 My sweetie Joseph and I made plans to go to this apple cider festival in Massachusetts. It happens every November and we were both really looking forward to this event but when the time came to leave Vermont to go to the festival I felt like this dark cloud of doom and depression just like settled over my head and so while Joseph had an awesome time at the festival rubbing elbows with all the local apple gurus I spent the weekend in the car and I started to wonder if this is what it feels like to have a major depression take hold in your life and so as we were leaving orchard country on Sunday to come back to Vermont we go around a curve in the road and there's this pile of junk next to someone's driveway and a big sign that says free and there's like broken sleds and children's toys and I'm like Joseph pull over and he's like we don't need any more junk and I'm like pull over and so he pulls over and I hop out of the car and I pick up this white two-foot tall cat statue it's made of plastic but it's supposed to look porcelain and it has a nicotine stain patina to it like it's been in someone's smoking parlor for the past 70 years and it's got these black demonic eyes like not like a normal living creature's eyeballs there was no retina it was just like doom and death in the eyes and it was really matching my mood and I just loved it and Joseph's like that is the scariest looking cat I've ever seen in my entire life like that cat is not getting in this car and I was like Joseph we need this cat and he's like what do we need it for and I'm like I don't know I just feel like it needs to come with us and like we could use it for target practice I don't know and so I get in the car with the cat and there's not room for it in the backseat so I kind of have to nestle it between us in the front seat and so it's just Joseph the cat and I we're driving down the road in five minutes into this cat joining our trip I get a cell phone call and it's my brother and he says Leslie dad has pneumonia the nurse says he has 12 to 15 hours left to live he's dying and my dad had a heinous form of Parkinson's disease and had been sick for the past eight years and so this moment was a long time coming and I tell my brother we're two hours from Boston we'll be there as soon as we can and I hang up the phone I look at Joseph I look at the cat and I'm thinking all right the demonic free pile kitty of death has joined us from the underworld for my dad's passing and we got this we got this I'm trying to like rally myself but then I burst into tears and we booked it to Boston and pull up in front of my dad's house that he owned with his girlfriend and the first thing I do when I get out of the car is I take the cat and I put it at the base of this aluminum ramp that we had installed over the front stairs so that we could get my dad's wheelchair in and out of the house and so the cat is like facing out towards the road and it just felt really comforting to have this cat like guarding the entranceway to the house and so I walk up the ramp and halfway up the ramp I pause to collect myself for what I'm about to walk into because a my dad is dying and I have a lot of grief about it and b I'm gonna have to interact with my dad's girlfriend and her and I don't get along and so I have a lot to prepare myself for and so I go in the house and my brother is sitting with my dad who's in a recliner and my dad lost his ability to speak about a year prior and he hadn't been able to walk for three years so we've been in a pretty debilitated condition for a while now and I kiss him on the forehead I say hey pops he looks at me with this bewildered look then realizes it's me smiles and then falls asleep and then we hear a knock at the door and it's a hospice nurse and she comes in and my brother and I are relieved and she tells us you know what it might look like to die from pneumonia and what we can expect and how we can support my dad and she gives us morphine and tells us how to administer it and then she's like all right gotta go call me if you have any questions by and I was like wait a minute because I had just read this book on death and dying and the chapter on hospice really melted my heart because hospice sounded like this incredible service where trained and compassionate nurses come and care for the dying person but also help the family through the experience and I just expected someone to be there with us and so she leaves and then we hear the front door fly open with a bang and it's Maureen my dad's girlfriend and she just thunders into the house and roars to no one in particular what the fuck is that cat doing in the front yard I am not from Boston just so you know and I'm thinking all right we don't have hospice but we've got the cat who as far as I can tell hasn't introduced itself yet we don't know its name and it has really demonic eyes but I'm just I love it and Maureen just like thunders into the kitchen and starts like shuffling food around and counting coupons and counting calories and like bringing my stress level up like 10 notches and my brother and I are trying to take care of my dad and we get him from the recliner and into a hospital bed that he'd been sleeping in and slowly friends and neighbors show up to say goodbye to my dad and pay their regards and so Joseph and I camp out in the corner of my dad's bedroom and we start playing the card game Rummy and this weird thing just keeps happening with like every hand it feels like the cards are stacked in my favor and so at the end of the game it's like 500 Joseph to me I'm sorry 500 me to zero Joseph and it just feels really uncanny and I start thinking about this card or I start thinking about this conversation I had with my dad about a year ago before he stopped being able to talk and I said to him hey pops I know you're an atheist and you're not spiritual whatsoever but if there is consciousness after death you like keep an eye out on me right and he said yes of course and burst into tears and then shortly after that lost his ability to speak and it just felt like he was here in this moment like he was trying to say through the card game like there's no way in hell some hippy boyfriend dude is gonna be my daughter Rummy I'm my death bed and this just like I just lose it I'm crying and I go to my dad's bed and he's asleep but he's also crying and I'm a mess in the next day my dad's still alive and he seems to be in pain and we're giving him the recommended doses of morphine and it's not helping my brother gets on the phone with hospice and they put him on hold and basically give us the message of like just give him stronger doses and figure it out and it was like up until this moment we've kind of been expecting someone to help us or waiting for you know someone to guide this experience and that person wasn't going to come and so we realized like we needed to step up and figure this out for my dad and so we go into his room and we turn the lights down low and we light some candles and we burn I find this like sage smutch stick in his death that we burn and I start reading poetry that I think a dying atheist like my dad might appreciate and my brother plays some of his favorite music like the soundtrack to the good the bad the ugly you know the song that's like and my dad had this affinity for like andy and flute music and we tell him we love him we share stories we tell him we forgive him for leaving us when we were little and we tell him it's okay to go and slowly the energy in the house just comes down so many notches and morine starts chilling out and she stops counting coupons and she even cracked a joke about the cat in the front