September 26, 2025 • 37 mins
As a podcast host, I'm often asked, "What's your favorite podcast?" and my answer is always the same: Heavyweight. So you can imagine my excitement when my favorite podcast joined the Pushkin slate! Hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, Heavyweight creates space for difficult conversations and resolving long-standing regrets and unanswered questions. Balancing humor and empathy, Jonathan helps his subjects pinpoint the moment things went wrong and joins them on a quest to make them right. This episode features Gregor, whose parents are pushing 90. Gregor wants to move them out of their big Victorian home—but they refuse. So, he's come up with a bold plan to get them out. It’s a touching story about learning to let go and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you do, find more episodes of Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, it's doctor Laurie Santos Here. As a podcast host,
I'm often asked what's your favorite podcast, and my answer
is always the same. My favorite podcast is Heavyweight. Heavyweight's
a show about creating space for difficult conversations and resolving
long standing regrets with humor and empathy. Each week, host
(00:37):
Jonathan Goldstein sits down with people to revisit a defining regret,
or a lost connection, or an unsolved mystery from their life.
Jonathan tries to help his guests make it right, often
with a fair bit of comedy mixed in. Heavyweight is
pretty much the best podcast ever, so you could imagine
how excited I was when my favorite podcast join the
slate here at Pushkin. And today I'm extra excited since
(01:01):
Heavyweight is finally launching their new season and that means
I get to share one of Heavyweight's new episodes with you.
In this episode of Heavyweight, you'll hear from Gregor. Gregor's
parents are pushing ninety and Gregor wants to move them
out of their big Victorian home, but his parents refuse,
so Gregor has come up with a bold plan to
get them out. As I'm sure you'll soon.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
See.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is a really touching story about learning to let go.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Here's Heavyweight.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Hello, I'd like to welcome to the show, Jackie Cove. Jackie.
It's a new season. I'm with a new company, Pushkin Industries,
and I thought it might be nice for you to,
you know, tell everyone how much the show is meant
to you.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Do you, seeple, look at our faces right.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Now we're on the telephone.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Could imagine what kind of look I have on my
face right now?
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Ecstasy discussed. Heavyweight is back, Mamla. They thought we were
down for the count and now but what's this? Oh
oh with a right now left? Heavyweight back pushing it
with Bushkin, Mamala, Bushkin Industries. Okay, you go with that.
Bye bye from Pushkin Industries. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this
(02:26):
is Heavyweight Today's episode. EDA right after the break.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
All right, you're ready, you're rolling, You got levels meme
mamomu okay go.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
This is Gregor. You might know him from such previous
episodes as Gregor. Gregor is one of my oldest friends,
and today he's coming to me with a problem.
Speaker 5 (03:06):
I'll take it from the top. Okay, so I have
two parrots, Milton and Etta.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Edta and Milton are both pushing ninety and Gregor's problem
is that they refuse to move out of their house.
It's the same three story Victorian Gregor grew up in.
He was twelve when the family first moved in. He
still remembers the excitement as they unloaded boxes from the
moving truck or moving trucks.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
You know, normal people move with like a big giant
eighteen wheeler moving truck. I believe we moved. We had
six moving.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Trucks, one for the family's belongings, the other five for
the collections. Some people collect coins, some people collect comic books.
Gregor's mother, Eta, collects collections.
Speaker 5 (03:55):
She has like maybe two hundred egg beaters, antique egg beaters.
She has you know what a bisk nodder is.
Speaker 6 (04:04):
No.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
In occupied Japan, people bought these little figurines where the
ed would wobble back and forth.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
It's like a bobble headed doll something like that.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
Anyway, she probably has two thousand discounters.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Then there are the nineteenth century weaving looms, the handmade baskets,
the medieval scythes. Eta Airlik is an artist and her
collections are the source of her inspiration. Edis's beauty in everything,
and in her hands everything becomes art. She'll sculpt lint
from the dryer. She'll put googly eyes on a splatter
of dried bird poop.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
My mother has been unbelievably prolific in making art for
like the last thirty five years, to a degree where
now the living room is like full to the brim
with a million pieces of art, and every week she
probably makes five or ten more pieces of art.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
None of this would be a problem except that a large,
cluttered house is becoming increasingly dangerous for Gregor's elderly parents.
Speaker 5 (05:00):
I fear the more conventional fears. I fear my mother
falling down a flight of stairs, or my father. I mean,
there's all kinds of dark things that can happen in
a house full of staircases.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
And so Gregor wants to move his parents into a
smaller apartment, something more manageable. That's his plan.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, that's his plan. But that's not my plan.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
This is eta The.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Practical thing is, we can't be in the house too
much longer. I'm eighty eight.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, but to move out of the house.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Isn't simply a question of selling the furniture. It's my god,
what do we do with all this?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
All this, all the collections is what's keeping Eta in
the house. And of all her many collections, of all
her milking stools and antique rolling pins, it's her collection
of fragile, colorful bottles that is perhaps the biggest impediment
to moving. By Gregor's estimate, Eta has thousands wine bottles,
perfume bottles, all decanters, bottles washed up from the bottom
(06:03):
of the ocean. As well as being an artist, Eta
is a Buddhist. Bottles are not just bottles but a
series of meditations. Because on each of the bottles, in
fancy fonds and careful calligraphy, Eta places a message in
the form of a zen like.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Riddle, I turn my noose to Titropus and madly dance
upon it.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
Isn't it gorgeous?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
That's very nice?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
But how's about this one? It's a black popple with
gold calligraphy, and it has the first letter shows a breath,
somebody blowing a breath.
Speaker 7 (06:40):
Do you see it?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
It really does look like a breath is blowing. That's
by design. There you go, there you go.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
You want me to give that away for nothing?
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Other inscriptions are stop schlepping your old being into the future,
or we cling to illusions of control. After hearing a few,
I start to recognize a theme. All the bottles bear
messages imploring one to let go. Yet Eta is incapable
of le and go of the very bottles doing the
(07:11):
imploring or much of anything else. There is a little
bit of a paradox, or there's something to kind of
be struggling with you.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
You're very, very sharp. That is exactly exactly true. These
works would talk about being stuck with the grasping level
I suffer from that.
Speaker 7 (07:35):
I could leave tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
This is Gregor's dad, Milt. If the taxi pulled up
right now, you would you would jump in.
Speaker 7 (07:43):
I'm ready to go.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, I'll stop you there.
Speaker 6 (07:45):
He's never taken a tax in his life. But if
I pulled up that.
Speaker 7 (07:50):
Uber duber so I don't get attached to furniture and
bottles of stuff.
Speaker 6 (07:57):
I'll just reinforce that point that while my father may
positive that he's a Taoist and not attached to anything,
he is very much complicite, relentlessly bringing home the raw
material to which my mother, you know, turn the art out.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
When was the last time he brought something home, Milt yesterday.
