 Brocken. Cancer gives, cancer takes away. Cancer gave me a lengthy running resume, and cancer took away from me the one man that made that possible. My high school track and cross country coached Charles Richards. Charles Richards was a six foot six tall, very thin African-American man in his fifties. His legs were about six feet of him. He was a former high jumper and hurdler. When you talk to him, it felt like you were talking to his belt. He was a quiet man. He never cussed, never raised his voice. But you knew you didn't do quite as well as he thought you would, because he had the same outfit every single practice. He had a baseball cap, a red shirt, and long, long brown slacks, and glasses. And he would look down at you over his glasses and simply not have to say anything. And you knew that you didn't perform as well as he thought you should have. And if you did perform as well, then it would just be another very subtle glance. I didn't realize until years later that I was a project of his, a special project, because I had a rutting impediment. I could only run one pace. It didn't matter how long the race was. It didn't matter the weather or how tired I was. My legs only moved one speed. And so he thought it'd be hilarious if he put me in the longest races, which in high school were the mile and two mile. And my mile time, my best mile time, was about a 450. And my best two mile time was about at 10 minutes. So I had one pace. And so he got pretty exasperated with me, I think, after a while. And one race in particular, one meet in particular, he put me in the half mile. So let's take this guy that's a slow pace with him in the half mile. And I showed him, because I ran the mile first in 448, and I ran the half in 224. Senior year, banquet, end of track season, I was graduating high school. I get up on stage to receive my letter. He looks to me and says two words that nobody else could hear. He said, crazy legs, which is the name that my colleagues and my teammates had given me, because they weren't crazy. They were just one speed. He said, crazy legs, go long. And it was like Yoda was saying something cryptically to me, like a running whisperer, go long. Well, I didn't have much time to do that, because two years later I was in college and I was diagnosed with the liposarcoma in my left quad. And the doctors, it was a fast growing tumor, the doctors needed to remove it right away. And so I went into surgery, had radiation, had it taken out, to have a long scar as a result of that. I'm enormously grateful to the doctors and nurses at University Hospitals in Cleveland, because going into surgery, I didn't know if I would wake up with one leg or two. They did not have a good image of the tumor. And being 20, I woke up with two and I thought that was the way things were gonna be, because when you're 20, you're sort of invincible, which also gets to why three months later, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to run a marathon. And I'd run three miles before in practice in high school. And so I asked him a question that I thought was pretty important, and that was how far as a marathon. And he said 26 miles, and I couldn't imagine what 26 miles was, but I was 20. And I said, well, that doesn't seem terribly far. And he said to be fun, which of course is what someone says is never run a marathon. And so I did the Columbus Marathon. I didn't really know what I was doing. I thought I'd finished in four and a half hours, and I ended up in 307. And I'm pretty sure I ran the same pace from mile one, because again, I didn't really know what I was doing. But I got through it because of two things. One, I heard Charles Richards' voice in my mind when I said yes, he said, go long. And secondly, I thought, well, what's a marathon more than a two-mile high school run and a 24-mile Richards extension? So that's how I thought through that, a two-mile warm-up, and then, okay, the rest is just what Charles Richards was telling me to do, Coach Richards. About seven, and I did 20, 25 marathons seven years later, I moved to Central Kentucky and a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to do a 50-miler. And I heard Coach Richards' voice saying, go long. And my friend said, well, it's less than twice a marathon. And it's fascinating how weak my mind is because that sounded pretty good. And so I did the 50-miler, which is again, it was a two-mile run and a 48-mile Richards extension. And it, of course, should not be a blizzard. And it was in December in Kentucky, and it was god-awful, but that's all right. It was a 50-mile race, and it was right. It was a modicum of fun involved in the first mile or so, and then you just sort of stick with it because you're in the blizzard and what are you gonna do? Then I moved to Vermont in 2001, and another friend of mine, and you meet weird friends when you do these kind of races, asked if I wanted to do 100-mile. And I heard Coach Charles Richards, right? It's actually, go long, go long. And he said, well, you know, there's one of the best ones in the world is an hour and a half south of you in South Woodstock. It's cheap. You don't have to run a hotel room or take an airplane. And I thought, well, okay, why not, right? That sounds pretty good. And it's a two-mile run and a 98-mile Richards extension. So I did that in 2002. Well, and I didn't know what I was doing. So I made my friend run it with me, which I thought was punishment for him. But two years later, I actually trained for it. And in 2003, I did the Vermont 100-miler. And I don't like to tell people how I do in races. My wife will say that, because I'm incredibly grateful because of having two legs to do it. But in 2003, I finished in the top 10. And I don't