yard and this piece just starts to settle on my dad's bedroom and at eight o'clock that night I crawl into my dad's hospital bed next to him and I wrap my arm around him and I have this dream where I'm a small child and he's an adult and he's leading me up this mountain and then halfway through the dream I realize I'm the adult and he's the kid and I'm leading him leading him and we're climbing this mountain but then we're also descending and the last thing I remember before I wake up is this silhouette of my dad as a child and me holding his hand in his cat with its tail in the air between us and he wake up and I realize that the end is near and it's six am the next morning my dad's skin starts to turn gray and we're there with him and we're holding his hand and telling him that we love him and morine's there and it's fine and then finally he takes his last breath and it's really peaceful and calm and I just wish there was some way to press pause on this moment and to spend a little bit more time with my dad and let it sink in that he's dead and he's not suffering anymore but I know in my heart this moment can't last and I we have to make a phone call and we have to call the brain guy because my dad decided he wanted to donate his brain to research and he had this rare brain disease that they couldn't figure out if it was Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or maybe both and because neurological brain diseases are more devastation than a life should be asked to bear he really wanted to support finding a cause and a cure and so my brother calls hospice and the doctors were really adamant that you know as soon as he dies there's a short window where they can come and harvest the brain and we got to get him out of there quick and so the thought of my dad's like brain in a refrigerator refrigerator later is a little hard to swallow so my brother gets on the phone with them and they send the brain guy over in a hearse and I watch as they wheel my dad down the aluminum ramp and pass the cat into the hearse and the cat's there and I just feel a cat like presiding over all of this helping me do that cat thing of embracing the rhythm of life and death and helping me hunt around in my psyches in our landscapes for the deeper parts of myself and helping me bring them forward unapologetically into the waking day and I just started thinking about how most people I talked to want a short and painless and easy death they don't want to burden their family members they don't want anyone to wipe their butt but my dad's death wasn't like that my dad's death was long and torturous and involved many years of butt wiping in bed sores legal disagreements with Maureen and long hospital visits it really was an apprenticeship in death and dying and here we were coming out the other end of it death no longer seemed demonic or scary my dad's death felt like a warm friend an end to the suffering and for the first time in my life I could see how maybe death could be a friend to me someday too and so my brother and I we pour our heart into this epic obituary for my dad we get it in the Boston Globe we hold an end of life ceremony we celebrate my dad in the way he wanted to be celebrated which included a tub of cupcakes from Costco and then it's time to come back to Vermont we're loading up the my car to come back and everything's all ready to go and I pick up the cat and Joseph's like Leslie you can't bring the cat back with us like the cat's got to stay here and I'm just thinking like I'm really attached to this cat at this point and I have these visions of maybe like sticking it out in the woods behind our house and I could go visit it when I miss my dad and so I stick it in the car we start driving back to Vermont and a few miles later I'm thinking you know someone else might need this cat it doesn't feel right to take it and so I pull the car over and I leave the cat exactly how I found it on the side of the road thank you Josie Levitt I learned how to ice skate in New York City in someone's apartment my parents divorced when I was little and um my brother and I would spend every other weekend visiting my dad and even though his apartment was only 17 blocks from our house it felt like a world away my brother and I shared a small room with a bunk bed that had a wicked shimmy and um my father was the kind of dad who just didn't know what to do with kids he didn't know what made us happy he was anxious around us and by the end of the weekend he looked like he had a headache and then in those moments I realized the weekend wasn't long for only me um and my father would start every weekend because he had no idea what to do with us he'd say hey kiddos what do you guys want to do today Museum of Natural History my brother would shout before my father even finished the sentence so Museum of Natural History just always won and I had a childhood stutter that rendered me effectively mute to during these morning conversations so for years and years all we would do was go to the Museum of Natural History and I hated it I didn't like dinosaurs they scared me you know you're walking the great hall of the Museum of Natural History and it's giant life-size dinosaurs and they look kind of cool but they made me feel even smaller in a big world and I would always try and touch the bones and my brother would be angrily yank my device don't you're going to ruin it for me and because he was afraid we're gonna get kicked out and my brother was a tough kid um he had a very low frustration point and a hot temper and it was you could always tell because it is his eyes would get a certain set to them and you could see him thinking fists or epic tantrum and you never knew which way he was going to go and I think honestly one of the reasons we went to the Museum wasn't because Harris said it first it's because my father was afraid of him and afraid of the tantrums that he knew he couldn't control and we go to the Museum and every once in a while I catch my brother you know those had they had those dioramas of like the naked cavemen and that always kind of freaked me out because they're just like these naked guys with pelt of fur and like you can see a little tiny tip of penis and I just thought really is that and the women with their hanging downy breasts just depressed me and I thought am I gonna turn into like Harry hanging downy low and I just didn't like it and and my brother loved it he identified with them and I could see him looking in the glass like trying on the caveman poses like somehow he was looking for Neanderthal masculinity that was missing in our house clearly and it just you know it just never worked for me and there was one day that um we went there and my um my brother was told that the hall he wanted to go to was closed for innovation and he punched a hole in a wall and stocked off and I was like yes we're going someplace else today and um in the next weekend and my father said hey guess what we're doing today kiddos and I was like what he said we're going ice skating ice skating never been ice skating before I'd heard about it I'd seen it but we'd never done it and my father sucked at a lot of things but my god he found the best ice skating place in new york city was on west 58th street it was called the petite ice skating studio it was in someone's apartment they had this giant free war apartment and they converted the front entryway in the dining room into an ice skating rink that was probably about this big actually it was 20 by 32 feet and I found my words on the ice and it was amazing because I could ice skate and my brother couldn't and he was 15 months older than me and he always