Speaker 7 (08:16):
I'm always interested in what she's doing, and I often
find the raw materials walking around in the woods or anywhere,
fine stuff. Her only requirement is if I find something,
it has to have what she calls a charm.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
As for Melt, what he's charmed by, exceedingly charmed by,
is that a Milt is a poet, and after over
sixty years of marriage, he still writes poems about her,
rhapsodizing about the way she creates art or cooks, or
the way she dances. Milt says he can watch Eda
dance all night. He just doesn't understand her being so
(08:52):
chained to her belongings.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I'm stuck, but I am not coming up with the
solution that's any better, am I?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Except dying, And that's not a solution. No, it's not
a solution. For greg He's left holding the whole thing
of Milton.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
At as three kids, Gregor is perhaps the one most
ready to serve the child his parents handed to do list.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
When he comes to visit, I mean, he talks me,
and that's because he has meanness in him. I'm not
saying he doesn't, but he's also a very kind, giving, generous,
loving person.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yes he is.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, don't tell him, I said so.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
In Action is a choice not doing anything something's bound
to happen sooner or later, and just sort of watch
the secondhand sweep around the clock face until somebody's dead
is the most passive and weakest possible way to exist.
And it just feels like, you know, the Damoclean Sword
of mortality is coming, and all we're going to do
(10:05):
is sit here and watch Rachel Maddow until it cuts
our head off.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
And so, because Eda can't let go, Gregor wants my
help in pulling off a most extravagant workaround, one that
will allow Edda to both keep her stuff and still
move out. The plan of action that Gregor wants to
present to.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
Her, what if you don't get rid of your possessions
and we make a museum of your stuff.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Gregor explains to me the details. It seems that in
the nineteen sixties, Edda and Milt bought a two hundred
year old farmhouse with no running water or indoor plumbing.
Gregor's plan is to convert the barn into the eta
b airlike museum. Convincing one's mother to downsize by way
of a feral farmhouse museum that, by Gregor's own admission,
(10:56):
is probably a breeding ground for the haunt of virus.
Has all the makings of a classic Kakammi scheme. But
this is just the beginning for his plan to build
(11:23):
a museum. To work, Gregor will need his siblings on board,
so as his emotional envoy, I begin by phoning his
sister Lexi. Lexi is the level headed one of the three,
and I want to get her read on the plan.
I mean, is it realistic that he'll be able to
turn the barn into a museum like that? Perhaps this
(11:50):
plan is a bit half baked, but I figure I
might have more luck getting Gregor's brother Dmitri on board.
Dmitri has never been afraid of a scheme that runs
a little pink on the inside, So I give him
a call. We haven't spoken since I moved from New York,
where Dmitri lives, to Minnesota.
Speaker 4 (12:09):
I hate to see a Minneapolis area code when you call.
It makes me.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Sad your business doesn't bring you to Minnesota. I'm guessing
it does.
Speaker 7 (12:18):
Sometimes.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
I interviewed Prince for a cover story I earned one.
Maybe very trouble with Prince.
Speaker 7 (12:23):
He's very touching.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Dmitri is a personal trainer who's kickboxed his way across Thailand.
He's also a journalist who interviews celebrities.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
So I went there, waited all day for the interview.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
And a musician who had a song go platinum six
times in Belgium, and.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
He was like, hey, you want to jam and I
was like okay. So I wound up actually jamming with
Larry Graham and Prince for like twenty minutes. What that
was one sense.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Before Dmitri you can launch into his next sentence, I
jump in. So your brother Gregor.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
I'm familiar with him.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
He has his plan, which maybe you're also familiar with.
When I'm finished rehashing Gregor's museum plan, Dmitri offers a
laundry list of issues.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Sonos of getting lemezy is walking out of your part
of the barn because it's high grassed, a lot of
deer getting poison ivy. So there's also like a horrible
black mold because, as you know, the farmhouse burned down
when my albino baker friend Theo, stayed there and lit
a fire in the roof and the whole house burned
down in the way.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
And along with his friend Theo's trouble, there was also
his friend Sonem's trouble in that cursed place.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
My friend who spent twenty five years as a Buddhist
monk under the Dollar lum I had to use a
broom to fight off a very large raccoon that was
in the house and was like growling at it and like.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
A horrifying But for Dimitri, even more daunting than the
rabid raccoons is changing his mother's mind on the matter.
Whenever he's trying to clear space in his parents' home,
it refills overnight, suggesting edis problem can't be solved by
physical means. Instead, he thinks the problem has to be
attacked at its psychological root. She needs to learn how
(14:03):
to let go, and for this, Dmitri has just the solution.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Well, maybe Hie hypnosis. It stopped her from smoking, which
is probably a more powerful psychological and physical addiction than
collecting things.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yet it was a packaday smoker, a habit she hung
on to for nearly thirty years.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Our friend, who was a hypnotist said, I can hypnotize you,
and she went into the session thinking this isn't going
to work. The whole time the hypnosis was going on,
she was like, this isn't working, this isn't working. And
then she walked out and never smoked again. He was
an interesting person too. His name was Saul Feldstein. He
actually had one of his eyeballs was like hanging out
of his face and like it was like a sort
of early commune hippie thing, and like.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Having grown up on TV sitcoms of the nineteen seventies,
I'm well aware of the power of hypnosis.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
Hanging out of his face.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Hypnosis gave Fred Flintstone the self control to stop beating
Brontosaurus Berger Communi. It gave the funds the confidence that
jumped Snake Canyon on his motorcycle his eyeballs. As a boy,
I always wondered what it would feel like to have
my full potential unlocked through the hypnotic arts.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
And he was very successful as a hypnotist.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Unlike building a museum, hypnosis requires neither time effort, nor
those awful stanchions that snap back with that loud thwacking
sound that make everyone turn around and stare at you,
fully convinced that Saul Feldstein is the solution to all
of our problems and that museums belong in a museum.
(15:37):
Dimitri and I say our goodbyes.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
We're slating in. On part two, Johnny discusses post talking
to Dmitri. Here we go.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
I need to tell Gregor that I like Dmitri's idea
much better than his. But I need to tread lightly
from Cain and Abel to Stephen and Alec Baldwin. I
know how competitive brothers can be, and unlike the Lord
or Alexander Ray Baldwin Senior, I don't want to be
seen playing favorites. Do you think you're like hypnotism has
(16:16):
a role in this.
Speaker 5 (16:17):
Well, I hear that, like your voice went up in
octave when we started talking about hypnotism and you got
excited about hypnotism.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Well, Dimitri seemed to think that it would that it
could help. Okay, so the two of you should go
see a movie together. Going to movies is Gregor and
my thing. Clearly I'm arousing some jealousy. I need to
keep my arguments away from Dimitri and grounded in the
merits of hypnotism, this whole barn thing as the symptom,
(16:44):
but through hypnosis.
Speaker 5 (16:45):
Why are you saying it with like the weird accent
on the word hypnosis?
Speaker 3 (16:49):
I mean, do you think that hypnotism has something to
offer here?
Speaker 5 (16:54):
My short answer would be absolutely not. I think it's
a waste of time. Hypnosis, hypnosis, hypnosis.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Hi, Johnny, how are you.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Hey, Dimitri?
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Hi?
Speaker 3 (17:09):
I've got your brother Gregor on the line with me.
We've met, Hi. How are you? Can you make the
case to your brother?
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (17:18):
I just think that you know there's no harm, there's
certainly no nothing to lose. It takes fifteen or twenty minutes,
and she's proven that she's very susceptible to hypnotic suggestions,
so why not try it?