tell folks this, but you all are a nice, seeming nice crowd. I was ranked 35th in the world at 100 miles. Thank you, thank you. But as I was cruising through, you know, mile 70, mile 90, and looking at my watch and thinking, why, I wonder if I'm doing all right. I kept thinking of Coach Richards, like, wow, I'd love to see him right now and say, you know, thank you for this incredible gift that you've given me. Mile 99, doing it one mile to go, I'm pretty sure I was gonna finish at that point. I had this sort of imaginary conversation with him. And I thought, I really need to get in touch with him when I finish. So that fall, I went back to my hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio, and went to the high school and saw the assistant track coach who was still there when I was there and I asked, well, where's Coach Richards? He said, well, this is the first time in 26 years that Coach Richards hasn't been here. And I asked, well, I said, well, because he's ill. And I said, well, I really wanna see him. So I went back to my parents' house and I looked up his name in the phone book. He lived 10 minutes away and I called him up and his wife answered the phone. And I told her who I was and I wanted to see just Coach Richards and catch up with him and I hadn't seen him in 20 odd years. And she said, come on over. So I came over and his wife took me into the living room. He was sitting on a couch. He was down 230 pounds. And we talked about cancer. He told me that he was dying of pancreatic cancer. And he had a couple weeks left to live and so we talked about cancer and then he asked me about running. And he said, he remembered this. He said, crazy legs, have you been able to keep up your running? And I said, well, Coach Richards, funny you should ask because I remember when I was a senior, you said, go long. And so I've enjoyed long distance races. And he said, well, how far have you gone? And I said, well, and I'm always really apologetic because I don't want folk to think badly of me. I've done 50 mile races and I've done her mile races. And I swear the look he gave me, I thought he was gonna say, I feel so sorry for your wife and kids. I need to apologize to them for putting this thought in your head. But we talked for about an hour and I shared with him some deep feelings of gratitude that I had for him. And I gave him the belt buckle that I had won in the Vermont 100. You don't race these things for money, right? You win a belt buckle. And I gave it to him because I told him that I was very familiar with his belt buckle from when I was in high school. And he laughed at that. And he gave me one of the most significant embraces that I've ever had in my life when I left. And so next year, I'll be 50 and my plan is to do the Vermont 101 last time. And retire from that foolishness. And I can only hope that I will make the distance and at mile 99, I'll have another imaginary conversation with my high school coach. Thank you. Craig Jarvis. This story links probably my two favorite places from my childhood. I grew up in Virginia and I was about, wherever I was, I was about two hours from Washington, DC. And either my mom or my grandmother would always take me once a year to the Smithsonian. And it was, I loved going there. We'd go to the art museums, the Hirshhorn, the East Wing, we'd go to the Air and Space Museum, we'd go to the Natural History Museum. And I got to know a lot of them, like the back of my hand. At the Natural History Museum, I would go in and I knew exactly where to go to see things. You come in, there's this big, huge elephant that's like an African elephant that's been, I don't know if it's stuff or if it's just a model. And then if you go to the right, or if you go to the left, there's a bunch of like a diorama of animals in their natural environment. If you go to the right, there's all the dinosaurs. You go upstairs to the left, there's the old humans and then what they used to call primitive cultures. And then there's a hope diamond up there in this case, which everyone just kind of gocks at and sits there and hundreds and thousands of people that go around it. So the other place that I really loved was my grandfather's house. It was on the Chesapeake Bay or right off the Chesapeake Bay. My grandfather was an ad man. So he made ads. He built a very successful ad agency in the South. And he was known for being very artistic in his ads. He had beautiful pictures, really beautiful designs. And he retired in his late fifties and he built this house. Now in Virginia, everyone is very, very conservative. Everyone, I mean, at one point, back in Jefferson's time, it was very cutting edge and everything was very new. But since then they have basically been doing the same thing ever since. So there's a lot of colonial houses and neo-colonial and neo-neocolonial houses. But my grandfather built this amazing modern house just overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. You would walk in the front and it just kind of cascades down to this amazing grand ruin that with two stories of windows just looking over the bay and then it cascades down to the other side and into his office. And there was, you know, the walls you could see into the, there was no wall into the dining room. It was just a fascinating place. And one of the most fascinating places, the things about it was is it on top of a formation of fossils called the Yorktown Formation which were about three to five, three to five to seven million years old. And you could go to the beach right below his house and you could just pick up shark's teeth. You could pick up like scallops that were this big. It was just amazing stuff. I would spend hours and hours and hours looking. I've