was better at me than physical things but he couldn't ice skate ice skating scared him and his his version of ice skating was just falling a lot hot tears and saying stop looking at me and I'm like I'm going too fast to look at you you know and because it was a rectangle you you had to turn in a really weird way because you couldn't turn really and I wasn't good enough yet so you'd kind of smack the wall and go the other way and three glides just smack the other wall because this doesn't take long and I'm and every time I'm smacking my brother is still crying and I'm like oh get over it but I loved it and we called it lipiteat and the cool thing about lipiteat was first of all it had no front wall so it was like this it was like skating on an infinity pool and when you're seven you feel like that's really far down it's not but it felt like it was 20 feet I felt like I was gonna die so there was element of scare there and excitement and the back wall was all glass and open out onto their living room so I'm like skating taking a lesson and there are people behind me having mimosas because they're having brunch so like they're watching me I'm watching them I felt like we're in a Woody Allen movie like it was such a New York moment and um and we loved it and we told our grandpa like grandpa we can skate he's like oh my god kids this is amazing because he had a pond on his property and he said we're gonna skate on the pond and I said okay grandpa I need to preface this with something my grandfather was a very very smart man not so good in nature because to test the ice of his pond you know rather than walking out onto the ice and you know kind of doing this he drove his Cadillac onto the pond he said you can't stay on the shore I got this we're like no you don't care I'm fine you just and just think about Percy I mean really does someone named Percy have any skill at figuring out if kids can skate on ice or not probably not and um this guy got an office job so he drives this this is 1972 like two ton Cadillac I'm saying that this is a big the biggest Cadillac they made and he's driving his Cadillac onto the right in the middle of the pond and he's in the front seat and he's bouncing to see what's gonna happen and even I know as a little seven-year-old like this is not gonna end well and I look at my brother and I'm like wouldn't we rate like 60 pounds total what is grandpa thinking two tons 60 pounds and then we hear this deafening crack and the ice splits right down the middle of the car you have never seen a seven-year-old man move as fast as my grandfather did in that moment because he's like oh shit and he gets out of the car he flies out of the car gets to the shore just in time to watch his red Cadillac sink into the pond and this was the scariest and also the most hilarious thing I had ever seen in my life and then the following year he did the exact same thing but with a red Cadillac and then that year it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen because it was I mean and then the following year it like there's no learning curve for anything in my family in the following year he um he got smart and he had a friend with him and they had to change the back of the car and he had his tractor at the ready he's like okay Percy I got it and the first crack in the ice that you know and he's like no no don't don't wheel in the guy's like no we gotta save the car you're and he pulls the car and you know I gotta say in those three years before my grandpa died we never skated there it's just in my little Le Petit place you know um and then we we moved um and my mom and my brother and I got season tickets to the new hockey team the NHL the Islanders and so we we thought we're gonna skate more and we went to Kenyatta Park and we skated every summer and we loved it and again my brother still he could finally skate but he wasn't as good as me and I could skate away faster than him and I skated way fast because I was pissed that I was a girl and I was stuck in girls roles and I had to wear white figure skates and all I wanted were black boys hockey skates because I wanted to go fast I didn't want the tow pick thing I didn't want to do the swirl I wanted that off I wanted to play hockey and there was no way a girl my age back then could play hockey for anybody so I would skate backwards like my favorite defenseman and then my brother I would just like you know do those spraying stops and cover him in ice and then I could see his fist ball up and I'm like you can't catch me and I pretend I was getting the shot that won the overtime goal for this Stanley cop and my brother's moods kept getting worse and um to the point that his therapist recommended excuse me that he um he take an axe and work in the woods and cut down trees and call them his hate trees and get all his hate out on the trees decent idea 12 trees later he was still going and I was 11 and he was 12 and we were and my brother had always said to me he's just rude and I wore like my favorite hockey players jersey to school one day and everyone started calling me dyke diesel truck driver that's not what real girls do and I just wanted to play sports you know and um so my brother was in this bell mood he had sequestered himself in his room much of the summer eating salami and reading hustler which frankly would make anybody cranky honestly if that's all you did and um and we went to get new skates because it was time and Harris was just he just had that scent in his eyes and I thought this is not gonna go well and I was getting my skates and he said what are you getting the white skates for those are for real girls you know and it just it bugged me and um and he got his black shiny men's hockey skates that were amazing and the guy was helping them lace them up and um you know his boots in the thing and he could tell Harris was in a really bad mood and he said come on mr sunshine it's all gonna be okay you don't control my brother out of a bad mood and he looked at him and his eyes got that set look to them and I thought my heart's pounding out that this is not gonna go well and Harris's foot is like this and he accidentally on purpose sliced the man's hand open I never skated again until recently and I um I just moved up to the the islands and I see people skating all the time and I think this looks fun I want to do this how can I do that like I want to skate out in the open and not hit a wall and turn around and I want to be outside never done that so I thought okay I'm gonna do this you know I'm 54 years old I'm gonna do this and I went to the sporting goods store with my girlfriend and the man said how can I help you and I said I want the shiniest blackest fiercest pair of men's hockey skates you have thank you very much Scott Laban I'm generally partial to stories about Vermont life but tonight I thought it'd be fun to do something from an entirely different era and an entirely different place the era is 1972 and the place is southeast Asia mostly Indonesia the reason it while 1972 was the summer between my junior and senior year in college and back then and maybe still today I don't know what you wanted to do that summer was travel and sew wild oats and that sort of thing because you knew you had just one year left before you embarked on a long dull life of work and family responsibilities I mean this was your last chance to sew wild oats maybe would get put off by law school or med school only marginally better or worse yet you could get drafted and I need to talk about the draft for just a minute because some folks either don't remember or never knew how it worked originally there were local draft boards