Speaker 5 (17:28):
I agree with all those points. My main feeling is
that getting someone to stop a behavior like smoking is
much much easier than getting someone to change their personality,
which is harder to hypnotize someone out of.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
That may be true, I wouldn't disagree.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
There, Swept up in a wave of brotherly bonamy, I
decide it's a safe space to cautiously share my one
secret boyhood longing, and along the way I could get
hypnotized that as something too. Yeah, a lot of stuff, Yeah,
and immediately regret it. What do you mean a lot
of stuff?
Speaker 4 (17:59):
I mean that's a smug smile.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
They could work on.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
But we could give you a whole brand new thing
where you're like super charming all the time.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
Being more able to look people in the eye.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
Not always hide behind a microphone.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
Actually, you know there is all joking aside. There is
a new hypnosis that works on what's called voluntary baldness syndrome,
where they realize that a lot of men are sort
of doing it on purpose.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Why would someone do that on purpose?
Speaker 4 (18:21):
Well, is that it turns out that hair loss is
more of like an act of willful insolence often and a.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Cry for pap. I used to love my hair.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
Well, if you loved it so much, why did you
get rid of it?
Speaker 3 (18:31):
First of all, I find the defensive and Gregor trime
in here, because I'm sure you're equally offended.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
Now, Dimitri used to be bald as an egg and
then he willed it back on.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
I think if you did at the same time with
my mother, we can get a two for one deal
package deal.
Speaker 7 (18:46):
I'm just saying it's science. If you read the New
England Journal.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Inments with Gregor and Dimitri aligned in friends again at
my expense, I set out in search of the one
eyed hippie hypnotist Saul Feldstein, but it turns out Saul
died in twenty nineteen at the age of ninety two.
So I reach out to other hypnotists. All pretty much
(19:10):
hang up on me once I explained the project. So
hypnotism is out, the museum is out. I'm stuck with
my crap personality, and Edda is stuck with her house
full of crab. And Gregor is still at an impasse.
But things are about to change coming up after the
break at his big night.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
You know what that guy says to me just now,
This guy told me that I was beautiful.
Speaker 5 (19:37):
You are what's going on yet?
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Gregor tells me that Da has been offered a show
at the Carter Burden Gallery in Manhattan. Edda is an
outsider artist, so the offer of her own solo exhibition
feels like finally, at the age of eighty eight, She's
being invited inside the show with a It's formal invitations
and co check feels like validation. It's the kind of
(20:14):
opportunity Edda has always hoped for, and for Gregor, it
feels like an opportunity for her pieces to find good
homes outside her home. The show opens on March twenty first,
twenty nineteen. Gregor and I make a plan to speak
the morning after so we can tell me how it went.
When we speak. What Gregor tells me is that things
(20:35):
that night took a wild turn. Do you want to explain?
Speaker 5 (20:40):
Sure, I flew into town from my mom's art opening. Okay,
we're here at the art opening. It's a pretty good drowd.
Everyone's eating wine and cheese, and but it's so loud
that it was almost like a cartoon version of my
mom's success story. And that like some stranger guy came
up was like, you're a beautiful womanful her ego was
(21:08):
buffed many sides, Everything going great.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Oh. Gregor's dad, Milt, on the other hand, wasn't having
as good a time. He spent most of the evening
in the corner nibbling on crackers. At the end of
the night, Gregor approached him, Well, father.
Speaker 5 (21:25):
What'd you make it up?
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Oh?
Speaker 7 (21:27):
It's very nice, A little bit exhausting.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
He seemed like, even though he sometimes talks in a
quiet voice. He was especially quiet, like I could hardly
hear him.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
On the drive home, Milt conked out. When the family
couldn't rouse him, they realized he wasn't just sleeping, but
completely unconscious. Eda began yelling, wailing Milt's name. He was
driven to the hospital, where the EMTs lifted him onto
a gurney. The doctors thought he might be having a stroke,
but they couldn't say for sure. In the waiting room,
(22:02):
Eda turned to Gregor and said, you might as well
order the dumpsters right now, meaning he in empty out
the house because of Milt. Isn't coming back to it.
That's it. How do you know when the Democlean sword
of mortality isn't just dangling above you, but actually falling?
(22:24):
How do you know when it's time to pick up
the remote, turn off Rachel Maddow and finally act the
night a milestone in Edda's career was meant to symbolize
the turning point, and it was just not the kind
she was hoping for. Milt was eventually sent home from
the hospital, but his clap signaled a change for Gregor too.
(22:46):
For so long he'd been saying maybe it's time, but
maybe it was time to stop saying maybe hello, hem, Hi,
it's Gregor and Jonathan.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Oh and I thought this was a scam call.
Speaker 8 (23:06):
How do you like that?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
How are you well?
Speaker 5 (23:08):
I wouldn't be so sure. It's not.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
We haven't finished the call yet, right, So what's the pitch?
Speaker 5 (23:14):
Johnny wanted to dredge up a bunch of painful family issues.
Speaker 7 (23:18):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Sure, why not? They're painfuler the better.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
I want to talk with Eda about the night of
the art opening and the way it affected our thinking
about remaining in the house.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
I won't be able to stay here alone. Either I
will become ill or Milt will become ill, and I
need somebody to help me. There is a new little
piece in my head that says.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Things are going to change in the aftermath of the
art show opening. As that is new reality sunk in,
another plan began to take shape, one that Eda came
up with. Her idea is to pair each of her
message on the bottles with the right person. In this way,
each one will find the right home.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I now have a whole shelf full of stuff that
I'm now earmarking to give away.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
That's something that you've not normally done.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
No, I only gave very few things away, you know,
to my best friend or to the kids or something
like that. Very few, very very few.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Do you think it's at the beginning of something more
of this to come?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah, yeah, it has to be. It has to be.
I take it very seriously. When I think of giving
a person a bottle, I have to think would it
be good for that person?
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Okay? Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Really?
Speaker 7 (24:40):
All right?
Speaker 3 (24:41):
A few weeks later, I called Gregor to see how
Eda's bottle drive is coming along.
Speaker 5 (24:46):
So she called me this morning saying, I thought of
the perfect person to give the perfect bottle too, but
I'm afraid it's going to hurt his feelings. Okay, she
wants to give you a bottle.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
She wants to give Okay, well that wow, that's really nice.
Why would that hurt my feelings?
Speaker 5 (25:06):
You know, if you give someone a bottle that says
like I wish like I was present, then it's sort
of an implication that you're not present, you know what
I mean? It could be interpreted sometimes as like a
sort of a criticism. So I don't know how you'll
take it.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
Well, did you tell you what my bottle says?
Speaker 5 (25:23):
That's as much as I can say at this point,
it's as much as I'm authorized to say.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
Even though I should know better know how Gregor will
dangle this knowledge over my head like a cat dancer.
My curiosity gets the better of me, and so I
keep asking Gregor what the bottle says, which he uses
as an opportunity to dissect my personality. All I can say,
he says, is that it addresses some of your deep
(25:54):
seated issues.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
Despite all your insights about other people, you sort of
tend to remove yourself from the collective and put yourself
in the position of like journalistic observer.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Uh huh.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
When you have these insights, you know, your dime store insights,
you bolt on at the end of things where you're
maybe we all need someone to run to that hallmarking
nonsense that you didn't this about at the end of
the day.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Jerk, you feel comfortable to saying something like that to
someone telling me.
Speaker 5 (26:19):
About my I knew you were going to take it
the wrong way.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
What's the right way to take that?