got a collection, you know, dozens if not hundreds of shark's teeth from spending hours on there. Now the most interesting thing that anyone ever found was my grandfather found when he was looking at the land he found this thing that looked like a human molar except for it was about 30 times bigger than a human molar, it was massive. And he didn't know what it was. So he took a picture of that and a couple of other things he found on the beach that he didn't know what they were. And he sent it to the Smithsonian. And the Smithsonian wrote back to him. He said, well, you have, one of these things you have is the vertebrae of a whale. You have something else there. And then the third thing you have, the thing that looks like a molar is a mastodontooth. And they said, we would love to have that mastodontooth as part of our collection. My grandfather said, no, you can't have it. So he put it on the shelf in the grand room and every time I went to see him, I would pick it up and hold it and just be amazed at this amazing beautiful molar. When I was about nine or nine or 10, my grandfather passed away. And my grandmother actually gave me the tooth. It was mine. But my mom and my grandmother gave me the idea, well, you know, the Smithsonian wants that tooth. Do you want to give it to the Smithsonian? And kind of just lights went off. It was like, I knew exactly where the mastodont exhibit was. You go behind the dinosaurs and then there's this little area with, there's actually a statute of some neanderthals. There's a neanderthal man and a neanderthal woman and they're looking down in this pit where they have another neanderthal man like wrapped in hides and they're gonna bury it. And so they're commenting on the neanderthals. This is how they have ceremonies for burying people. Right across from them is a mastodont skeleton, full mastodont skeleton. And then if you go catacord into that, there's a woolly mammoth skeleton. And then in between them, there's these two teeth that are on display and you can touch them and you can tell that the mastodont tooth is just like a human molar. The woolly mammoth tooth is completely different. It's like a scrub brush. It's got ridges going side to side. It's nothing like a human tooth at all. And I thought, wow, it would be amazing for my grandfather's tooth to be sitting there for everyone to see. And so I said, sure, let's give it to him. So, my mom drives us up to, I put our tooth in a shoebox and my mom drives us up to the Smithsonian. I'm sure she made some calls before. I don't know, but there was a guy, a curator, sitting there waiting for us right below the huge African elephant. And he takes us down to his office and we slowly open up the shoebox and he takes out the tooth and he just comments, oh, it's really, really beautiful. And he says, look, look right here that mastodont didn't brush his teeth before it died. So we might be able to tell what his last meal was. And we had some fun about that. And then he opens up a big map and he asked me to show on the map where my grandfather might have found the tooth. And so we found that and he put a little X there. And then he says, well, come with me. I want to show you something. So I follow him and we all follow, my mom was there and we follow him. And he opens us up into these sort of the bowels at the Smithsonian. There are rows and rows and rows of specimen drawers. There are specimen cabinets. And it's like walking through that warehouse in Raiders the Lock Ark. It just rows of them and rows of them. And we go, I don't know how far we go, but he stops and he opens up a drawer and he says, look, and I look down and there's a couple of other, two other masks on teeth. And he might have well just taken it right there. My grandfather's tooth put it in the drawer and shut it. I knew exactly what was going on. And my heart just kind of sank. My tooth was not going to be on display for everyone to see. It was going to sit in that drawer for no one to see. And it would be lost to the world. I didn't say anything. I looked at the other teeth and frankly, my grandfather's tooth was by far the most beautiful tooth. One of them was actually just, it was like a squish. It was like, you know, you'd sat on the tooth and it was nothing. The other one was like a half a tooth that would have been broken. I mean, my grandfather's tooth was just perfect. And I didn't say anything. I didn't say no, this is not what I want. I want my tooth back. I was 10 years old. So I walked out and I don't even know if I regret it. I mean, I'm sure 100 years from now when some graduate student has to do some dissertation on mastodon anatomy, he'll get some useful information on the tooth. But I feel a great sense of sadness that that tooth, that beautiful tooth is sitting there in the dark in that drawer and none of you will ever see it. Rice. I call my story turning up the heat. It was a cold March day about six years ago when I stopped by at Gifford Hospital to visit a friend and neighbor that had just had his hip replaced. And after our conversation, it was time to go home. I said, as most of us would do, is, well, is there anything I can do to help in your recovery? And he said, well, as a matter of fact, there is. He says, when I came here, I of course turned the heat down to 55 degrees to save some heat. And if you would just take the key, go into my house, turn up the heat, leave the key on the table and shut the door. I mean, leave the door, I mean, unlock the door, but leave it unlocked. And so I said, well, that's certainly not too hard. I can certainly do that on the way home. And so he gets out of bed with his Johnny on and searches for the key in his pants and the closet and his jacket and