that determine who went and who didn't it was theoretically universal but not so much there are all kinds of ways to get out of it there was the student deferment my favorite there was conscientious objector status you could go and convince the local board that your conscience wouldn't let you kill people even even communists and then there were the medical exemptions you need to find a doctor that could say you had a hot murmur or flat feet or bone spurs which a current president was afflicted with or most damning of all you could exhibit homosexual tendencies that was that was an immediate shows you how things have changed right today the lbgtq community is fighting hard for equal access to the military and in my day straight guys were making passes at medical examiners to try to get the opposite result the consequence of all these exemptions was that the military was more and more made up of either kids from poor families or children of color or a few ultra patriotic good boys from the south and it was nuts the social justice types decided this wasn't fair that middle-class white Yankee boys were not given an opportunity to to fight for their country now i got to say as an abstract principle i am all for social justice however when they changed it to a lottery i'd be lying if i didn't say that some of the white middle-class Yankee boys who were feeling a certain amount of consternation about this and the way the lottery worked was they put your net your number on a ping-pong ball your birth date and put in this big bin you know like it would go around and what would get sucked up and and they would read the the birth date they did this on tv mind you right i mean this was like megabucks in reverse you didn't want your number to get called and they were they were draft lottery parties and dorms where you drank a lot of beer and you know some of the older people are nodding their heads right and and they would they would tell you the range that they thought they were going to need for the next year and in my year it was 125 to 130 i was 135 struck me as it being a little close so i was determined to leave no ode unsone this summer most folks went to europe during this during this year there was even a book called europe on $15 a day that was in everybody's backpack you know i chose to go to asia instead partly because i studied chinese in college i thought it might be a place to use it because you couldn't go to china back then i think if you could do europe on $15 a day you had to be able to do asia on 10 right so that's what i decided to do and i got a grant from the macArthur foundation you may know that name from the genius awards for a million dollars right i'm not a genius and i didn't get a million dollars like i think they gave me five hundred dollars to research um political socialization in hong kong schools a topic that nobody cared i went about including me but you know the old saying you don't you don't look a grand horse in the mouth so i i took the money and i didn't plan to spend a whole lot of time in a library anyhow now back then there were no like discount flights if you wanted to cheap flights somewhere you had to get a charter and to do that you need to join an organization and i joined the chinese american recreation club i think it cost me 20 bucks or something so i show up at the airport and the first thing i notice is that the members of the chinese american recreation club are in fact chinese americans um i was the only white guy there and that got me a lot of curious and little suspicious looks in fact i heard the phrase several times yang guai zha which in chinese means foreign devil um which i'm sure they meant in the most affectionate possible way so we get on the plane and i was not a world traveler the most exotic place i've been up to that point was new jersey and i was able to drive there for me and we got in this thing called a stretch dc8 which i had assumed was like a stretched lumazine right they made the the plane longer no what that meant was they crammed in more seats to stretch the number and there was no in-flight entertainment there was no food cart there was no drink cart it's possible if you were exhibiting obvious signs of dehydration they would give you water but that was just about it and worst of all it was before they banned smoking on planes and i swear every male member of the esteemed chinese american recreation club was a smoker you could not see from the back of the plane to the front and i know that because i was in the absolute last row the one jammed up against the bathrooms you know where the seats don't tilt it was a 24-hour trip from zorek to dubai to srilanka to thai bay eventually i landed in hong kong to do my research well i was there about two days and i got cast in a movie as an extra as an italian policeman in a bruce lee movie called return of the dragon chuck norris is anybody know the movie you do well i was the guy the size of an ant in the final scene that made the arrest so that was fun and then i did things like i visited the the casino as a macao and i went to the raffles and had high tea the hotel in singapore i took the night train to bangkok thailand and slept on one of those upper bumps i had all kinds of adventures uh in bangkok which was a wild and woolly town uh i was nearly kidnapped by a band of felonious transvestites i fought that off i went up to chang mai and i accidentally booked rooms and what turned out to be a house of ill repute called the white house by the way i'm not this was not for political irony it just was a white house um but i ended up in jakarta which is really the heart of the story when i traveled back then i'd stayed in very cheap places because i had no money like guest houses and hostels and so forth but like once a week i felt like western food so what i would do is i would put on my one good uh set of clothes the shirt that i had i bought in hong kong and it was a light lavender shiny rayon neru shirt some of you may not know neru shirts but they were named after the prime minister of india and they wore these jackets with a high collar and kind of embroidery around it and so forth and i don't know exactly why they were popular i think maybe beetles wore them on an album cover during their maharishni yogi in any event that's what i had so i go to the intercontinental hotel in in jakarta and i always would go for the breakfast buffet because i figure you got the most food for the money and if by chance they mistook you for a guest you didn't pay anything you know so i'm there and eating my breakfast and i see these other westerners off to the side and people are making a big fuss over them and i say who are they and they say well those are the bg's they're in town for a concert on their tour and i was more of a rolling stones fan myself not a beat man i was kind of cool but i finished my breakfast i walk out the door and i met with this crowd of cheering people they're cheering they're clapping they're jumping up and down they're flashing photos clearly they think i'm a bg seems ridiculous now but you don't imagine me 45 years younger 45 pounds lighter a full head of hair over the ears a light dark beard and that ridiculous shirt right i could have just stepped off the cover of the sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club band so they're i don't know if you ever had the experience of having a crowd of people cheer out here but it's quite a rush it's right i mean all i can compare it to is telling a tempo story so i don't want to disappoint right i wave i smile i flash five as i go down the whole thing and people are handing out they