Speaker 5 (26:24):
I think sometimes you sort of make yourself resistant, like, oh,
I don't matter, I'm just the fly on the wall
to watching the human condition. As you know, people live
and die and suffer, and babies are born and old
people lower it into the ground. Oh, when the dirt
hits the coffin. That reminds me of my sponsor. I
think you just you use the thing to remove yourself
(26:46):
from what's actually going on. Okay, all right, you're like,
you know what, really make this thing sing? Now, let
me just get a shot of you throwing your art
off the bridge. That's what we need to finish this.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Maybe Gregor thinks I'm being too prying with his mom,
and this is just an expression of his protectiveness, so
I apologize to him and tell him I'll try to
be more respectful. It turns out that Gregor has little
respect for my respect.
Speaker 5 (27:14):
Yeah, hey, lady, I could be more respectful out there.
Won't tell you to throw your stuff in the garbage.
I'll tell you to throw it into recycling bin. Dah Wade,
don't wind up in no landfill, you understand. Very respectful.
We'll even separate out the green bottles from the Clini glass.
(27:39):
Very good, John.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
Why would you even let me speak to your mother?
Speaker 5 (27:43):
I don't know. I mean I thought maybe you could
patch things up.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Over the next couple of years, Eda continues to slowly
search out the right homes for her bottles. Whereas in
the past, Eda was only able to give away a few.
Gregor estimates that she hands out about one hundred. During
this time, Milton is in it out of the hospital
with cardiac issues ranging from fainting spells and high blood
pressure to an actual heart attack. But then in the
(28:17):
summer of twenty twenty two, it's Eta who received some
bad news. Three years after Gregor and I first spoke,
Gregor phones to tell me his mother has been diagnosed
with brain cancer. The doctor found nine metastases in her brain.
They went to three different hospitals in five days, and
the consensus was that it wasn't a matter of months,
(28:39):
but of weeks. In what felt like only days, Eda
went from carrying laundry up the stairs to needing to
be carried up the stairs herself. With Ata's illness, Gregor
decides to move in. The whole family does into the
big packed house they grew up in. A hospital bed
(29:01):
is set up on the main floor in Ata's old office,
and Gregor wakes up at sunrise and sits at at
his bedside in silence. He speaks with her, makes her comfortable.
He tells her it's okay to go, that everything is okay.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
And I stayed there for six weeks, eight weeks and
sort of did the bedside vigil as she slowly died.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
In those final weeks, Gregor saw a change come over Edda.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
In the years running up to her death, she would
say things like, listen, there's a rolled up rug in
the attic that's worth a lot of money. Make sure
that they don't, you know, cheat you out of that one.
That was always kind of a sort of joke, sort
of real thing. But when the actual room of death
(29:55):
and dying was happening, that stuff didn't really come up.
It felt more like she was at peace with a
lot of stuff, and a lot of the stuff. She
told me she would be laying there with her eyes shut.
But and I'm like, you know, mom, what are you
thinking about it? She's just just with her hand. She
would indicate that she's like dancing by just flowing her
(30:17):
hand in the air. It felt like a great death.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
The words on the bottles had finally sunk in. In
the end, Eda could dance out of the world gracefully,
no grasping it's the living who are left to grasp.
Speaker 8 (30:38):
Since my mom died, it feels like it's harder to
throw things out than I thought.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
This is Gregor's sister Lexi. Again, like Eda, Lexi is
an artist, and like Gregor, she's surprised by how, after
all the years trying to get her mom to let
go of her stuff, she herself is finding it so
hard to let go of that very same stuff.
Speaker 8 (31:01):
It just feels really hard to like her art.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
It feels it's like a part of her. Yeah, but
it's her. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (31:12):
I had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day,
who is of course, really you know, grief stricken, and.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
He was saying why do people make art?
Speaker 8 (31:23):
And he thinks the reason people make art is so
that they're not forgotten when they die, like you do
something that remains in the world.
Speaker 5 (31:34):
I think of her a lot.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Do you still carry with you your mother's love? Do
you feel it?
Speaker 5 (31:41):
I carry her with me. I mean in the way
that you know, when I experience something I can't help
but hear my mother's voice making fun of me for
my description of what I'm experiencing. I might be describing something,
(32:03):
telling her about just some Quotadian thing in the day.
You know, this is a nice sunset, but I've a
nice sort of That truck weren't backing up, and I
can hear her being.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Like, why are you so rotten?
Speaker 5 (32:17):
You know what is wrong with you? I mean, that's
that type of thing.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
You can try to move your aging parents out of
their house. You can treat death like a to do
list with items to check off, but ultimately you can't
control how people live or die. Even after Eda's death,
Milt remained in that very same house. It's Dmitri and
his own family that move in so that Milt doesn't
have to be alone. And over the next few years,
(32:52):
Gregor in fits and starts, and with disregard for what
anyone thinks, continues to work on the museum. Only it's
become less about a full fledged museum open to the
public and more of just a place to honor his mom.
And then one day Gregor tech saying he found a
sealed box in the Victorian with my name on it
(33:13):
written in Edda's hand. When the box arrives, I unravel
what seems like yards and yards a bubble wrap. Edta
had taken great care the bottle is a beautiful blue,
the blue of a childhood toy. It's crevaceous and feels
good in my hand upon it, Eda laid out her
(33:33):
words to me.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
I would love to live like a river flows carried
by the surprise of its own unfolding.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
See what I mean, I do? But how dare she?
I'm kidding? Cue the outro music, Cue the dime story
in sight. Whether it's to a museum in the wilds
of upstate New York or to a landfill, none of
us knows where we're flowing. In the face of that,
(34:02):
we need to learn how to let go. My feeling
about what comes after death is constantly changed. I don't
have a spiritual practice, so all I have is a feeling.
And my feeling today is that bodies are vessels, just
like colorful bottles, or vessels just like podcasts and houses
packed with stuff, and all of art is It's all
(34:25):
just stuff, and stuff can be beautiful, but it's there
to help us get closer to the non stuff, Because,
like the words Eta inscribed on one of her final bottles,
all important matters are invisible. Now that the fernures returning
(35:29):
to its goodwill home, Now that the last month's rent
is scheming with.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
The damage to bottom.
Speaker 5 (35:41):
Take this moment to deserve, if we meant it, if
we tied.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
But felt around for four Team from Things That Accidentally Talker.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Phoebe Flanagan and
me Jonathan Goldstein. Our senior producer is Khalila Holt and
our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon.
Special thanks to Steve marsh Amy, Gains McQuaid, and Sarah Nix.
Our production council is Jake Flanagan. Emmamonger mixed the episode
(36:22):
with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson and
Bobby Lord. Additional scoring by Boxwood Orchestra and Blue Dot Sessions.
Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of
Epitaph Records. Follow us on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast, or
email us at Heavyweight at Pushkin dot Fm, and if
(36:42):
you'd like your very own Eta Berlick original her bottles
can be found on her Instagram at Eta Berlick. We'll
be back next week with a new episode. Can you
Believe It? Back in the Saddle? Hiding behind that Mike
Oh yeah, oh yeah, So I wanted to go through
(37:13):
the entire thing just to make sure the fact and
also make sure that that your mother made she put
bird poop with googly eyes? Is that correct?
