Look Away—Or Don’t: The Moth Radio Hour

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2:16This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Kate Tellers. The other night I was walking home from the subway with my two children, ages 8 and 10. We had just crossed an intersection when we heard squealing tires immediately followed by the crunch of metal. When we turned around, there were two people lying in the street next to a smashed-up motorcycle. I knew two things immediately. I had to call 911 and my children could not witness this. I quickly told them to turn around with their backs to the street and me as I described to the dispatcher what I was witnessing. After help was confirmed, I turned around to my children to see their tiny backs rigid, lit up by flashing blue and red lights as the sound of sirens grew closer. They looked so innocent. I do not regret preserving some of that. Sometimes the right thing to do is to look away, and other times we need to look life straight in the eyes. In this hour, we'll explore stories from people who are grappling with this conundrum.

3:18And for all you big-hearted people out there, I confirmed with the detective later that the two men in the intersection survived. They will, thankfully, be fine. Our first story comes from Ali Griswald, who told the set a story slam in London, England. Here's Ali. So I love my flat except for its window. There's nothing inherently wrong with the window. It's even double glazed. The problem is that it looks directly into my neighbor's shower. This is the main window in my flat. It's the one I face when I'm sitting on my couch, when I'm eating dinner at my table. It's impractical to keep it covered at all times. It is unavoidable as were they when they were showering. I've never met my neighbors in the building next door, but I feel that we're intimately acquainted. They were either very clean or very dirty. I'm unclear which, but as far as

4:22I was concerned, at least one of them was in the shower at all times, and often both of them together having enthusiastic shower sex. I considered what to do about this. I thought I'm an adult. I should be able to work out a mature solution to this problem. We all live on the top floor of our respective buildings, and it would be perfectly reasonable for them to assume they're in the privacy of their own home. I felt like it was my civic and neighborly duty to let them know. So I decided to go about it in the most British way possible by writing them a very apologetic note. I started with I'm sorry, which after several years of living in this country, I think is the best way to start a conversation with any British person. So I say dear next door neighbors, I'm so sorry for the awkwardness of this note. I just wanted to let you know that your shower window isn't as opaque as you might think it is.

5:30Actually, it's pretty see-through in case you wanted to get a curtain, wishing you well kind regards all the best. Allie. Early the next morning, I tiptoe over to my neighbor's flat. I've addressed the note to top floor flat because I don't know their names. I don't even know their flat number. I put it through the mail slot and I run back to my building. A week goes by, nothing changes. The showering and the shower sex continue a pace. At this point, I'm forced to conclude there's one of two options. Option one, they read my note and they don't care. Option two, which seems to me far more likely, they didn't get or didn't read my note. I resigned myself to the situation and in the meantime, I tell everyone else in my building about it too. And so a couple months later, my neighbors and the flat directly below mine,

6:31Alex and Georgia come by with some news. They tell me that the flat in the building next door is up for sale and their friends are buying it. They've already told their friends about the shower window and their friends are planning to get a curtain. I'm like amazing. What an incredible sitcom level solution to my sitcom level apartment problem. When are they moving in? Home sales close slowly in the UK but several more months down the line, their friends moving. I know this not because Alex and Georgia tell me but because one day new people are in the shower and they're taller. I won't go into too much detail other than to say that when you are seeing people through their shower window and they're taller, more is available at eye level. So I go back to Alex and Georgia,

7:31I say hey guys, I see your friends moved in but maybe you could remind them about the shower. They tell me that they're seeing their friends for dinner in a few weeks and they can bring it up then. In the meantime, they come over to my flat to sort out a problem we're having in the building just in time to see one of their friends step into the shower. Alex and Georgia press their faces to my double glist window. That's Pete said Alex. That's all of Pete said Georgia. I suggested this problem was more urgent than dinner and maybe we could send them a text. A few days later I'm sitting on my couch when I see it. It is a historic day in my flat. The curtain is going up. It is like the opposite of the Berlin Wall falling. I text all my friends the news. A few weeks later, Alex stops by and he knocks on my door. He tells me that he's been over to the friends for dinner