have albums with sharpies that they want me to autograph so i accommodate i i autograph one and i now like to think that somewhere there's a little indonesian lady whose most prized possession is a framed bg's album hanging on her wall autographed by me because we're grudgingly the summer camp gets a postcard from his parents a few weeks later that says we're moving i got that postcard i wasn't at summer camp i was taking some time off from school and i was living on a commune in southern virginia i've been there a few months a couple of months and i decided it was probably time for me to figure out what i'm going to do and um they happened to have a rustic cabin at the edge of their property in the woods and i decided to go spend a night by myself and think about life and so off i went and i found the cabin pretty easily nobody was expecting me back until the next afternoon i got myself settled and i grabbed a bucket and headed for the river for some water i mentioned it was a rustic camp right and um just before i headed down the hill towards the river i got my bearings i looked around and that's the last time i ever saw that cabin i couldn't find it every time i headed back for the cabin i found the damn river again i later learned that it was a peninsula of land but um i looked for a few hours and it got dark out and when you're in the woods and it's dark it's kind of good to just settle down there's not very far you can go so i found a tree to make a friend with and uh sat down with my back against the tree just in time for the skies to open up and it was one of those really heavy summer pounding rains all night the good thing was i couldn't hear any critters in the woods so i couldn't get scared you know it was fine and um the rain stopped a little bit before sunrise the sun came out i kind of tried to bring my clothes out as best i could and went off to look for the cabin for not long i gave up and just followed the river out to the road and um which happened to be the road that the farm was on that i was staying at and got back to the farm drive myself off nobody knew i'd been wandering through the woods all night um later that day noticed that i had a small cut on my foot and um there's a little red hard bumps never seen anything quite like it and one of the folks at the farm noticed it and we dug out the medical journals and started looking through the books trying to figure out what this was i think most of the concern that i picked up something infectious was kind of everybody was going to break out and these little hard red bumps and uh well the next morning my foot was aching and there were more of those little red bumps and so they made me go to the local world doctor i never went to doctors very much when i was young and i certainly had never gone without my parents i was still pretty young well i was scooping off there you know i was barely just turned 18 and um so we got to the local world doctor and he looks and goes um then gigabytes all righty what's that jiggly and he some little critter something you pick up in sand or in the woods and don't worry about thing just put some calamine on it if they they're itchy but you're just going to be fine i didn't have a whole lot of confidence in this diagnosis of gigabytes but all right so be it's at least they were contagious so i could go back to the farm and um the male hiccup and there was a postcard for me from my mother i could see it clearest day right now it said moving to Pittsburgh someplace north of rutherland let you know when we get there this was before cell phones this was in the 70s i'm there's the third 70s story and um we had a four party line at the farm and did not use it for long distance calls so it wasn't like i could just call my folks and say so like someplace north of rutherland that's a really big area you know it didn't say when they were moving and i've got this foot that feels funny and it has these gigabytes all over them and i didn't feel really comfortable about this well by the next morning the foot had started to swell and the gigabytes were still popping out well i know i wasn't getting bit by anything at the farm so something was way off with that diagnosis and i had the sense that i probably was time for me to go home well i still knew where it was i caught a bus to new um new york city where i would have to change for the bus to vermont and i arrived at port authority about 10 o'clock at night so this is the story i was going to tell how i got to the city late at night and i found my brother's apartment which was in the cloister's someplace north of parlor never heard of it um and the trials and tribulations of spending about 15 hours with my big brother in new york city where he dragged me hither and young but then i got another email from lovejoy and he said tell give me a short bio but don't describe yourself a storyteller i can't have everybody's describing themselves as storytellers well that gave me pause i'm not a storyteller i've never claimed to be a storyteller but what am i i think i'm the keeper of stories um my first story the only other one i ever told was about my big brother um and his adventures and i'm the keeper of our family stories and there are so many and you know there's this big deal right now to check your dna find out where you come from look for your heritage well your heritage isn't where you and steps are started from it's the stories that have trickled down through your families it's the story of my great grandmother who to supplement the family income ran card games on the kitchen table behind the tailor shop at night and they look where they live next to um molly magies bar it's the story of um my grandfather's parking lot in coney island across from the entrance to steeplechase and he ended up hiring a mobster low-level mobster who had just gotten out of jail he needed a job for his cover and my papa needed some cover to keep the people off the lot from trying to get stuff out of him well that mobster tony became a really close family friend and uh when my father proposed to my mother dad was still in um school had no money for a ring which i guess you have to have a ring if you're gonna get married or if you were gonna get married in the 40s and tony happened to have a friend named lou capone who was going up the river for 10 years from when tony just arrived and so for really cheap papa was able to buy al capone our lou capone's ring with an enormous diamond which he put into a ring set from my mother and it was in a gold van without the initials lc on it my dad's name was Leonard Cohen so that worked out just fine they both got a ring for the price of one or my mama with her pocketbook and because they owned the parking lot where you could park for 75 cents a day that pocketbook was black and must have weighed 40 pounds because it was all full of quarters and the time she tapped the shoulder of a drinksman outside of a bank asking what time and he turned around with a gun and she hit him with that 40 pound black purse these are the stories that i keep and i hold close and that i share with my grandchildren if they want to know if they come over for an overnight they don't ask me to read them a story they ask me to tell them a story and i gladly do because these are their stories this is their heritage this is their dna or the time i had my son that my son tore everything out from under the sink looking for elbow breeze to clean his bike with these these are the stories that have value and meaning in our lives and i'm proud to be a storykeeper and i bet there are many storykeepers here because all our families have amazing histories