 you might notice by my voice that I did not grow up here in Waterbury. In fact, I was born in Reeves, down the road and faced in the water. But I did in fact spend about ten years in Massachusetts. So now you're probably wondering why on earth am I talking like this. I bet two years ago I sustained a concussion while skiing. It was first it was normal operating procedure. I'd had a concussion before and I knew what to expect with regards to recovery. But as the weeks turned into months my symptoms got worse, not better. And in about three months in my voice, I woke up one morning and my voice was really weird. It was sort of singsongy and it was hard to connect my thoughts together. And it was really weak and I could hardly sit up. I was rushed to the emergency room where the doctor to get to an MRI and the doctors there began to use scary words like potential stroke and brain bleed. But after 18 hours in the emergency room, the doctors came to me and they said, great news. Your brain is fine. It's perfect. We can see nothing wrong with it. The bad news was, clearly there was something wrong with my brain. A brain injury is an extremely lonely and isolating thing. I couldn't sit up. I couldn't be around my family or my friends. I couldn't read a book or listen to music. And each the breathing in my own breathing hurt my head. And each day I had to find a reason to get up and find something to laugh at and to be thankful for. And at night my daughter would crawl into bed with me. And I couldn't ask her about her day or what was going on with the life. We could just lie there. We were a family in great distress. But I did start to improve with time and I began to walk again and I began to talk again slowly. And my voice began to change. And at first it sounded a bit like a robot. And then my voice decided perhaps it wanted to go on a bit of a world tour. And its first stop was Czechoslovakia. And after a couple of months it moved on to a French-Canadian accent. And so now when I would go out to the shops I'd have someone pay a good turn to me and they'd start speaking French. And I would have to say to them, I'm so sorry. I don't understand what you're saying. I just have the accent. And I actually had a friend of 20 years come up to me one day and she said, Gwen, I've met your doppelganger. She's talking about me. And Christmas arrived and my voice travelled on to Sweden. And I have to say having a Swedish accent for the holidays is not a bad thing. I was able to be around my friend, my family a bit for longer periods of time. And I still had the cognitive issues in the headaches but I could still be around my family now. So it was a great Christmas blessing. January arrived and my voice travelled on to Ireland. And there it stayed for about 10 months. And I have to tell you, people love the Irish. Not a day would go by that someone didn't stop me and say, I love your accent. Oh, it's the best trip of my life was in Ireland. And you've been to Castle Kill, Kenny. And I tell you, there are times that I would say yes. And yes, Castle Killer, he is quite beautiful. It's just simpler that way. I'm just a few short weeks ago, I was told that my voice has travelled another 12 miles to the shores of Scotland. But it sounds a bit as if I had lived in the States for a couple of years. So perhaps I'm getting closer to home. So since no doctors could tell me what was going on with my voice, my so since no doctors could tell me it was going on with my voice, I took to the internet. And from what I gather, I have something called foreign accent language syndrome. It's incredibly rare. 120 people have been diagnosed with it worldwide since it was discovered in the early 1900s. It's usually due to head trauma. And there is no cure. Sometimes you snap out of it. And sometimes you don't. My doctor said in Pittsburgh, it's a physical manifestation of buildup of anxiety in my brain due to head trauma. And that as my brain continues to heal, the accent should dissipate. And the only way to do that is to get up to live life fully. So much of who we are is tied up in our voices. And I didn't realize that until I lost mine. In a sense, my family has had to get to know a new person. The woman that my husband fell in love with. And the mother that would sing the off key lullabies to her children is gone. And there's been a lot of grieving and frustration along the way. Our house was dark and silent for a long time. And part this part of my recovery has been the sound of my children's laughter. And yes, they're arguing on the house again. I still have a ways to go with my recovery. But I'm positive I'm going to get there. When we were young, we used to play a game called if you could change one thing about yourself, what would you change? And without fail, every single time I said my voice. Thank you. I think there was a reason that you went first when it's because each of us has something to say to you. And mine is my accent is original. I was born and raised in Cardiff in Wales, in case you're wondering, but I've lived many years in Vermont. So when I go over there, they tell me how American I sound. I want to tell you today about something that happened to me just in January. I found myself one day in January, walking along the seafront in Piraeus with my friend Mansour. Now, those of you who are classical scholars will know about Piraeus. And those of you who are world travelers will know about Piraeus because it's the port of Athens. It's