Speaker 5 (37:21):
She's called it with two g's. Okay, how many times
would you say you were rejected by girls in the do.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
That was an episode from the new season of Heavyweight.
Thanks for listening. You can hear new episodes on Thursdays,
and you can find Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.
Pushkin. Hey, it's doctor Laurie Santos Here. As a podcast host,
I'm often asked what's your favorite podcast, and my answer
is always the same. My favorite podcast is Heavyweight. Heavyweight's
a show about creating space for difficult conversations and resolving
long standing regrets with humor and empathy. Each week, host
(00:37):
Jonathan Goldstein sits down with people to revisit a defining regret,
or a lost connection, or an unsolved mystery from their life.
Jonathan tries to help his guests make it right, often
with a fair bit of comedy mixed in. Heavyweight is
pretty much the best podcast ever, so you could imagine
how excited I was when my favorite podcast join the
slate here at Pushkin. And today I'm extra excited since
(01:01):
Heavyweight is finally launching their new season and that means
I get to share one of Heavyweight's new episodes with you.
In this episode of Heavyweight, you'll hear from Gregor. Gregor's
parents are pushing ninety and Gregor wants to move them
out of their big Victorian home, but his parents refuse,
so Gregor has come up with a bold plan to
get them out. As I'm sure you'll soon.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
See.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
This is a really touching story about learning to let go.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Here's Heavyweight.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Hello, I'd like to welcome to the show, Jackie Cove. Jackie.
It's a new season. I'm with a new company, Pushkin Industries,
and I thought it might be nice for you to,
you know, tell everyone how much the show is meant
to you.
Speaker 4 (01:52):
Do you, seeple, look at our faces right.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Now we're on the telephone.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Could imagine what kind of look I have on my
face right now?
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Ecstasy discussed. Heavyweight is back, Mamla. They thought we were
down for the count and now but what's this? Oh
oh with a right now left? Heavyweight back pushing it
with Bushkin, Mamala, Bushkin Industries. Okay, you go with that.
Bye bye from Pushkin Industries. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this
(02:26):
is Heavyweight Today's episode. EDA right after the break.
Speaker 5 (02:50):
All right, you're ready, you're rolling, You got levels meme
mamomu okay go.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
This is Gregor. You might know him from such previous
episodes as Gregor. Gregor is one of my oldest friends,
and today he's coming to me with a problem.
Speaker 5 (03:06):
I'll take it from the top. Okay, so I have
two parrots, Milton and Etta.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Edta and Milton are both pushing ninety and Gregor's problem
is that they refuse to move out of their house.
It's the same three story Victorian Gregor grew up in.
He was twelve when the family first moved in. He
still remembers the excitement as they unloaded boxes from the
moving truck or moving trucks.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
You know, normal people move with like a big giant
eighteen wheeler moving truck. I believe we moved. We had
six moving.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Trucks, one for the family's belongings, the other five for
the collections. Some people collect coins, some people collect comic books.
Gregor's mother, Eta, collects collections.
Speaker 5 (03:55):
She has like maybe two hundred egg beaters, antique egg beaters.
She has you know what a bisk nodder is.
Speaker 6 (04:04):
No.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
In occupied Japan, people bought these little figurines where the
ed would wobble back and forth.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
It's like a bobble headed doll something like that.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
Anyway, she probably has two thousand discounters.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Then there are the nineteenth century weaving looms, the handmade baskets,
the medieval scythes. Eta Airlik is an artist and her
collections are the source of her inspiration. Edis's beauty in everything,
and in her hands everything becomes art. She'll sculpt lint
from the dryer. She'll put googly eyes on a splatter
of dried bird poop.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
My mother has been unbelievably prolific in making art for
like the last thirty five years, to a degree where
now the living room is like full to the brim
with a million pieces of art, and every week she
probably makes five or ten more pieces of art.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
None of this would be a problem except that a large,
cluttered house is becoming increasingly dangerous for Gregor's elderly parents.
Speaker 5 (05:00):
I fear the more conventional fears. I fear my mother
falling down a flight of stairs, or my father. I mean,
there's all kinds of dark things that can happen in
a house full of staircases.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
And so Gregor wants to move his parents into a
smaller apartment, something more manageable. That's his plan.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, that's his plan. But that's not my plan.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
This is eta The.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Practical thing is, we can't be in the house too
much longer. I'm eighty eight.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, but to move out of the house.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Isn't simply a question of selling the furniture. It's my god,
what do we do with all this?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
All this, all the collections is what's keeping Eta in
the house. And of all her many collections, of all
her milking stools and antique rolling pins, it's her collection
of fragile, colorful bottles that is perhaps the biggest impediment
to moving. By Gregor's estimate, Eta has thousands wine bottles,
perfume bottles, all decanters, bottles washed up from the bottom
(06:03):
of the ocean. As well as being an artist, Eta
is a Buddhist. Bottles are not just bottles but a
series of meditations. Because on each of the bottles, in
fancy fonds and careful calligraphy, Eta places a message in
the form of a zen like.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Riddle, I turn my noose to Titropus and madly dance
upon it.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
Isn't it gorgeous?
Speaker 3 (06:29):
That's very nice?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
But how's about this one? It's a black popple with
gold calligraphy, and it has the first letter shows a breath,
somebody blowing a breath.
Speaker 7 (06:40):
Do you see it?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
It really does look like a breath is blowing. That's
by design. There you go, there you go.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
You want me to give that away for nothing?
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Other inscriptions are stop schlepping your old being into the future,
or we cling to illusions of control. After hearing a few,
I start to recognize a theme. All the bottles bear
messages imploring one to let go. Yet Eta is incapable
of le and go of the very bottles doing the
(07:11):
imploring or much of anything else. There is a little
bit of a paradox, or there's something to kind of
be struggling with you.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
You're very, very sharp. That is exactly exactly true. These
works would talk about being stuck with the grasping level
I suffer from that.
Speaker 7 (07:35):
I could leave tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
This is Gregor's dad, Milt. If the taxi pulled up
right now, you would you would jump in.
Speaker 7 (07:43):
I'm ready to go.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, I'll stop you there.
Speaker 6 (07:45):
He's never taken a tax in his life. But if
I pulled up that.
Speaker 7 (07:50):
Uber duber so I don't get attached to furniture and
bottles of stuff.
Speaker 6 (07:57):
I'll just reinforce that point that while my father may
positive that he's a Taoist and not attached to anything,
he is very much complicite, relentlessly bringing home the raw
material to which my mother, you know, turn the art out.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
When was the last time he brought something home, Milt yesterday.
Speaker 7 (08:16):
I'm always interested in what she's doing, and I often
find the raw materials walking around in the woods or anywhere,
fine stuff. Her only requirement is if I find something,
it has to have what she calls a charm.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
As for Melt, what he's charmed by, exceedingly charmed by,
is that a Milt is a poet, and after over
sixty years of marriage, he still writes poems about her,
rhapsodizing about the way she creates art or cooks, or
the way she dances. Milt says he can watch Eda
dance all night. He just doesn't understand her being so
(08:52):
chained to her belongings.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I'm stuck, but I am not coming up with the
solution that's any better, am I?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Except dying, And that's not a solution. No, it's not
a solution. For greg He's left holding the whole thing
of Milton.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
At as three kids, Gregor is perhaps the one most
ready to serve the child his parents handed to do list.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
When he comes to visit, I mean, he talks me,
and that's because he has meanness in him. I'm not
saying he doesn't, but he's also a very kind, giving, generous,
loving person.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Yes he is.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, don't tell him, I said so.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
In Action is a choice not doing anything something's bound
to happen sooner or later, and just sort of watch
the secondhand sweep around the clock face until somebody's dead
is the most passive and weakest possible way to exist.