and we're so blessed to hold those stories and to share them and keep them alive so are you a storykeeper too van worris you're all familiar with david bern david bern is a songwriter from talking heads and one of his songs called once in a lifetime has a set of uh well the lyrics go like this the beginning of the lyrics are of course i'm going to forget it now right you may find yourself um i'm sorry you may you may find yourself in in in shock and shock you may find yourself living somewhere else in the world you may find yourself behind a an automobile in a large automobile you may find yourself i'm sorry i'm pretty nervous you may find yourself in a big house with with with a with a woman woman that you love i'm sorry i didn't know this but i'm losing a little bit sorry or you may ask yourself well why am i here you know and no that's not what is it how did i get here i'm sorry i apologize well anyway you know about three months ago or three years ago i mean i had a patient once asked me how did you become a chiropractor not why did you become a chiropractor but how you became a chiropractor and i've never really been asked that question i've been asked why many times kind of easy to answer but i never really evaluated evaluated my life and determined how i became a chiropractor before and you know that point i always thought free will was the biggest part of my life i would have to you know i decided which direction i wanted to go i determined you know whether i became a chiropractor how i didn't school all those those things and then in this this one moment when i was thinking about my life i began to realize that there's these many these many moments these many moments that actually had a force a driving force a direction that may have and probably did alter the path that i was on that point in time in fact there are many of those moments much like vectors you know really lined up from for one end to the other and i began to realize that there's actually a straight line between the time when i was 16 years old to the time now that i'm a chiropractor i never really looked at serendipity as being a part of my life at that point in time but apparently it is and so the story really starts when i was 16 years old this hormonally driven 16 year old that finally found a girlfriend of 16 that would actually talk to me and i was one of those guys that you know i really didn't know how to talk to girls we never asked them out asked them to dance so therefore i never danced but here i am and i find a woman who are young gal that actually liked me i met her at my brother's wedding and we were both in the wedding and you know things took off that was on my junior year and we had a four-year relationship at that point in time well my senior year is beginning beginning of my senior year i skipped school the first week of school it's in it's in september with my buddy mike and we were driving to see my girlfriend kathy who lives actually in ron island i'm jones beach state park so we had a long distance relationship i leave them in wanton just falls that's about two and a half hour drive so we skipped school and we're going to meet kathy who's also skipped with the friends of her with the friend who was to go to jones beach for the day and we did had a wonderful day it was a glorious day and as all glorious moments are they they have to end at some point in time so around two o'clock we have to go home now i have to go home because we have to be home for dinner and with my with my parents obviously and i have to keep up this this illusion that somehow i went to school which obviously i didn't so we're going to leave somewhere around two o'clock in the afternoon and um anybody's most people are here from long island in new york they know the traffic and along island expressway and around new york city can be an absolute nightmare so we take off somewhere around two thirty three o'clock we're doing okay because most of the traffic at that point is leaving new york city coming out to long island so on the way to new york it wasn't that bad we got to the other side of new york we get about half hour outside of new york city in a town called that hall in new york and it's the traffic is a nightmare there's so much traffic everybody's flying at high rates it's really nice to have them go it's just really a lot real fast and really crowded streets or crowded roads anyway my buddy looks at me mike and he says this is really dangerous we need to wear seat belts i mean this is 1969 who the hell wears seat belts and i just i didn't know if they were in the car so you know we pull over and of course they're stuck way in the back you know i left the floorboard in the back we finally pull them out put our seatbelt on take off at 65 something five miles an hour get about five minutes into the road and bam someone pulls out right in front of us and we t-bone this car really bad accident that was unconscious for a little bit all i seem to remember is a darkness with the shards of glass and reflections of light when we come i come through and i wake up and mike stole the seat with the seatbelt down we take our seat belts off we go over to this car this young woman is what we thought was badly hurt but she she had a lot of little cuts on her face lots of blood the face tends to bleed quite a bit so anyway point is we were all okay she was hurt a little bit worse than we were but we weren't bad but we were brought to the hospital by ambulance and then you know here's the moment that's probably the worst moment of any parents life my father gets his car in the middle of the dinner by the way that i'm supposed to be at you know to keep up this illusion and he gets the phone call that says your son was in a car accident an hour north of you and valhalla needs to be being taken to the hospital valhalla hospital at that point so he comes and picks us up and i'm not really that bad we were released that night and then the young lady was released the next day but you know i have a few scratches but my biggest nightmare is not what's wrong with me but the fact that i'm gonna have to drive home for the next hour with my father at this moment it's you know it's it's going to be the longest hour of my entire life at that point but it turns out that that was in case like most of our parents i'm sure he was very understanding very loving and he just cared that i wasn't really hurt badly so still in high school senior year time goes by and during that time period i developed the worst neck pain you could possibly have i mean it's that kind of pain where it just lives here on your top of your shoulder pain down to my fingertips it was all the time it never stopped it lasted for the better part of 10 years so you learn to live with something like that right so i go through all the high school play basketball still has a pain um graduate most of my life at that point is about working traveling and going to college all through that time period lots of pain the entire time i went to the university to date and graduated with a degree in physical education and degree in biology and left school went back home and you know my my goal at that point was to become a doctor i wanted to become an orthopedic or or a physical therapist something that got me you know taking care of patients in the meantime i got a job in kingston new york as a manager to fitness center and it's a great job because i'm dealing with people it's the first time i'm able to deal with people constantly and and my job is to make sure that people were keeping to their you know their their their workout program so i'm there for about a year and in well