the closet and the drawers and he couldn't find the key. But again, like most of us, he said, well, I have a key at home that's hidden. All you gotta do is get that key and you get into the house and that way you can turn up the heat. And so he said, you go to my house, you go to the lower level, you can drive there pretty close and you go to a rock near the door and pry it up and underneath that rock in a glass jar with a screw top, you'll find the key. So I said, well, no problem, I'll do that on the way home. So after I get there, I take a tire iron out of the car and to use to pry off hubcaps and stuff like that. And I go over to this rock, which was really a patio block of concrete about 18 by 12 by inch and a half thick. And I pry on it and gently and broke off the corner because it was frozen solid to the ground. So my reaction was as most of us would probably say, well, this has got to have some heat to break that bond between the concrete and the ground. And so I go to my house, which is about a quarter of a mile away and I get a propane torch and bring it back and I'm heating the rock. And when I think about it hot enough, I turn the torch off and my truck is right near and instead of sticking it in a snow bank, I'll leave it in the seat of the passenger side of the truck and I go back and work on the rock when of course I smell some plastic burning. And I look towards my truck and I see a little pile of smoke coming up. So priority number one became priority number two and I go over to the truck, I take off the thing and I unscrew it of course this time because it had residual flame. And now I had to rethink about things. So far, I have a broken patio block and a hole in the seat of my precious 1991 somewhat rusty pickup truck. But I'm sort of a problem solver and I can't just leave it there. I gotta do something so I would say, I might even ask you, where do you do next? You gotta get some heat into that, some BTUs of heat into that rock. And so I thought, I don't know if anybody's got any ideas. To me, I thought, okay, water, hot water. So I go back to my house. I fill up three jugs of 130, 140 degree water out of the faucet and I bring that back and I pour two of them on that rock and while I was able to lift the rock but there was no jar, no key, nothing underneath that rock. Adjacent to that rock was another rock that looked just like it. But this rock happened to benefit from the water I put on this rock and I was able to lift it up and underneath that rock, there was a little jar and Paul, I'll call him Paul, he was an engineer and he decided to seal it. He would put some plastic like this queen or Saran wrap or something and screw the top on because you don't wanna get water into that jar that's underneath the rock. So I took it out and I looked at it and inside that jar, there was a key encased in ice. You know, I didn't make, I'm not making this stuff up. But I had the key, all I have to do now is just go over to my truck with the heater and heat the key, heat the ice until I could finally get a hold of the key and I was able to go around his house, go in his front door and expect to find a thermostat and most of us are looking for the little half circle where this side shows you the dial and it turns on your circulators when you turn it up from 55 to say 68 and then this side gives you a temperature that shuts it off. Well, instead of that, he has to have a nice plastic box with a little screen, six buttons and all I could do was push some buttons until 68 degrees came up on it and I wait there awhile hoping that's all it takes and then I left the jar and the key on the table and left the door and left it on like, because I had to do this because what if he didn't find his key? I had to get into his house and so that was pretty much the end of the story and I went home and I was waiting, I didn't wanna call him that night because I wasn't really sure that I turned the heat up and so a couple days later I did call him and I say, Paul, how are you doing? He was doing fine. I said, when you got home that night, did you find a warm house? And he said, no. And so I guess that's pretty much the end of the story. There's a few morals. One of them is things never go as easy as you think they will. The number two is I think it's a better place to hide a key. Most of us put it on a nail under the steps. The fourth one of course, don't count on turning off the torch with the thing. You gotta unscrew it off the top and don't put it in your truck. And I guess the fourth one I guess would be asked if you don't know how a thermostat's gonna work, one of these modern programmable thermostats is gonna work, you better ask questions. Kate Harbaugh. In 2009, I lived in Chicago. I had recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Master of Fine Arts degree and text and image. I had a boyfriend and I also had a job. I was getting paid to be a writer at a small e-learning company there in Chicago. Things were going well. In early February, I got a phone call from my boyfriend and he broke up with me out of the blue over the telephone. I was pretty devastated. But I did what I thought all self-respecting people do and I threw myself into my job. About two weeks later to the day, at the end of the day, I was pulled into a conference room and I was told that I was getting let go with one third of the rest of the company. It was 2009 after all. So that night as I walked back to my apartment, I looked around at the city that I had truly fallen in love with and I felt kicked to the curb. So I decided then and there that it was time to leave and that I was gonna head back to the East Coast. My father lives in Pennsylvania and I figured I would go there first