the place where the beautiful Greek triremes, the wonderful old ships used to set sail. And it's the place where many, many travelers set sail these days for the Greek islands. It's also a place like most of Greece, which has seen better times. And there are many empty buildings in Piraeus. And Mansour was living in one of these empty buildings quite legally, I must add, because Mansour is a refugee. He's a refugee from Mauritania, which is one of those Western African countries that nobody really knows anything very much about. And Mansour has been a refugee for many, many years. He fled some conflict in his own country many years ago and has wound up living in a UNHCR sponsored apartment in an apartment block, which had been abandoned in the port of Piraeus. My knowledge of his background is somewhat spotty because when you're volunteering and working with these people who have suffered enormous trauma, one of the instructions is not to ask too many questions. You don't pump people for their stories. You just wait until little bits unfold. So there are people that I count as very good friends. And I really don't know a lot about their background. Perhaps that's true with other friends too. It's interesting how and when the background and the stories come out. I remember another person, a Syrian by the name of Hassan, that I was working with. And I was doing a little exercise to find out where he was with English. We were looking at the alphabet and I asked him to pick a word for each letter of the alphabet and then we'd have a conversation about whatever word it was that he picked. And that would help me to understand how his English conversation was. And we were going along quite nicely and then we came to D. And I said, what would you pick for D? D is for danger, like when we came across on the boat from Turkey. So that was how I began to learn a little bit about his refugee journey. But to come back to Mansour and the day in Piraeus, we were walking around. He lived there. I'd taken the train out of Athens to spend some hours with him. So we walked on his regular walking path. He told me that this is something he did every day for exercise. He walked a couple of miles right around the town. And as we were walking around the town, I noticed a beautiful big church. It was dedicated to St. Nicholas. There's so many Greek churches are. Beautiful ornate church. And I said, Oh, have you ever been into the church? Now I was raised very religiously as a Catholic. And visiting a church is something that is very, very normal to me. You see a church, you go in and have a look around. And Mansour said no, he had never been into the church. So I said, Oh, come on, let's go. So he sat out across the road, nearly killing both of us. And we came over and we walked up the steps. And as we walked up the steps and into in through the door, he very reverently took off his hat. And I thought, Oh, you know, he knows what to do in a church. Maybe he hasn't been in this one before. And I did what I usually do when I go into churches, they have in Greece, they have very long tapering candles, you put a little bit of money in the box, and you take some candles. And I always take three candles. And I like one for the refugees, one for the people who work with them and help them and one for all our families. So I did this and I got three for Mansour as well. And he lit the candles and stood them in the sand. That was there for them. And we walked around the church and we looked up at the beautiful paintings and the icons and the beaten silver altarpiece. It was very beautiful. And then we went out and we completed our walk and we had a meal and I went back to my place in Athens. And didn't really think that much more about it until a few days later, I had, I was talking to Mansour on the phone and he said, When are you coming back to Paris, Julia? Because that was that was a very nice visit. And I said, Oh, yes, I suppose I'll come soon. And he said, Well, I want to do that thing that we did. And I said, What thing? And he said, You know, even church, Oh, that's in the candles, you want to do the candles again. So I said, Okay, when I come again, we can go and light some candles. And he said, I really hope we can because I didn't tell you that I was feeling very, very sad that day. And lighting those candles really helped me. People in the apartment had been telling me that I needed to leave. And I felt very depressed and lighting the candles really helped me. So I said, Oh, well, you could go in yourself anytime. And he said, Julia, I'm black, I'm a Muslim. I can't go in there by myself. And I realized how little I really knew about what his life was like. So I said, Ma'am, so next time I come down to Paris, we'll certainly go in and light some more candles for you. And in the meantime, whenever I go into a church here in Greece or anywhere else, I will be sure to light a candle for you. And that's what I want to ask you to do. Whatever in your life takes the place of lighting a candle in a church, whenever you do it, please think about the refugees, about the people who work with them, and about all our families. Thank you. David Bain. In the 1970s, I was a co manager for an artist colony that was on a private island off the coast of Savannah. And the island was owned by Mrs West and Mrs West control a lot of access to it. And the idea of the concept here is that artists would come, that we would provide them a place to stay, we would