in walks is beautiful i mean she is she is just you know at that point just i think is incredible and her name is ruth and she's a chiropractor and would stop me anyway um there's that flag so anyway uh all i want to do is go out of this one you know i just want to ask her on a date but i'm still pretty darn shy at this point hard to believe it 28 years old i'm still shy but i am and i really don't know how to go about it two months goodbye and she's walking on a locker room and i still haven't asked her out she walks right up to me looks me in the eye and says would you like to come to my office and learn about chiropractic i'm gonna cover practical so i'm thinking yes of course i'm gonna get i'm gonna get a date i'm going on a date with this beautiful woman well of course that's you know and i'm thinking yes she's into me of course she's into me of course she's not because what she wants is you need to learn about chiropractic so i can refer patients to her but you know from from the gym that i'm working at but at that time the hormone to fly and all i'm thinking is yes she wants to go on a date with me so wednesday comes i go into this meeting and there's eight people there i i i somehow i thought i was gonna be the only person but there's eight but there's eight people there so i'm still i'm still running on the illusion that yes she really wants to be with me but it's really that's not the case but i'm still in that space so you know the other eight people are there because they want to uh they want to learn about as much chiropractic as possible but all i want to learn oh i i don't do you know i didn't give a crap about chiropractic at that point all i want to do is go on a date with this woman so little by little each person leaves and finally i'm there alone with her so i'm about ready to ask her out she looks me right and she says would you like to be adjusted well i don't know much about chiropractic at that point but i do know that if she's if she's gonna adjust me she's probably gonna have to put her hands on her hands on me so i'm like i'm down this this is really good i'm still i still have a chance you know so i sit down she does an exam i haven't told her yet about my neck pain and i didn't at all because it's just something i lived with all this time she lays me down on a table i'm lying down on my back she's at the end of the table holding my head i'm looking up at her these beautiful brown eyes i'm falling in love by the second she says you're ready i said yes and bang she adjusts my neck it was the last thing that's ever happened to me and i'm thinking oh my god it's an exorcist moment you know i'm expecting like linda blare and the exorcist is gonna be this green vomit flying out i i i i get up and i look at her and say what the hell did you just do to me and i saw this fear in her eyes like oh my god i must have hurt her but the exact opposite was true in fact in that moment the pain went away instantly was if someone took a switch pull the switch off and it actually went away in that moment first time in 10 years so in the time that it takes a butterfly's wing to flap this woman went from the person that i really wanted to go to bed with to a mentor like that and in that moment i realized i needed to be a carpenter and i met with that with that lady many times after that to determine where i went to school and how i would go about becoming a carpenter and she got me to the school in georgia not the school she went to which is the school i wanted to go to wow but uh but georgia so i go down to georgia and i i i start school i i get a house to live in and i meet another student who's from vermont and he's down there going to car practice school as well and so uh if we became best buddies schoolmates we came here practice together his name is fran smith we both practice in vermont to this day and uh that's it jill missile the best summer of my life coincided with the best job of my life in 2012 in my home state of alaska now i'm a consultant for a living which means my jobs aren't really normal jobs they could last anything from a couple hours to a couple days to a year or more and they can encompass all sorts of tasks even though my specialty is emergency management and disaster planning being a consultant is basically telling the world that you'll do anything for money so i get a lot of when someone calls me to offer me a job or a contract it's you know i never really know what i'm gonna get so i get a call from a colleague named steve who's from an engineering firm he calls me up he says hey jill i i've got this work this summer i don't know if you're really gonna want to do it and i said all right of course inwardly and of course i want to do you're gonna pay me for something i'll do it but i played a little cool you know i said well well what is it he said well you know it's really hard physical labor okay you know i i like working out you know that might be fun he said it's in really remote locations in alaska and i'm like i'd really like to travel in alaska so that sounds all right he says well the only way to get to these sites is through like things like four wheelers now i'm really interested right but i can't be too excited because i want to get paid a lot so i say oh okay well that does sound difficult and he says there are some sites we can't get to by four wheeler so you have to take a helicopter so as the daughter of a helicopter pilot i have a lot of respect for the machine and i really know the dangers involved got a lot of lectures about it um so it's really easy to kind of say you know helicopters are fun you know who but the fact of the matter is that helicopters are really really fun so i said you know i i'm okay with those travel modes uh what's the work he said well there's gonna be a land swap between the federal government and the state government but the state government won't take the land unless the federal government gets rid of all these illegal cabins that were built on it so you have to go remove these cabins and i said all right that sounds kind of interesting but it i'm just confused because it sounds like a demolition job you know why are you calling me and he said oh because we really want someone on this job that won't burn down the state and i said burn down the state he said yeah we have to burn these cabins and i said Steve are are you calling me to ask me if i will fly around in a helicopter all summer and burn down buildings how much do i have to pay you to do this so with that the best summer of my life started so we were a ragtag group there was me the firebug there was uh andre and chad the two giants they are clearly for the muscle even though they were engineers crazy and we had kind of a string of of environmental scientists and they were all like kind of young slight women uh there for some reason i still don't know what it was but as andre was fond of saying you know hey they pull their weight all 90 pounds of it so we took we flew out to all sorts of locations we took the four wheelers out we had a blast so before you start feeling too sorry for like the people who built these illegal cabins these are just people that went out onto the land in alaska there's a lot of land and said it's really nice out here but they didn't own the land so you know this this these cabins kind of dotted the landscape and it was everything from from like a falling down old trapper cabin full of porcupine shit which by the way is extremely flammable as i discovered um to like fully formed houses like two stories really really nice and the year before they had gone and posted all of these cabins even the porcupine shit