop thinking
terrible thoughts. Things I couldn't speak, not even to Emily.
With this new overwhelming love for my son came new
overwhelming fears for his safety, his heartbreaks to come, for
his old age, his loneliness, so I started seeing a therapist.
(13:48):
I explained how worry was the lingua franca of my childhood.
I wasn't allowed a paper route because it was a
good way to get abducted, no barefoot in because of
rusty nails. And I didn't even learn to swim until
junior high because water that's where people go to drown.
Worry and fear were how my mother communicated love. I
(14:10):
said to my therapist with a shrug, But love is love.
The important thing is that we feel it. But my
therapist's response troubled me. She said that love was the
transcendence of fear, that you might even say fear was
the opposite of love. Sitting at my childhood desk with
Aggie's toys scattered at my feet, my therapist's words returned
(14:33):
to me. If I was becoming my mother, would AGGI
someday become me? Someone weighed down by fear? And worry?
Was our genetic line nothing more than an inglorious chain
of Russian dolls? Should my therapist save the notes from
our sessions so I can send Aggie to her at
a discounted rate. I didn't want my son becoming me,
(14:55):
and there were only two people who could help me
understand how I became me, wh who charged New York
therapy rates that might leave me bankrupted before I'm cured?
And the other my mother day three. As a child,
I felt trapped and embarrassed by my mother. As an adult,
(15:17):
I came to be amused by her. It's only as
a freshly minted father visiting home for the first time
that I'm beginning to see that I am her.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
How much you pay for apples seventy but I'm desperate?
Speaker 1 (15:33):
This is what we normally talk about. Where to get
the best price on paper plates? Where to get the
best price on honeydew melon?
Speaker 5 (15:40):
Dina?
Speaker 3 (15:40):
What do you pay for a bottle of water.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Twenty four for a dollar eighty eight?
Speaker 5 (15:46):
Bottle water.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Cox twenty four for six forty nine?
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Will you pay for a loaf of bread? But after dinner,
after Aggie's gone to sleep, my mom and I sit
down at the kitchen table to have a different converse station.
Emily is reading in bed, and my father's watching TV
in the basement. It's just us. Hello, Hello, go ahead
and talk here. I am Why do you say here?
Speaker 5 (16:13):
I am?
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Well?
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Where should I say there?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I am?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Tonight? I want to talk about the fear, that thing
my family lives inside, like a snowsuit with a broken
zipper that can no more be removed than our own flesh.
I want to talk about the nameless thing that binds
all Goldstein's, that ignites us, propels us, and ultimately paralyzes us. Well,
I think about this stuff now, because you know, I
(16:39):
have I have a I have a son, and I think,
but I think he's so beautiful.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
And I saw those blue eyes like no horas Bay's eggs.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
My mother's not talking crazy talk, she's talking Yiddish.
Speaker 5 (16:56):
So Bay's eggs.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah, what does that mean?
Speaker 5 (17:00):
Bad O?
Speaker 1 (17:00):
I shouldn't hurt them. The bad eye, the evil eye,
the belief that merely saying something positive is enough to
invite evil forces to snuff the good thing out. So
even bringing up a normal son to mom question about
good parenting is enough to attract the eye. On the
day of my bar Mitzvah, my mother carefully sewed a
(17:23):
red ribbon into my underwear. In this way, she reasoned,
should the evil eye turn its gaze upon me, I'd
be protected by my underwear. Why do you think you
do that evil eyed stuff? It's what you say, it's cuckoo.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
I know it's cuckoo, but I can't help it.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
But then that's just a superstition. I don't know everybody
does it. I've never met anybody who puts red ribbons
in their own I'm saying I personally have never met
anyone who does that. So I can't say everybody puts
red ribbons in their underwear. But what what is it
supposed to be? Warding off? But what is the evil eye?
(18:06):
I don't know. This is how conversations with Dina often go.
The derail hit dead ends. So when I ask her
why was our home the way it was? I expect
more of the same, But instead my mother grows quiet.
(18:31):
I worry, Yeah, I do too.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
I'm afraid of this, afraid of that. Well, I was irrational.
I wasn't thinking right, and I have a chance to
redo my a little bit.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Not with you, but with Augie. She stops talking and
stares into her lap for a while. We just sit there.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
I look upon this as a second chance. I want
to correct my mistakes, Johnny, I want to redeem myself.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
That's it. My mother doesn't usually talk this way if
something's causing her grief. She returns it to the store,
sends it back to the kitchen, and so talk of
second chances and redemption. The words sound weird coming out
of her mouth, and I don't know how to respond.
Where's all this coming from? I ask? Are you thinking
(19:28):
of something specific? It's too painful. I don't want Maybe
if you talk about it, you won't talk about it.
I don't think it could be anything. Then I can't.
I can't talk about it. Don't press me, please well,
I don't want to force you. I don't want to
make you feel bad. I am ashamed of myself. Let's
(19:50):
change the subject, and with that the conversation ends. I'd
gotten to my mother for answers about my childhood, but
instead she has left me with questions I didn't even
know I had. What had happened that was so bad?