8:35and they were looking at photos of the listing of the flat from when I was up for sale when he noticed something odd about the kitchen. In the kitchen you can see the fridge and on the fridge there is distinctly a single piece of paper. So Alex zoomed all the way in on the photo and there blurry but unmistakable and all of its awkward apologetic glory was my note not lost, not unread but displayed in a place of honor for everyone to see. Thank you. That was Ali Griswald. Ali is a writer and former investigative journalist living in London. This is her first story for the moth. She still lives in that same flat but is happy to report that

9:37there have been no more shower incidents. Our next story is from Misha Merrill who told this at a story slim in Miami where we partner with WLRN. Here's Misha. Hey, I'm nervous. When I was a kid back in the 1990s, my mom used to take my sister and I over to blockbuster video and she would say go pick out any video you want and then we'd pick it out and we'd rent it and we'd bring it home and she would make a copy of that video for us to keep so we could watch it whenever we wanted. Right, so that's illegal and we did it for many years and eventually blockbuster

10:44kind of caught on and the VHS tapes would arrive with a sort of lock on them that prevented us from being able to copy them. So we found another video store called New Concept Video which was in Miami Beach, it was a great local video store and we started doing the same thing there and it was kind of a blessing because New Concept had this entirely different collection of movies like all these eclectic independent movies and foreign films and my mom was in heaven because she's a real film buff and she could kind of culture my sister and I a little with all these eclectic movies so you know while she had her head buried in like the indie film section I wandered around as a nine or 10-year-old in this video store and found another section which had this like partition with a red like velvety curtain and I would poke my head through and see this you know like ocean of just like fleshy just porn it was porn and and and I was amazed and mesmerized because I mean

11:52not only you know it was amazing but it's also I was I had no idea what sex was because we didn't discuss these things in my family because despite the fact that like my parents are very open-minded and my mother in particular I kind of think of her a little bit as like an Annie Hall like a real life Annie Hall she's she's very beautiful and very funny and and warm but neurotic and throws on like outfits that don't really work but they look amazing on her so she's like that but she's also a Kurdish and Muslim so along with this Kurdish muslimness comes a lot of other you know baggage in my opinion like especially basically she's sexually repressed so you know and so we didn't talk about sex growing up and she protected us a lot from that conversation which meant that these videos that she was copying she wouldn't just copy them she'd also edit them censoring out anything

12:54that she thought was too sexy or violent so she just cut all that stuff out and so that means that like you know when I think about watching a movie as a kid I really can't remember one movie that I watched that didn't at some point just freeze with two characters on screen like clearly about to kiss and then frantically fast forward and I was desperately trying to look past those gray squiggly lines on screen but I couldn't see anything because it was just this chaos of fast forwarding all the way through the scene and then it would stop and the movie would continue and she did this without fail with every movie that we rented and then what happened is like just to be safe and cover her bases she wouldn't just you know cut out like sexy scenes she also cut out just huge portions of the movie because she was suspicious that maybe there's some like subliminal sexual content in there but she's not quite picking up on and just to be safe let me cut out like this massive portion so like for instance like Greece like the movie

13:59Greece which I loved my sister and I would watch Greece and the way I watched I thought like wow like what a weird kind of like avant-garde experimental movie when really it was this incredibly conventional musical because she had cut out like a third of the movie then there was the Wizard of Oz which I don't know if anyone remembers there were these flying monkeys in the movie which terrified my sister so she made another version without flying monkeys in it which I have to say did not affect the story at all so still a great movie without the monkeys so yeah this is the way I grew up and how I watched movies and you know I eventually like wanted to see the original format of these movies and I did I watched them and I have to admit I mean I was pretty disappointed with the originals because they were really fake and phony and they had these

15:02stories that made sense and like a plot that was you know had a through line at an arc and a beginning and a mill and an end and I really like what my mom did because the movies she made these versions my mom's versions they they reflect a lot more accurately my life you know they're scattered they make absolutely no sense and there's very little sex in thank you that was Misha Merrill I asked Misha about some of the edits his mother made to the movie Greece that made it so avant-garde he told me that she cut out all of the early scenes of Danny and Sandy kissing on the beach he thought it was an intentional decision that the audience know absolutely nothing about their backstory a bold choice

16:06in a moment spice grannies on a plane and beauty on the other side of bravery the mothradio hour is produced by Atlantic public media in Woods Hole Massachusetts spring break isn't what it used to be it's better this spring stay three nights and get a fifty dollar best western gift card life's a trip make the most of it at best western visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions this episode is brought to you by peloton break through the busiest time of year with the brand new peloton cross-training tread plus powered by peloton IQ with real-time guidance and endless ways to move you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence helping you reach your goals in less time let yourself run lift sculpt push and go explore the new peloton cross-training tread plus at one peloton.com spring starts at the Home Depot and we are bringing the heat to your backyard this season fire up the flavor with our wide variety of grills for under