And it just feels like, you know, the Damoclean Sword
of mortality is coming, and all we're going to do
(10:05):
is sit here and watch Rachel Maddow until it cuts
our head off.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
And so, because Eda can't let go, Gregor wants my
help in pulling off a most extravagant workaround, one that
will allow Edda to both keep her stuff and still
move out. The plan of action that Gregor wants to
present to.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
Her, what if you don't get rid of your possessions
and we make a museum of your stuff.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Gregor explains to me the details. It seems that in
the nineteen sixties, Edda and Milt bought a two hundred
year old farmhouse with no running water or indoor plumbing.
Gregor's plan is to convert the barn into the eta
b airlike museum. Convincing one's mother to downsize by way
of a feral farmhouse museum that, by Gregor's own admission,
(10:56):
is probably a breeding ground for the haunt of virus.
Has all the makings of a classic Kakammi scheme. But
this is just the beginning for his plan to build
(11:23):
a museum. To work, Gregor will need his siblings on board,
so as his emotional envoy, I begin by phoning his
sister Lexi. Lexi is the level headed one of the three,
and I want to get her read on the plan.
I mean, is it realistic that he'll be able to
turn the barn into a museum like that? Perhaps this
(11:50):
plan is a bit half baked, but I figure I
might have more luck getting Gregor's brother Dmitri on board.
Dmitri has never been afraid of a scheme that runs
a little pink on the inside, So I give him
a call. We haven't spoken since I moved from New York,
where Dmitri lives, to Minnesota.
Speaker 4 (12:09):
I hate to see a Minneapolis area code when you call.
It makes me.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Sad your business doesn't bring you to Minnesota. I'm guessing
it does.
Speaker 7 (12:18):
Sometimes.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
I interviewed Prince for a cover story I earned one.
Maybe very trouble with Prince.
Speaker 7 (12:23):
He's very touching.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Dmitri is a personal trainer who's kickboxed his way across Thailand.
He's also a journalist who interviews celebrities.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
So I went there, waited all day for the interview.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
And a musician who had a song go platinum six
times in Belgium, and.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
He was like, hey, you want to jam and I
was like okay. So I wound up actually jamming with
Larry Graham and Prince for like twenty minutes. What that
was one sense.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Before Dmitri you can launch into his next sentence, I
jump in. So your brother Gregor.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
I'm familiar with him.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
He has his plan, which maybe you're also familiar with.
When I'm finished rehashing Gregor's museum plan, Dmitri offers a
laundry list of issues.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Sonos of getting lemezy is walking out of your part
of the barn because it's high grassed, a lot of
deer getting poison ivy. So there's also like a horrible
black mold because, as you know, the farmhouse burned down
when my albino baker friend Theo, stayed there and lit
a fire in the roof and the whole house burned
down in the way.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
And along with his friend Theo's trouble, there was also
his friend Sonem's trouble in that cursed place.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
My friend who spent twenty five years as a Buddhist
monk under the Dollar lum I had to use a
broom to fight off a very large raccoon that was
in the house and was like growling at it and like.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
A horrifying But for Dimitri, even more daunting than the
rabid raccoons is changing his mother's mind on the matter.
Whenever he's trying to clear space in his parents' home,
it refills overnight, suggesting edis problem can't be solved by
physical means. Instead, he thinks the problem has to be
attacked at its psychological root. She needs to learn how
(14:03):
to let go, and for this, Dmitri has just the solution.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Well, maybe Hie hypnosis. It stopped her from smoking, which
is probably a more powerful psychological and physical addiction than
collecting things.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yet it was a packaday smoker, a habit she hung
on to for nearly thirty years.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Our friend, who was a hypnotist said, I can hypnotize you,
and she went into the session thinking this isn't going
to work. The whole time the hypnosis was going on,
she was like, this isn't working, this isn't working. And
then she walked out and never smoked again. He was
an interesting person too. His name was Saul Feldstein. He
actually had one of his eyeballs was like hanging out
of his face and like it was like a sort
of early commune hippie thing, and like.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Having grown up on TV sitcoms of the nineteen seventies,
I'm well aware of the power of hypnosis.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
Hanging out of his face.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Hypnosis gave Fred Flintstone the self control to stop beating
Brontosaurus Berger Communi. It gave the funds the confidence that
jumped Snake Canyon on his motorcycle his eyeballs. As a boy,
I always wondered what it would feel like to have
my full potential unlocked through the hypnotic arts.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
And he was very successful as a hypnotist.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Unlike building a museum, hypnosis requires neither time effort, nor
those awful stanchions that snap back with that loud thwacking
sound that make everyone turn around and stare at you,
fully convinced that Saul Feldstein is the solution to all
of our problems and that museums belong in a museum.
(15:37):
Dimitri and I say our goodbyes.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
We're slating in. On part two, Johnny discusses post talking
to Dmitri. Here we go.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
I need to tell Gregor that I like Dmitri's idea
much better than his. But I need to tread lightly
from Cain and Abel to Stephen and Alec Baldwin. I
know how competitive brothers can be, and unlike the Lord
or Alexander Ray Baldwin Senior, I don't want to be
seen playing favorites. Do you think you're like hypnotism has
(16:16):
a role in this.
Speaker 5 (16:17):
Well, I hear that, like your voice went up in
octave when we started talking about hypnotism and you got
excited about hypnotism.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Well, Dimitri seemed to think that it would that it
could help. Okay, so the two of you should go
see a movie together. Going to movies is Gregor and
my thing. Clearly I'm arousing some jealousy. I need to
keep my arguments away from Dimitri and grounded in the
merits of hypnotism, this whole barn thing as the symptom,
(16:44):
but through hypnosis.
Speaker 5 (16:45):
Why are you saying it with like the weird accent
on the word hypnosis?
Speaker 3 (16:49):
I mean, do you think that hypnotism has something to
offer here?
Speaker 5 (16:54):
My short answer would be absolutely not. I think it's
a waste of time. Hypnosis, hypnosis, hypnosis.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Hi, Johnny, how are you.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Hey, Dimitri?
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Hi?
Speaker 3 (17:09):
I've got your brother Gregor on the line with me.
We've met, Hi. How are you? Can you make the
case to your brother?
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (17:18):
I just think that you know there's no harm, there's
certainly no nothing to lose. It takes fifteen or twenty minutes,
and she's proven that she's very susceptible to hypnotic suggestions,
so why not try it?
Speaker 5 (17:28):
I agree with all those points. My main feeling is
that getting someone to stop a behavior like smoking is
much much easier than getting someone to change their personality,
which is harder to hypnotize someone out of.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
That may be true, I wouldn't disagree.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
There, Swept up in a wave of brotherly bonamy, I
decide it's a safe space to cautiously share my one
secret boyhood longing, and along the way I could get
hypnotized that as something too. Yeah, a lot of stuff, Yeah,
and immediately regret it. What do you mean a lot
of stuff?
Speaker 4 (17:59):
I mean that's a smug smile.