She couldn't even talk about it? What was she so
afraid to tell me? After the break, I find out, Hello, Hello,
(20:20):
So mom's upstairs with Emily. Do you have any insight?
Day four? I sit down with my father to see
if he has any idea what the second chance is
that my mother's talking about. He's hesitant to talk because
that goes against his strategy of staying out of the drama.
In fact, most of my childhood memories of him are
(20:41):
of a man in bed napping with a large volume
of World War II history splayed open on his chest.
This retiring nature might be the secret to having stayed
married to my mother for more than fifty years. What
is the thing that she is carrying around with her?
Speaker 3 (20:57):
She's a very private person and she feels she doesn't
want to be intruded upon. Don't take it the wrong way, so.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
You have no inkling. You don't know what's going on.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Doesn't even discussed with me. I don't know what guilt,
I don't know what she's talking.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Don't find it odd or intriguing in a way.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
It's a touchy subject for her, and she's very reluctant
to talk about it.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Talk about it. What's the it?
Speaker 3 (21:21):
I don't know. You have to ask her, and she's
going to shut down. She's going to shut down.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
This means she'll try to change the subject or start
to yell. But today I don't care. I just want
to know what the big secret is. I wonder what
it is? I say to Emily, who knows? She says
while brushing her hair. So many things about your mom
are a mystery to me, like why is the kitchen
faucet always running full blast? And why does she keep
(21:50):
offering me paper towels. I think she says, you should
just let it go, but of course I can't. What
had my mother done that she wanted a second chance at?
Was it for the time she bought me a shirt
for my birthday that she later admitted was actually a dress?
(22:11):
Did you want to redo the time she dropped me
off at a birthday party and hollered out the car window.
Have fun? But if you get diarrhea and someone's on
the toilet, just making the bathtub diarrhea is not a
time for pride. Of course I now see the wisdom,
but as a child, her words were a source of shame.
(22:33):
I need to know. So I invite my mother out
for a Sunday stroll with Oggie and me. Maybe if
she can just relax, it'll come out like diarrhea.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
We'll talk.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
What should I say?
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Learn to take your robble?
Speaker 5 (22:50):
So tell me?
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So, do you find walking with Hoggie relaxing?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Very relaxing? So nice? It's a pleasure, my little friend.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
To start things off. I lobber an easy question, cocktail
party stuff. What's your first memory?
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Kindergarten? And we lived on Colonial four h three nine Colonial,
And I remember my father used to play peinockle and
he had a thumb that was the nail like the
thumbnail was very cut off, and all of a sudden
I thought of it, and I started screaming and crying
and carrying on. I'm worrying. Oh, I remember, how old
(23:38):
are you must have been four or five.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
So an early memory is being at kindergarten and remembering
your father's thumbnail and starting to cry. What was it
that upset you about it?
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I read about it because it wasn't like a regular thumb.
I was worried crazy.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I tried a guide her towards happy red inniscences, but
all her memories are awful. Rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, her
mother slapping her in Woolworth's for whining about a balloon
she wanted, waking up in the middle of the night
to find a wall in the kitchen covered in moths.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Then I remember my mother's pressure cooker in that house
hits the ceiling and pea soup was splattered everywhere, all
your memories.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Let's hear another memory. With the small talk exhausted, I
trepidaciously bring the subject back around to the do over.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
I don't know, Johnny. I don't want to talk about it.
I don't want to remind myself the way I felt.
Doesn't conjure up good memories. Please, and that's the.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
End of it.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I don't want to go into details.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Nonetheless, for the rest of the day, I can't stop
myself from asking for details, I asked, as she puts
away the breakfast dishes.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
I have nothing more to say, Johnny.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Leave me be, I ask, as she cuts coupons while
watching Judge Judy with Emily in broad strokes.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Alone, Please Emily take him off me?
Speaker 1 (25:17):
And while she peels boiled eggs for lunch, Leave me alone.
Later we all sit down for dinner and with it
some wine.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
What's wrong with me?
Speaker 1 (25:27):
I think I'm off my rock. My mother rarely drinks wine.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Oh my god, how did I get like this?
Speaker 5 (25:36):
Mom?
Speaker 1 (25:36):
You just had a glass of wine. As she drifts
off into an inebriated slumber, I give it one last try,
can I Is there anything you need to tell me? No,
any secrets to reveal No, I was getting nowhere day five?
(26:03):
All right, you want to change him? What? It's our
last day, and I've decided to give it a rest.
I stop asking weird questions and we all just hang out.
We talk about the price of things, We yell from
room to room, We search for lost cell phones, and
grow pleasantly bored with each other's company. Overall, it's pretty nice. Well,
(26:28):
while putting Aggie down for a nap, my mother has
a question for me, Sonny, what was it.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
That you were hoping to get from me? Oh?
Speaker 1 (26:38):
I really did just want to be able to have
a conversation, that's all I'm not. I don't want to.