17:09three hundred dollars like the next grill four burner gas grill that's perfect for hosting your spring cookout then set the scene and turn your outdoor space into the go-to spot the patio sets for every budget bring it this season with grills that deliver flavor and patios that set the vibe from the Home Depot start your spring with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot exclusive supply see Home Depot dot com slash price match for details this is the moth radio hour i'm Kate tellers our next story in this show about the choice of when to look is from Madeline Baronson who told this at a slam in Denver where we partner with public radio station k u n c here's Madeline so i had boarded the plane to Portland Oregon where i was headed for my grandsons third birthday and in my hand i had my boarding pass and on my boarding pass was printed my row and seat eight b and when i got to row eight i saw that the women in seats a and c both had gray hair

18:11and since i am also a woman with gray hair i found it kind of funny to be completing this little trio of Crohn's on a plane and when i sat down and i got a better look at my seat mates i thought was i saw that it was even funnier than i thought because each of us had a very distinct style that reflected a different persona so we were kind of like you know the spice girls granny addition the woman in the windows seat seat a was fit and thin and she was wearing all patagonia sporty granny the woman in the aisle seat was wearing this like drapey velvet dress and a crystal necklace missed it granny and i was in the middle in one of my cotton vintage dresses that i paid like three dollars for thrift store granny so um you know all put together in a row like this we look like a real-time 3d bus feed quiz which modern funky granny are you and i was kind of proud

19:19of that and i was feeling very pleased with myself about the way we were redefining the post men appausal woman right like look at this world you don't have to devolve into the stereotypical cranky judgmental busy body who's in love with berry metal out you know you can still be yourself not that there's anything wrong with berry metal anyway then the scorchest couple comes on the plane and stops at the row in front of us row seven and i don't know their names because they only called each other babe the rest of the time but for the sake of this story we will call them Brittany and Dan and Brittany took a look at her boarding pass and she saw that they were assigned seats B and C and she turned to Dan and she went ballistic she was like the middle seat are you kidding me the middle seat how many times did i tell you i needed the window seat that was the only thing you had to do the only thing oh my god you screw up even the simplest thing

20:26at which point the man in seven a had turned his back to them closed his eyes and was now pretending to fall asleep um spirty granny mystic granny and i kind of shot each other a yikes look um and britney was going on and on um listing all the ways that Dan was ruining her life and every now and then Dan would say something like sorry babe sorry babe but it just made it worse she was like i don't want you to be sorry babe i just want you to not be lame babe can you understand that can you just try to not be so lame can you even try oh my god so she went on and on and on all through the boarding process all through takeoff and um and it was getting worse it was getting uglier and meaner and at one point i realized that mystic

21:27granny and spirty granny and i were all holding hands and sort of this kind of like we were bracing ourselves against this ugliness and this horror and that i also realized that we knew this story we had seen this before right the beautiful abuse of woman and the broken man under her spell who can never do anything right is responsible for everything and can fix nothing and when we got to altitude and britney was still at it mystic granny broke and she reached up and she tapped britney on the shoulder and she said excuse me you are not the only person in the world there are other people on this plane and your childish selfish tantrum is upsetting all of us it's time for you to stop

22:27and britney turned and looked at her and she burst into tears and she got up and she went off to the bathroom and she stumbled down the aisle sobbing all the way but now spirty granny had something to say so she tapped down on the shoulder and she said um i don't care how pretty she is it is not worth that abuse and you know what you deserve more and realizing that we had just morphed from the granny spice girls into the granny greek chorus i thought well now it's my turn to add something so i said yeah i said that's not love that's not love and dan was looking at us between the you know the space between seed speed and his eyes his big round eyes were filled with tears and he said mind your own fucking business so just then britney comes back from the bathroom and she's still crying and she falls into her seat