Speaker 7 (18:00):
They could work on.
Speaker 5 (18:01):
But we could give you a whole brand new thing
where you're like super charming all the time.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
Being more able to look people in the eye.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
Not always hide behind a microphone.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
Actually, you know there is all joking aside. There is
a new hypnosis that works on what's called voluntary baldness syndrome,
where they realize that a lot of men are sort
of doing it on purpose.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Why would someone do that on purpose?
Speaker 4 (18:21):
Well, is that it turns out that hair loss is
more of like an act of willful insolence often and a.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Cry for pap. I used to love my hair.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
Well, if you loved it so much, why did you
get rid of it?
Speaker 3 (18:31):
First of all, I find the defensive and Gregor trime
in here, because I'm sure you're equally offended.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
Now, Dimitri used to be bald as an egg and
then he willed it back on.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
I think if you did at the same time with
my mother, we can get a two for one deal
package deal.
Speaker 7 (18:46):
I'm just saying it's science. If you read the New
England Journal.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Inments with Gregor and Dimitri aligned in friends again at
my expense, I set out in search of the one
eyed hippie hypnotist Saul Feldstein, but it turns out Saul
died in twenty nineteen at the age of ninety two.
So I reach out to other hypnotists. All pretty much
(19:10):
hang up on me once I explained the project. So
hypnotism is out, the museum is out. I'm stuck with
my crap personality, and Edda is stuck with her house
full of crab. And Gregor is still at an impasse.
But things are about to change coming up after the
break at his big night.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
You know what that guy says to me just now,
This guy told me that I was beautiful.
Speaker 5 (19:37):
You are what's going on yet?
Speaker 3 (19:53):
Gregor tells me that Da has been offered a show
at the Carter Burden Gallery in Manhattan. Edda is an
outsider artist, so the offer of her own solo exhibition
feels like finally, at the age of eighty eight, She's
being invited inside the show with a It's formal invitations
and co check feels like validation. It's the kind of
(20:14):
opportunity Edda has always hoped for, and for Gregor, it
feels like an opportunity for her pieces to find good
homes outside her home. The show opens on March twenty first,
twenty nineteen. Gregor and I make a plan to speak
the morning after so we can tell me how it went.
When we speak. What Gregor tells me is that things
(20:35):
that night took a wild turn. Do you want to explain?
Speaker 5 (20:40):
Sure, I flew into town from my mom's art opening. Okay,
we're here at the art opening. It's a pretty good drowd.
Everyone's eating wine and cheese, and but it's so loud
that it was almost like a cartoon version of my
mom's success story. And that like some stranger guy came
up was like, you're a beautiful womanful her ego was
(21:08):
buffed many sides, Everything going great.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
Oh. Gregor's dad, Milt, on the other hand, wasn't having
as good a time. He spent most of the evening
in the corner nibbling on crackers. At the end of
the night, Gregor approached him, Well, father.
Speaker 5 (21:25):
What'd you make it up?
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Oh?
Speaker 7 (21:27):
It's very nice, A little bit exhausting.
Speaker 5 (21:32):
He seemed like, even though he sometimes talks in a
quiet voice. He was especially quiet, like I could hardly
hear him.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
On the drive home, Milt conked out. When the family
couldn't rouse him, they realized he wasn't just sleeping, but
completely unconscious. Eda began yelling, wailing Milt's name. He was
driven to the hospital, where the EMTs lifted him onto
a gurney. The doctors thought he might be having a stroke,
but they couldn't say for sure. In the waiting room,
(22:02):
Eda turned to Gregor and said, you might as well
order the dumpsters right now, meaning he in empty out
the house because of Milt. Isn't coming back to it.
That's it. How do you know when the Democlean sword
of mortality isn't just dangling above you, but actually falling?
(22:24):
How do you know when it's time to pick up
the remote, turn off Rachel Maddow and finally act the
night a milestone in Edda's career was meant to symbolize
the turning point, and it was just not the kind
she was hoping for. Milt was eventually sent home from
the hospital, but his clap signaled a change for Gregor too.
(22:46):
For so long he'd been saying maybe it's time, but
maybe it was time to stop saying maybe hello, hem, Hi,
it's Gregor and Jonathan.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Oh and I thought this was a scam call.
Speaker 8 (23:06):
How do you like that?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
How are you well?
Speaker 5 (23:08):
I wouldn't be so sure. It's not.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
We haven't finished the call yet, right, So what's the pitch?
Speaker 5 (23:14):
Johnny wanted to dredge up a bunch of painful family issues.
Speaker 7 (23:18):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Sure, why not? They're painfuler the better.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
I want to talk with Eda about the night of
the art opening and the way it affected our thinking
about remaining in the house.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
I won't be able to stay here alone. Either I
will become ill or Milt will become ill, and I
need somebody to help me. There is a new little
piece in my head that says.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Things are going to change in the aftermath of the
art show opening. As that is new reality sunk in,
another plan began to take shape, one that Eda came
up with. Her idea is to pair each of her
message on the bottles with the right person. In this way,
each one will find the right home.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I now have a whole shelf full of stuff that
I'm now earmarking to give away.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
That's something that you've not normally done.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
No, I only gave very few things away, you know,
to my best friend or to the kids or something
like that. Very few, very very few.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
Do you think it's at the beginning of something more
of this to come?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Yeah, yeah, it has to be. It has to be.
I take it very seriously. When I think of giving
a person a bottle, I have to think would it
be good for that person?
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Okay? Oh?
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Really?
Speaker 7 (24:40):
All right?
Speaker 3 (24:41):
A few weeks later, I called Gregor to see how
Eda's bottle drive is coming along.
Speaker 5 (24:46):
So she called me this morning saying, I thought of
the perfect person to give the perfect bottle too, but
I'm afraid it's going to hurt his feelings. Okay, she
wants to give you a bottle.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
She wants to give Okay, well that wow, that's really nice.
Why would that hurt my feelings?
Speaker 5 (25:06):
You know, if you give someone a bottle that says
like I wish like I was present, then it's sort
of an implication that you're not present, you know what
I mean? It could be interpreted sometimes as like a
sort of a criticism. So I don't know how you'll
take it.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
Well, did you tell you what my bottle says?
Speaker 5 (25:23):
That's as much as I can say at this point,
it's as much as I'm authorized to say.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
Even though I should know better know how Gregor will
dangle this knowledge over my head like a cat dancer.
My curiosity gets the better of me, and so I
keep asking Gregor what the bottle says, which he uses
as an opportunity to dissect my personality. All I can say,
he says, is that it addresses some of your deep
(25:54):
seated issues.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
Despite all your insights about other people, you sort of
tend to remove yourself from the collective and put yourself
in the position of like journalistic observer.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Uh huh.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
When you have these insights, you know, your dime store insights,
you bolt on at the end of things where you're
maybe we all need someone to run to that hallmarking
nonsense that you didn't this about at the end of
the day.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Jerk, you feel comfortable to saying something like that to
someone telling me.
Speaker 5 (26:19):
About my I knew you were going to take it
the wrong way.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
What's the right way to take that?