cook for each other, and they could do their art. And part of my responsibility was to keep the garden going. And the garden was to make us as self sufficient as possible so that Mrs West would keep supporting us. One of the things you learn in the 1970s is how important mulch is. You can't get good mulch on an island that's 98% sand. You just don't grow grass. So I got the idea. Well, you know, there's a whole three sides of the island that's surrounded by salt marsh. The salt marsh dies, it pulls up on the sides around the perimeter. I can go out there and I can get some of that. But I needed a truck on the north end of the island with somebody named Brown Lee. Brown Lee lives up there and he had a truck. And so I went up and I said, Hey, Brown Lee, do you think you can help me out with this project? He said, Yeah, sure, I think I can do that. Yeah, no problem. And Mrs West kept Brown Lee there. He did a little raking. He did a little groundskeeping thing, that kind of stuff. And he had a truck trucks are very valuable on a private island. If you ever get a chance, make sure you have a truck. So Brown Lee said, Yeah, it helped me out. But then there's something you got to know about Brown Lee is that he only had a leg and a half. His right leg was missing from his knee down. And none of us really knew what happened to him. But the story going around the story we all adopted was that before Mrs West, the only on the island, her father on the island, and her father was a Northern he's from Detroit. And he would come down there with these buddies and they would all go hunting. And it was their private little hunting reserve. And of course, afterwards, they would all get liquored up. And you can just imagine them starting to fire guns off. And all of a sudden, it was dance here, dance there and bingo, Brandon Luton lost half his leg. Mrs West, being the person that she is, said, I'll help you out. I can buy you a prosthetic. And Bradley said, No, I'm okay. All right, I get along. And I just can't imagine that he wasn't making sure that he had life a stay on that island. So anyways, brownley and I, we got together, we drove around all over this island, we picked up little piles of hay and that kind of stuff. And I would load he said, look, get out, we find this stuff, I'd rake it up a little tide, I put it in the back of his truck, and he'd lean on the side of the truck and he sort of had this green on his face and he'd sort of chuckle a little bit through himself. And I can't help but wonder if it'd been a long time since he's seen a white boy load his truck. And so it worked out pretty good. Now brownley, he lived with Queenie. In Queenie, on the north end of the island, there was an old plantation site. And plantation house is pretty much gone. But there was the slave quarters or the enslaved people's quarters. And brownley and Queenie lived there and Queenie had a backstory to we all got backstories. That's why we're here. So Queenie, Queenie was on the mainland. Again, it's unverified. Queenie lived on the mainland. And she was a singer. She was sort of like a Billie Holiday. And she got into a little bit of trouble. And so Mrs. Westfather, he said, Hey, come over to my island. I'll take care of you. So she he got her away from her troubles. And she ended up being a maid for, I think for Mrs. Westman, she was younger and Anita made. And but whenever we go up to the north end, and we'd have these little parties, we'd have dinner, whatever. Queenie would get us all together and she'd start to sing. She'd start to sing Amazing Grace. And then she'd start to sing Kumbaya, my Lord. And it was just marvelous. So Queenie and brownley were living together. And the garden sort of came along okay, we're gathering all the salty, etc, etc. And, you know, that they get around towards October and Halloween was coming up. And so we all got together. We said, Hey, it'd be really cool to get dressed up and go up to the north end and go trick or treating. You know, it's a bunch of artists and some of us lived in tree houses and some of us lived in this abandoned logging camp. And so we, we all got together, we said, Okay, we'll do this. And I had a pair of long red, God, I say that wrong every time, red long johns. And it's not that hard. You take a stocking, you fill it full of rags and you pin it on to the back and, you know, the barn doors back there. So you got to make sure that's pinned up. And then I got there was a bunch of masks laying around, you know, that kind of thing. Everybody's got masks. So I took one and painted it red, put some black lines on it, put a couple of horns on it. And that was good to go. So we all piled into our vehicle. And you know, everybody else is really getting into this artist. They live for this opportunity. So they're all dressed up to so we go up to the north end and I said, Hey, let's stop at brownley and Queenie's house, you know, let's stop and go trick or treating. So we all go over to brownley's in Queenie's house. And they lived in a tabby was called a tabby. And I bang on the door and Queenie opens the door and she goes, Whoa, you know, she's not expecting trick or treaters. So we all crowd into the living room, we're all there. Hey, you know, and I say to Queenie, I said, Hey, Queenie, where's brownley? And Queenie says, Well, he's in the back. And I said, Okay, I like to say hello. Can I go back and say hello to her? She says, Well, you know, if you want. So I go, I got stomping back into