23:33and she leans against dan and she's whimpering oh my god she was so mean to me she was so mean to me and dan's like oh no babe i'm sorry babe meanwhile back in row eight we grannies weren't feeling quite so spicy anymore we just kind of slowly retreated into our own little personal spaces and cranky granny in the window seat closed her eyes and went to sleep uh judgmental granny in the aisle seat pulled out a book and started to read and me in the middle busy body granny i put in my ear buds turned on my music and listened to my love songs playlist all the way to portland it's my favorite playlist and i know what you're thinking and no there is no berry manel on it not one song thank you that was madeline baronson madeline is a writer ski instructor and a blissed out wife mother

24:39and grandmother who passionately believes that minding one's own business is highly overrated to see a picture of madeline wearing one of her obviously vintage fines please visit the moth.org did you know that we have a pitchline that you can call and tell us a two minute version of a story that you want to share on a moth stage we listen to everyone here's one that i love that reminds us that what we look so closely at one day may not be worth a second glance tomorrow this pitch came in from Arnold Bremen this is a short part of a long humorous story of all the two thousand performers that i presented i think f.o. merman was probably one of the most memorable it was the late 1970s and she was in her early 70s i was quite concerned that her voice wouldn't be as powerful as she was in her hey damn Broadway at rehearsal she absolutely alleviated

25:44that fear her voice could be heard from miles without a mic at performance time the Broadway bell sang danced up a storm and had the audience at the edge of their seats after the finale the audience jumped up and cheered the great legends backstage merman was merman she was totally herself loud rash and boisterous a hundred fans waited at the stage door she was flattered when i told her what she said now that's terrific on now get rid of them the following morning before taking my start to the airport i opened the local paper and the banner headlong radio the old star should retire to old performers home the audience jumped up out of sheer sympathy i prayed she hadn't seen the review she had and said to me i had to come to this pissant little town to get a view like that there were two hundred letters of complaint to the editor the editor sent

26:44them on to me and i posted them to my star i received a wonderful letter back the hangs on my wall today it ended oh don't worry about that untrue and unkind review i never pay any attention to them anyway i always say yesterday's newspaper wraps today's fish fondly effort sing out ethal those are wise words you can pitch us at 877-799-MOTH or online at the moth.org where you can also share the stories from this tower or others from the moth archive sometimes the choice to look is not simple our next story is from Liz Mills who told this at a grand slam we produced at the Castro theater in San Francisco where we partner with public radio station k-a-l-w here's Liz Mills my brother william is nothing short of food eating when it comes to

27:51getting out of things he doesn't want to do literally no excuse or strategy is beneath him and i'm really ashamed to say i've often been his accomplice nearly 15 years ago he called me from his college door room and told me he was totally screwed for a research paper the next day and so me his ghost writer since high school assessed the situation and there was no way i could write 15 pages on the ottoman empire by the next morning and so i said william looks like you're gonna have to say our grandmother died and he was like Liz i did that at midterms and so i joked how about grandpa and he said i did that one too suffice to say even Houdini runs out of tricks at a certain point and william certainly did he failed the paper but the good news is when it comes to the higher stake stuff william always rises to the occasion about six years ago he and i run a bus on the way to mountain view and the driver lost control of it hit the median we flipped and out of nowhere william turned into a real-life Clark Kent

28:55he was saving the day running around helping people up bandaging people up he was making us laugh in the middle of the dark highway when it was pretty scary he was our brightness so it probably comes as no surprise that a thrill-seeker like william ended up in an unconventional path about a decade ago he became a skydiver and a skydiving instructor and then a base jumper which means he's spent over 10 years climbing up mountains and jumping off epic peaks with only a parachute on his back pretty insane but kind of cool and so despite the fact that i'm epically less epic than him i still am always his get out of jail free emergency contact and i do that because i love him he's amazing and one of my favorite people so no surprise that i ended up in switzerland two years ago when i got the call that he needed my help he and his best friend mate were on this bucket list trip to the swiss alps to jump off this mountain called the eiger as a way to celebrate their newfound sobriety and just beginning a new life chapter but

29:59things weren't going according to plan and enter Liz my task of the day was i was standing at a police station in some random town in the swiss alps and getting a list of to-dos i had to sign a mountain of paperwork make a ton of calls pick up his shattered sunglasses cremate his body bring him home my big brother William at 32 had jumped off the eiger sword like superman seen the world from a vantage point very few ever will and not made it out of life grief devise words and as i sat there with a police officer i was shaking i felt outside of my body and i could barely process the fact that william who got out of everything some sort of magical part of him got out of everything hadn't made it out alive where was the magic as i was leaving the police station the officer handed me one more thing an SD card william was wearing a gopro when he jumped off the mountain because base jumpers do that and so