Speaker 5 (26:24):
I think sometimes you sort of make yourself resistant, like, oh,
I don't matter, I'm just the fly on the wall
to watching the human condition. As you know, people live
and die and suffer, and babies are born and old
people lower it into the ground. Oh, when the dirt
hits the coffin. That reminds me of my sponsor. I
think you just you use the thing to remove yourself
(26:46):
from what's actually going on. Okay, all right, you're like,
you know what, really make this thing sing? Now, let
me just get a shot of you throwing your art
off the bridge. That's what we need to finish this.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Maybe Gregor thinks I'm being too prying with his mom,
and this is just an expression of his protectiveness, so
I apologize to him and tell him I'll try to
be more respectful. It turns out that Gregor has little
respect for my respect.
Speaker 5 (27:14):
Yeah, hey, lady, I could be more respectful out there.
Won't tell you to throw your stuff in the garbage.
I'll tell you to throw it into recycling bin. Dah Wade,
don't wind up in no landfill, you understand. Very respectful.
We'll even separate out the green bottles from the Clini glass.
(27:39):
Very good, John.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
Why would you even let me speak to your mother?
Speaker 5 (27:43):
I don't know. I mean I thought maybe you could
patch things up.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Over the next couple of years, Eda continues to slowly
search out the right homes for her bottles. Whereas in
the past, Eda was only able to give away a few.
Gregor estimates that she hands out about one hundred. During
this time, Milton is in it out of the hospital
with cardiac issues ranging from fainting spells and high blood
pressure to an actual heart attack. But then in the
(28:17):
summer of twenty twenty two, it's Eta who received some
bad news. Three years after Gregor and I first spoke,
Gregor phones to tell me his mother has been diagnosed
with brain cancer. The doctor found nine metastases in her brain.
They went to three different hospitals in five days, and
the consensus was that it wasn't a matter of months,
(28:39):
but of weeks. In what felt like only days, Eda
went from carrying laundry up the stairs to needing to
be carried up the stairs herself. With Ata's illness, Gregor
decides to move in. The whole family does into the
big packed house they grew up in. A hospital bed
(29:01):
is set up on the main floor in Ata's old office,
and Gregor wakes up at sunrise and sits at at
his bedside in silence. He speaks with her, makes her comfortable.
He tells her it's okay to go, that everything is okay.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
And I stayed there for six weeks, eight weeks and
sort of did the bedside vigil as she slowly died.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
In those final weeks, Gregor saw a change come over Edda.
Speaker 5 (29:35):
In the years running up to her death, she would
say things like, listen, there's a rolled up rug in
the attic that's worth a lot of money. Make sure
that they don't, you know, cheat you out of that one.
That was always kind of a sort of joke, sort
of real thing. But when the actual room of death
(29:55):
and dying was happening, that stuff didn't really come up.
It felt more like she was at peace with a
lot of stuff, and a lot of the stuff. She
told me she would be laying there with her eyes shut.
But and I'm like, you know, mom, what are you
thinking about it? She's just just with her hand. She
would indicate that she's like dancing by just flowing her
(30:17):
hand in the air. It felt like a great death.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
The words on the bottles had finally sunk in. In
the end, Eda could dance out of the world gracefully,
no grasping it's the living who are left to grasp.
Speaker 8 (30:38):
Since my mom died, it feels like it's harder to
throw things out than I thought.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
This is Gregor's sister Lexi. Again, like Eda, Lexi is
an artist, and like Gregor, she's surprised by how, after
all the years trying to get her mom to let
go of her stuff, she herself is finding it so
hard to let go of that very same stuff.
Speaker 8 (31:01):
It just feels really hard to like her art.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
It feels it's like a part of her. Yeah, but
it's her. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (31:12):
I had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day,
who is of course, really you know, grief stricken, and.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
He was saying why do people make art?
Speaker 8 (31:23):
And he thinks the reason people make art is so
that they're not forgotten when they die, like you do
something that remains in the world.
Speaker 5 (31:34):
I think of her a lot.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Do you still carry with you your mother's love? Do
you feel it?
Speaker 5 (31:41):
I carry her with me. I mean in the way
that you know, when I experience something I can't help
but hear my mother's voice making fun of me for
my description of what I'm experiencing. I might be describing something,
(32:03):
telling her about just some Quotadian thing in the day.
You know, this is a nice sunset, but I've a
nice sort of That truck weren't backing up, and I
can hear her being.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Like, why are you so rotten?
Speaker 5 (32:17):
You know what is wrong with you? I mean, that's
that type of thing.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
You can try to move your aging parents out of
their house. You can treat death like a to do
list with items to check off, but ultimately you can't
control how people live or die. Even after Eda's death,
Milt remained in that very same house. It's Dmitri and
his own family that move in so that Milt doesn't
have to be alone. And over the next few years,
(32:52):
Gregor in fits and starts, and with disregard for what
anyone thinks, continues to work on the museum. Only it's
become less about a full fledged museum open to the
public and more of just a place to honor his mom.
And then one day Gregor tech saying he found a
sealed box in the Victorian with my name on it
(33:13):
written in Edda's hand. When the box arrives, I unravel
what seems like yards and yards a bubble wrap. Edta
had taken great care the bottle is a beautiful blue,
the blue of a childhood toy. It's crevaceous and feels
good in my hand upon it, Eda laid out her
(33:33):
words to me.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
I would love to live like a river flows carried
by the surprise of its own unfolding.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
See what I mean, I do? But how dare she?
I'm kidding? Cue the outro music, Cue the dime story
in sight. Whether it's to a museum in the wilds
of upstate New York or to a landfill, none of
us knows where we're flowing. In the face of that,
(34:02):
we need to learn how to let go. My feeling
about what comes after death is constantly changed. I don't
have a spiritual practice, so all I have is a feeling.
And my feeling today is that bodies are vessels, just
like colorful bottles, or vessels just like podcasts and houses
packed with stuff, and all of art is It's all
(34:25):
just stuff, and stuff can be beautiful, but it's there
to help us get closer to the non stuff, Because,
like the words Eta inscribed on one of her final bottles,
all important matters are invisible. Now that the fernures returning
(35:29):
to its goodwill home, Now that the last month's rent
is scheming with.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
The damage to bottom.
Speaker 5 (35:41):
Take this moment to deserve, if we meant it, if
we tied.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
But felt around for four Team from Things That Accidentally Talker.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Phoebe Flanagan and
me Jonathan Goldstein. Our senior producer is Khalila Holt and
our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon.
Special thanks to Steve marsh Amy, Gains McQuaid, and Sarah Nix.
Our production council is Jake Flanagan. Emmamonger mixed the episode
(36:22):
with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson and
Bobby Lord. Additional scoring by Boxwood Orchestra and Blue Dot Sessions.
Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of
Epitaph Records. Follow us on Instagram at Heavyweight Podcast, or
email us at Heavyweight at Pushkin dot Fm, and if
(36:42):
you'd like your very own Eta Berlick original her bottles
can be found on her Instagram at Eta Berlick. We'll
be back next week with a new episode. Can you
Believe It? Back in the Saddle? Hiding behind that Mike
Oh yeah, oh yeah, So I wanted to go through
(37:13):
the entire thing just to make sure the fact and
also make sure that that your mother made she put
bird poop with googly eyes? Is that correct?
Speaker 5 (37:21):
She's called it with two g's. Okay, how many times
would you say you were rejected by girls in the do.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
That was an episode from the new season of Heavyweight.
Thanks for listening. You can hear new episodes on Thursdays,
and you can find Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.
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