the back room there. And it was a bedroom. And there's brownley is laying in bed. And I hadn't thought it through. He's laying in bed. That means he doesn't have his big leg on. And he's laying there. And here's this guy walking in and a couple of other people. He's not expecting trick or treaters either. And I'm looking down through the little slits and my mask. I'm looking down at my friend brownley. And I'm realizing this is not good. This is all trick, all trick and no treat. Thank you. Susan Terry, 1773, the Vietnam War, the women's movement, the sexual revolution. I have been married 15 years, had two adorable children. And I had landed a dream job as a part time reporter, but a very famous newspaper in New York, Pennsylvania. My husband was the minister of the United Church of Christ. And we lived in a beautiful three story personage right next to the church. On the other side was a row of houses, where all my best friends in town lived. Our kids all roamed the four block area that was our neighborhood. It was absolutely wonderful. Until I learned that my husband for the last two years had been enjoying his own sexual revolution. It appears that he was frequently enjoying sex with strangers and friends alike. He did tell me, though, that he was now just focusing on one person. Her name was Rochelle. I knew her. She worked at the same newspaper that I did. He said he thought that she might be the person that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. It wasn't positive, but he would get back to me. I haven't talked to anyone about it. I knew that if the folks in the church found out about this, he would lose his job. If we separated, we got divorced. I wasn't sure I could find full time work and support myself and the kids and I didn't know what I could count on from him. So I was pretty much alone with this. One day, my mother called. She must have heard a flatness in my voice and she asked me how I was doing. Surprisingly, I actually told her. She went right into full blown southern mother. Let me fix this. Honey, you just pack those children up and you come on home and you can live with daddy and me. You can have your old room that you're going to go to school here and you can work in the real estate agency with daddy and me and we'll just have the best time. So it went from really, really bad to a whole lot worse. I let her know I didn't see this in my future. And then her tone change. And she said, you know, honey, a long time ago, something like this happened to me. Your daddy just lost his mind. And the next thing I knew he was involved with this woman. And he didn't know which way was what he didn't know whether he wanted to be here or be gone. And it was just a mess. And it was just awful. And then one day I realized, I just hadn't done anything wrong. I just needed to hold my head up high and hold on and he had come back to us. So that's what you need to do. Hold your head up high and hold on. I've never heard her speak so honestly about her own life. And I was touched. She called a few days later and asked how I was doing. And I said, well, I'm holding on. I'm doing doing better. She said, well, that's great. And we want to talk for a bit. And then she said, you know, honey, the other day, I told you those things about daddy. And I said, yeah, and she says, well, it wasn't true. I just made that up. Your daddy would never do anything. He wouldn't hurt us at all. I just made that I wanted you to feel better. My mother had a long history of guest lighting me. At this point, I felt nothing but white hot rage and defeat. I was really alone. I made it through the next week. And then I got a phone call from a woman named Linda. I she worked at the newspaper with me and I barely knew her. She said, I'm sorry to bother you. I wanted you to know that I know that your husband is having an affair with Rochelle. And I wanted to let you know if you need anything, or you ever need to talk, you can call me at any time. I don't remember the rest of the conversation. I must have just thanked her and we hung up. What I do remember is I went next door to my friends, and I told him exactly what was happening. I went back to the house. I started packing. I left. I took the kids with me. I divorced my husband. I got a job. Eventually, I had a terrific career. I supported my kids and to the surprise of my mother, they grew up to be amazing adults. I met and married the man of my dreams and I moved to Vermont. 45 years later, I'm wondering whatever happened to Linda. Google Facebook Messenger. Hi, remember me? Right back. Yes, I certainly do. How are you? I'm a little noncommittal. I'm fine. I wanted you to know about that phone call when you that you made to me about my husband years ago. I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like to make that agonizing decision of whether to call me or not. And I wanted to thank you for doing it. It made a difference. There was a long pause. And then she said, thank you for letting me know. I felt like I probably destroyed your marriage. And I carried a lot of guilt about that. I said, no, you didn't destroy my marriage. Question was whether or not it was already destroyed. Question was whether or not I was going to get destroyed. Your call saved me. I wasn't alone. When I wish I had also said to her was that your call was one of the great lessons I've ever gotten in courage, and respect, and kindness. And it probably kept me from moving back in with my mother.