31:01he had the final minutes of his life recorded so i know what you're thinking i hope Liz threw that out and forgot it ever existed but of course i didn't because i had some sick belief that sister loyalty meant i had to experience that too i threw it out of my head for a while though but a few months after his died he died i broke and i'm like a manic frenzy i pulled the video up on my computer and i just imagined if i hit play what i regret it would i just be screaming out the screen william pull the parachute earlier pull it now it's now or never you've got to do it now i hit play and the video was nothing like i expected it was really cool i saw from his vantage point being at the top of the mountain looking around at some of his great friends he was saying i love you man how epic is this he was doing high fives and everything i saw as he brought his toes closer to the edge and then he jumped and for 45 seconds when i was watching the video it was the two of us looking at this incredible escape ahead of us this valley it's beautiful we looked to

32:05the left and to the right and we took it all in and i understood it i mean why stand at the tippy top of the Alps looking out on a vista when you can fly over it and behold the world like entirely on your terms william started base jumping when he was in a really bad place and it was a hobby that became a passion and a passion that turned him into the best version of himself it was a part of the way he healed from bouts of a tremendous depression throughout his life so william's final gift to me was he showed me a way that healing has many different paths some of which are bananas like jumping off mountains and all of them are hard but it's worth it it's taken a huge amount of courage over the past two years for me to learn how to simultaneously hold grief and devastation with joy and hope william was the one who showed me there's such beauty on the other side of bravery the video ended i was devastated it felt irrecoverable i could not

33:10imagine watching this video it's second to me but i paused and truly it took a few seconds i realized the magic in it because william really was fudini he was always escaping all the way to the very end he escaped social norms the predetermined path the idea that the way things are or the way they're supposed to be he evaded that misconception we all have that the possibilities presented to us in life are representative of all our actual options he didn't escape death obviously but none of us will and my god did he show me the extraordinary beauty of a life well lived that was Liz Mills i asked Liz what it was like to share her brother with a room full of strangers

34:15she said sharing william both his life and his death with the moth audience felt very right he lived life in such an epic way as if he was intentionally teaming me up for a lifetime of moments where we could share the spotlight him as the protagonist me as the storyteller in a moment a hawaiian man goes hunting for the lost music of koala when the moth radio hour continues the moth radio hour is produced by Atlantic public media in woods hole Massachusetts introducing shark facial proglow a first of its kind at home facial pro level extraction removes impurities and dual temperature technology boosts radiance and deep puffs with both insta

35:19heat and insta chill technology treat yourself to a hydro fueled glow in minutes and because shark facial pro glow fits in the palm of your hand you can get that luminous post-baw glow anywhere visit sharkbeauty.com to learn more my day kicks off of the refreshing socio synergy drink then straight to the gym pre-can pick up back onto meal prep time for my fire session shift one more Celsius gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits i'm ready Celsius live fit go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now at celsius.com the american dream we all have a version of it the notion that where you begin has nothing to do with where you end up that anything is possible run for office live off the grid hit a home or throw robots teach goat yoga anything this spring the moth mainstages traveling to cities

36:20around the country with stories of the american dream doesn't even exist anymore for who what happens when that dream is dashed or deferred and what happens when the dream is fulfilled let's come together and listen to people telling true personal stories of their very own american dreams experience the moth mainstages live find a city near you at the moth.org slash mainstage this is the moth radio hour i'm Kate tellers our final story was told by boots lupinui at our mainstage in Honolulu Hawaii where we partner with Hawaii public radio here's boots hello amai kako this is a story about magic not the kind with the top hat and the rabbit and the

37:27howling lady in his sudden half it's always a howling lady now i saw real magic you know how when you see a magician and they tell you what to look and you're still amazed when the trick happens i'm going to tell you right up front what i looked so the magic i witnessed happened in koala koala is a beautiful place it's full of stories some of them are well known like the one about how the people of koala saved the infant coming home from being killed hiding from hiding hiding in from whole armies so that he might grow up and fulfill the prophecy and unite our islands koala did that i was born here on a wahu on the windward side in kanyohe right that way