one you know with a notice hey this is what's going on if you want to keep your cabin call us up and you know make your case for keeping it so really it's not our fault that no one did and i still can't believe that no one did but um we were supposed to remove all the non-burnables from all these cabins and then burn them down and we had to hoist all the non-burnables out or drag them out with the four-wheelers um so i really took it pretty seriously even though this job was awesome um because trees in alaska are extremely flammable and burning down the state was actually a real possibility so i had to monitor these fire conditions very carefully uh we never had conditions where we could just light something on fire because of winds or proximity to other vegetation and while they promised me that i would have adequate firefighting gear uh i discovered on our first job when i went to set up the portable pump which you know you set it up by lake and it sucks up water and you can spray it had a nice good you know two inch hose which is a good size hose and no nozzle so all that would come out is like a little dribble and i couldn't really you know spray sorry so our pump isn't gonna work uh they gave me a shovel so i could dig a fire break well the shovel's about this big like that long so that's not really kind of work so we were um resigned to kind of taking apart these cabins piece by piece and um taking out the non-burnables and then i would burn the rest build like a big bonfire and we just kind of keep it under control so that's how we did it so at some point chad who was really the foreman of this operation even though i was a safety person um in the fire world the safety person always gets the last say but in the rest of the world nobody cares what the safety person has to say so chad became impatient with this idea that we had to take these cabins apart and he's like why can't we just burn them and i'm like well chad you know this whole state can go up in flames but i could tell he was getting impatient so one day he decided to drop me and the environmental scientists off to burn some quans at hut somewhere while he and dre went off to burn some other cabin so by the time that we were all reunited as a team i could tell that they hadn't listened to me because the big like white faces and big round eyes when i got on the helicopter to meet them they were like yeah we almost lost that one that was the last time they questioned my burning decisions so we at the towards the end of the summer it was all helicopter stuff which was great we'd already had our four-wheeler time so we had our helicopter pilot join us his name was Nate Nate would spend most days sleeping in the backseat of the long ranger while we worked hard until Nate became enamored of our environmental scientists realized he didn't look too cool like sleeping in the helicopter all day while his would-be love was there like shoveling porcupine crap you know so he starts trying to find these other ways of making himself useful so i go up to the helicopter one day which is park like park park it i guess you i guess you do you park it about a half mile away just because that's the only place that we could land and get something out of the helicopter and come charging back and get to our cabin which was one of those really rickety ones like really dangerous where people are stepping on nails and getting stuff dropped on their head and you know all that safety stuff. Nate's up on the roof of this ramshackle falling down cabin shoveling his vestiffs off you know and i say Nate you remember we don't have comms here right that means like radio signal he goes yeah so what i said well in order to get a radio signal we have to fly the helicopter up over the ridge he's like yeah i'm like well as the only person capable of flying the helicopter do you think maybe you should stay on the ground until then so he stayed with more safe pursuits until then but we did see amazing sights that day that we were dropped off at the kwanzit hut which was just this old broken down wreck we flew in and i noticed there was a whole lot of moose around like big moose in rut which was very scary and as we unloaded the helicopter i really as we'd forgotten the shotgun so i said to Nate i'm like hey Nate when you take off can you just fly around and shoot those moose away he's like yeah okay so he flies around the moose all scatter but there's one moose that doesn't scatter it stands there and Nate flies the helicopter over to it go away moose the moose is like um Nate kind of charges the moose a little bit with the helicopter the moose snorts at him and shits of steam come out of its nose it was amazing i was it was i did not know what was going to happen but eventually the moose just kind of turned around but that night at dinner Chad looked at the schedule and he said all right tomorrow's the day we said the day it's a day for what it's the day we burned down Sarah Palin's cabin and i realized i had lived my entire life for this job turns out the cabin show we talked about on the Denali highway was an unpermitted illegal structure but we are there at first light and it was actually quite beautiful it's on a lake it has a really nice cabin very well constructed we started taking it apart we took out all the non-burnables and what we had to do is like heave them into a cargo net and Nate would take them out and dump them all that kind of stuff and we took out a boat which was quite a sight because a boat shaped like a wing so it's under the helicopter just flying yeah it's kind of nuts so we get this cabin down and the fire's burning nice we actually had good burning conditions fire's burning the cabin's most of gone we're just kind of you know horsing out stuff so i turned my attention to Sarah Palin's outhouse and it was actually built very stoutly there's high winds in the area so there's cables chaining it to the ground this thing did not want to come down and i beat on it with a sledge hammer i tried to take it apart with tools i could not get this thing to come down it was stuck so i went and got the chop saw and a chop saw is a very large hand tool and it had a demolition blade on it which is basically this nasty 16 inch blade with a bunch of chunks of metal on it so i just walked around the the outhouse just cut a big hole around the outside pushed it over victory was mine but then i looked down into the outhouse and i realized that the backsplash is made of metal which means we have to take it out because it's not burnable and for some reason none of my crew would reach in there and get it so i say all right well what about what if i burn it and like make everything really hot and then we'll pull it out and dunk it in the lake and cool it off it'll be nice and sanitized all right cool so i grab a bunch of stuff i grab some old firewood and i throw it down hole and i grab some propane i throw down the hole and i grab some jet fuel because that's what we were doing to burn stuff jet fuel is like burns really slow strangely enough dump it in there and then i go over the fire and i pick up a log that's kind of smoldering something and flame that kind of casually dump it in there well when you mix propane and jet fuel in a confined space you make a bomb i have never seen a pink explosion before but that outhouse went up in a jet of pink fire and it was just really lucky that i wasn't leaning over at the time my eyebrows have grown back so it was a summer of adventure and it was a summer of amazing sights it was a tour of alaska unlike anything that most people will ever see and it will always be the best summer of my life thank you