I don't want to cause your distress.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
You're not causing distress.
Speaker 5 (26:46):
It's it's what it was.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
And I don't even want to talk about old, painful stuff.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Who was sweet?
Speaker 3 (27:03):
What?
Speaker 1 (27:05):
She lays Aggie down, She stands over the crib. She
starts to say something, but then trails away. What are
we saying? All right, I'm gonna turn it off. Then
I was not adopted. I had no secret twin, and
(27:26):
my mother had no secret family. There were no murders,
no affairs. It turns out that my mother's big secret.
The thing that was so hard for her to say
was that she was sorry for a lot of things,
some small, some not so small. Some I remember, some
I don't, calling me names, screaming at me a lot.
(27:48):
How she could have been nicer to my girlfriends, How
she used to pull my hair, hit me. Hitting kids
was like the hula hoop. Back then, I say, a fad.
Everyone did it. It wasn't right, she says. Back then
people didn't know better. I say, I should have known better.
She says, I forgive you. I say, I don't forgive myself.
(28:12):
So I forgive her again, and I mean it, And
then I turned the recorder back on.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
I love you, honey. You made it a little easier
for me.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Thank you. I love you too much. When you become
a parent, your whole life changes, but you forget that
some things stay the same. I'd been so focused on
becoming a better father that I forgot I was still
(28:50):
a son. And maybe learning to be a better son
is how you become a better dad. Anyway I want
him to be. On the last morning of our visit,
my mother and I head to the park. As a kid,
the park was someplace I usually went with my grandfather
or father. One of the only times I remember going
(29:12):
with my mother, two collies appeared out of nowhere and
began chasing us. I remember we separated and the dogs
chased her while I hid behind a tree. I look
around the playground from my own childhood with her. I
knew most things were out sandbox because someone could have
peed in there. Same for the swings, monkey bars, teeter totters,
(29:33):
and merry go rounds. But then something surprising happens. Picking
Aggie up out of the stroller, my.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Mother says, I'll take him down the slide.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
He's never he's never gone down the side.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Come with Bobby Henney. We'll go down the slide together.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Okay, you're gonna go with him down the side. Well,
what do you think I'll put himself? I didn't. You're
not afraid to go down the slide.
Speaker 5 (29:54):
Why would I be afraid?
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I don't know. Okay, be careful, yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
On my nervis, I wasn't afraid.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Be careful. I don't know. My mother hands me back
Aggie and holding onto the railing, she carefully climbs the
steps to the top of the slide. When she gets there,
I climb up too, and hand Aggie back to her
with hesitation. She positions them onto her lap and I
(30:23):
run around to the bottom of the slide to await
their arrival.
Speaker 5 (30:26):
And you stand there and catch us in chase bad for.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Me, And then Dina lets go.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
You're gonna go down.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Whoo whoo. He's having fun. Huh, so much fun in fact,
that my mother decides to do it again. And so
again she climbs up the steps, all three of them,
to the top of the ladder, and from the grand
(30:56):
height of three and a half feet, my mother and
son descend the toddler slide once more, sliding sliding down
the snide. Oggie loves it, so they do it again
a third chance, a fourth, and even a fifth. Then
(31:19):
we move on to the bouncy caterpillar, the rope bridge,
and the swings.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Swim swingy Oggy's going swingy, the itsy bitsy spider win
up the water.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Parenthood is like a redo of your own childhood, and
grandparenthood is like a redo of that. That's all life is,
learning and relearning the same lessons over and over all
of us, like those itsy bitsy spiders crawling up endless
water spouts, trying to make just a little more progress
each time we set out. There's comfort in knowing that
(32:00):
no one ever gets it right, no matter how many
chances we get. But hopefully at least a few things
go right, a few purely kind gestures somehow get through,
And for everything else we ask for forgiveness, And if
we're lucky, we'll receive it, and if we're luckier, we'll
(32:20):
forgive ourselves too.
Speaker 5 (32:27):
Horrors.
Speaker 3 (33:17):
Now that the vernitures returning to its.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is scheming
with the damaged.
Speaker 3 (33:31):
Pole, take this moment to dissolved, if we meant it,
if we tried, but felt.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Around for far too empty from things that accidentally talk.
Eavyweight is hosted and produced by me Jonathan Goldstein along
with Khalila Holt. The senior producer is Caitlin Roberts, editing
by Jorge just Alex Bloomberg and Wendy Tour Special thanks
(34:04):
to Emily Condon, Emmanuel Berry, Pat Walters, and Jackie Cohen.
The show is mixed by Kate Bolinski, music by Christine
Fellows and John K. Sampson. Additional music credits for this
episode can be found on our website Gimbletmedia dot com
slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans
courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by
(34:25):
Hailey Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight. This is
our last episode of the season, but we're already looking
for stories for season three, so if you have one,
email us at Heavyweight at gimletmedia dot com. And if
you see fit phunch in some stars for us on iTunes.
Thanks for listening. Oh oh sign
Speaker 5 (35:04):
M
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