38:27but my roots reach back to koala we'd visit as as kids and i knew i knew that place was special a few years later i saw the amazing documentaries of eddy and mernick amai yeah documentaries about special places and a way of life that was disappearing all too quickly and i knew i wanted to make stories like that but regular guys we don't get to do that kind of stuff so maybe better we just leave it to the professionals like eddy and mernick amai but in the early days of 2017 eddy amai passed away and that line of storytelling ended later that same year my wife showed i we moved to koala and we hadn't even been there for very long when i ran into a couple of guys i hadn't met in years two great Hawaiian musicians they come over for dinner they bring their wives and their

39:30instruments of course in that order of course we dinner we moved to the living room the cases pop open the guitars and ukulele come out and we start playing we're playing old Hawaiian music we're playing local music that was on the radio when we were kids there was a couple of eagle songs and they're all kind of music that jam session lasted until four in the morning yeah oh yeah our wives were thrilled but the whole time i'm sitting there and i'm thinking about how good we sound we sound like we're already a band and i'm thinking i want to keep this feeling i want to feel this again and again so later that day i tell my wife that i've had these ideas for telling stories for years for making documentaries but i never thought i could do that kind of thing but eddy come out only had so long to tell stories and i don't know how long i have to tell stories i told her i wanted to go hunting for the old unrecorded songs of koala i called him heirloom songs

40:37and asked the old families if they could share any songs my wife foolishly agreed to help me because let's face it she married a musician and an artist and now a parent a storyteller so clearly she has poor judgment but she can write grad applications so she agrees to helping with her help i get to work i ask all the film guys ask the musicians and everybody says yes because apparently everybody else in koala has poor judgment too i get a grant i start to go fund me i name our band the koala mountain boys and we got to work i put out the word on social media i asked everybody i knew if they had any songs from any family in koala and immediately i get a hit how easy is this

41:37one of my grade school classmates contacts me and says her grandfather who was from koala wrote a song in 1940 or 41 so i contacted her by phone and she says she knows she's seen the song but she can't remember where so her and her husband they tear that house up and in the last place they looked they find it poppies papers and they send me the lyrics and she tells me about her grandfather how he legally adopted her and raised her as his own daughter how on long weekends and holidays he would take her back to koala so she could meet some of her koala family it's a good man what she sent me was a page of handwritten lyrics mako lello hova in hoi language my job was to take those lyrics and put them in the form of a finished song so i took the lyrics and the time period that he wrote them and i tried to craft a song that i

42:38thought might have been a hit on the radio here if you heard it in 1940 and just like that song number one done super easy right but it's funny when we finally recorded that song for the documentary we're standing in the boonies in this ancient part of koala and we're in front of this old cabin and it was surrounded by native plants and trees and there's a stream running right here we're dressed in period clothing and playing instruments that would have been available at the time of summer's written and we're playing this old slash new song and it could have been world war two era hoi and yet right in front of me there's a cameraman with a gimbal and a giant camera and off over here there's a sound guy with a bank of digital whatever they are and i've got a wireless digital monitor in my ear it's like a 1940 colliding with 2019 but we got it done we got it done and then nothing from months nothing nobody gave me any songs i asked everybody

43:45i knew to ask everybody they knew and nothing and i'm thinking these grad deliverable deadlines they're gonna come and all that money's gonna have to be paid back and i don't even know what kind of limbs i'm gonna have to sell to make that happen but it's not so magical now but i started this and a small group of people stood up with me and i knew in my bones that there is magic here so i just had to keep trying and so i did and a week before the film crew was to come up and shoot for the one and only time my bass player tells me i know a lady who has a song but she not gonna give him to you i don't even know what that means but i'm desperate so i called the phone number she grilled me forever and then she tells me to come to her house for round two of the interrogation

44:46i'm so Hawaiian i'm just trying to root out my intentions okay so i go and i sit down with her and and she tells me about her dad about how he used to run a crew that maintained the famous koala ditch trail and how he would take a couple crew members and some pack animals and hike into the forest and they'd stay in this little cabin next to the ditch trail for days on end while they worked on it and the whole time missing his family and at night he would lay in his cot and while he's thinking about his wife and kids the beautiful scent of gardenia's from all the wild gardenia bushes around the cabin would come wafting in the screen windows and he wrote a love song for his wife comparing her to the lovely gardenia's all around him she thought it would have been about 1939 or so at the end of this hour she smiles at me and says i think i'll give you my daddy's song yes and then she says it goes like this and she starts humming

45:47la da da no no no no that's not how no what that's it that's it after all of that that's it humming so i said does it have lyrics and she said oh yes and she pulls on a note pad and a pencil as she starts trying to remember what they might have been right about then i started feeling like i was getting COVID and i think i was contracting it from this song but i recorded her humming on my phone and i took her scratch paper lyrics home to write this song with now six days left just like the first one i was shooting for a song that would have been popular here back in the day in 1939 when he wrote it this one was easy this one wrote itself it was something about it that it felt like all i had to do was play it out loud and it would be real and it was just like with the first song we recorded it in the bushes on the

46:49wall of a rock wall of a color patch and we got it all done on time the last day of filming a Sunday afternoon the crew comes to me and they say we got all the interview footage shot we got all the song footage shot with all the b-roll shot but we still have no idea what the story is that we're editing this footage into because no way i could have a story about any of this now this this crew is leaving to go back to the airport to fly back to oahu in a couple of hours and i still don't know what the story i'm telling is so now i'm in my head running through all the interview footage trying to play it back and it hits me that i've overlooked the most important piece of this whole puzzle i took my eyes off of the spot where the trick was happening both the ladies who gave me songs for this story for this project one of the

47:55beginning of the project and one at the end of the project we're both from the same old koho family and yet they had never met they had never even heard of each other i didn't know how but then it hit me that i can tell the finished story with one last shot so i tell the crew to go get the first lady the one who grew up on oahu take her to the family graveyard in kohala it's a beautiful little plot she'd never been there before don't mic her up ask her to wait in the car because i don't want her to explore that graveyard on her own i go to get the other lady the one who grew up in kohala and i asked her to come back to the family graveyard to meet her cousin of hers for the very first time and she says yes and we filmed them meeting in the graveyard hugging and kissing the one woman pointing out the graves of both women's shared ancestors they're holding

49:01hands and they're smiling and walking and talking and without microphones but we don't get to know what they're saying that's not for us that conversation belongs to their family and it gives me chicken skin even now i think about the fact that the only people who heard those words were those two women and their ancestors and i was honored i stood outside that graveyard and i was honored to just be a silent witness to this sweetness in a graveyard and that was it there was the trick it was revealed i was watching the whole time and i still don't know how the trick was done but what i do know is these two guys these two these two men these two sons of kohala they love their family and their home so much that even after death they're moving things around just to try and reunite or unite their descendants in their homeland

50:05what kind of place what kind of special place raises people who hold that kind of love and passion and loyalty even after death like i said i i don't know i still don't know how the trick was done and i don't care because i saw real magic i saw what happens when an amazing place raises loving loyal children i saw a real magic no top hat and no rabbit and no howlay lady again cut in half real magic that was boot slip and we technically we'd look with our eyes but you will see boot story more clearly if you listen with your ears to end our hour here is the kohala mountain boys playing

51:07one of the song's boots references in his story it's called lovely guardiania only sweet heart graceful guardiania you're the flower of my heart my sweet guardiania you're my only sweet heart each petal snow we lie with fragrance so sweet you reminds me of that night when romance creep that's creep night i dream of you remember you can

52:17pitch us at 877-799-MOTH or online at the moth.org where you can also share these stories or others from the moth archive and by tickets to moth storytelling events in your area through our website there are moth events year round you can find a show near you and come out to tell a story the moth can be found on all major social media platforms that's it for this episode of the moth radio hour we hope this episode has inspired you to see stories around every corner we hope you'll join us next time and though we cannot see you we appreciate that you're here sweet heart my sweet heart

53:20this episode of the moth radio hour was produced by me jay allyson and kate tellers who also hosted and directed the stories in the show co-producer is vicki merrick associate producer emily couch the moth leadership team includes sarah haberman christina norman marina clujay sarah austin jones jennifer hickson jordan cardinale caledonia cairns susan rust sarah jane johnson and patricia urenia our theme music is by the drift other music in this hour is from epidemic sound and boots lupa newy podcast music production support from davie sumner the moth radio hour is produced by Atlantic public media in woods whole massachusetts special thanks to our friends at audicy including executive producer lia rees denis for more about our podcast for information on pitching this your own story and to learn all about the moth go to our website the moth dot org

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