just to see maybe I'd get a job in DC. So I packed up my tiny Honda and I drove across the country to Pennsylvania. Once there I unpacked a few things and about two days later, I got a phone call from my mom around 11 o'clock at night and she said to me, your memory has passed away. So the next morning I woke up and I told my dad I have to go. My mom lives in New Hampshire. So I packed the few things that I had unpacked and I got back in my little Honda and I went north. Once there I sort of settled into a routine. I helped her navigate the loss of her mother and I relished in the glow in the dark stars over my bed in the childhood bedroom that I was calling home once again. Even my eighth grade boyfriend's name was scrawled and glow in the dark paint on the wooden beams. And I got a job, I was waiting tables, I was catering and eventually I did land a desk job even though there was a hiring freeze. But slowly I slid into a pretty deep depression. And one of my friends, this woman Marissa that I had known for probably about 10 years called me and she said, I think I know what you need. You need a man. And I sort of shrugged and actually agreed. And she gave me a couple of emails for two or so guys that she knew in the area that she thought really highly of. This one guy in particular, a guy named John, he had a job, he had a dog and he liked to hike. So we started to chat over email and after a couple of back and forths we agreed to get coffee together. So we went into downtown Hanover right there where Dartmouth College is and we got coffees and we walked to this place called the Big Empty Meeting Area. He had his dog with him and he proceeded, it was a normal conversation, it was flowing, it was comfortable and about halfway through he sort of leaned in and said, my dog does the strangest thing. She likes to eat human feces. And I actually didn't respond. I didn't quite know how to handle that kind of comment. I didn't know what kind of appropriate questions you asked to a statement like that. So I let it go and the date came to its natural end and we agreed that we'd probably like to see one another again. So a couple of days went by and he asked me to go get dinner with him. So I met him in a little pub in downtown Lebanon, New Hampshire and we ordered beers and burgers and about halfway through the date he looked at me and he said, I have something I need to tell you. And exactly, I actually got, it's like the worst sentence you want to hear at basically any point in any relationship. So I said, okay, what's going on? What do you have to say? And he said, oh, it's really hard to say. And I was like, no, just tell me, you can just be honest with me. And he said, well, I do this thing when I get drunk and I actually felt a sense of relief because people do a lot of stupid things when they get drunk. And he goes, oh, I can't believe I'm gonna tell you this, but here it goes. So when I get drunk, I poop in public. And I had no idea what to say to that. So I'm trying to figure out, does he have a fear of pooping in maybe a public restroom and that he gets a couple of beers under his belt and he decides that he can use a public restroom? I think he sees my concern and he sort of fills in the gaps and he says, no, no, I get drunk and then if I'm angry at somebody, I'll actually go, I got mad at this girl once and I went and I pooped next to her car. And my landlord got really mad, I got really mad at my landlord one time so I actually pooped on his doorstep. And my best friend actually does this also and we have spades that we carry with us and it's like this thing we do. I actually don't remember what I said, but I do remember that I extricated myself from that date and that relationship and I proceeded to avoid him at all costs. A few days later though, my friend Marissa, my dear friend Marissa called me, I was leaving work and she was very excited to hear about how this date went. And I right up front said it was absolutely terrible, it was terrible. She's like, why, what happened? You guys are such a perfect match. And I said, Marissa, he poops in public. To which there was this really long sort of pregnant pause. And she said, he told you? To which I then asked, wait a second, you knew? That's it. Dave, Kelly. We like to think of our stories as having beginnings and ends, but really our stories flow like rivers. Funny flows into sad, to bitter sweet, to heartbreaking, to hopeful, to love, sometimes back to funny. I told this story five years ago because five years ago I thought it was funny. And it started 20 some odd years ago when one of the lawyers in the Northeast Kingdom had his license suspended and a lot of his files landed in my lap. And some of those files were big, thick files that had a lot of time and attention put into them. And some were thin, simple files. And one afternoon I got a notice from the Caledonia County Court telling me that one of those thin, simple files was going to trial the next week. And so I pulled the file and I looked at it and it was a pretty simple personal injury case. It looked like a fellow had been at the American Legion in Lindenville and he'd been drinking beer late at night on a Saturday night. And according to the file, he'd gone out to his car to get some cigarettes, but it was dark and there wasn't enough light in the parking lot and he tripped over the guardrail and fell down the embankment and wound up with what I would call a fairly unusual injury. And you'll learn more about that injury in a minute. But the defense attorneys in that case were Downs-Rackland and Martin. And so I called the Downs-Rackland office and I said, can I talk to the attorney that's handling this file? And they put me in touch with this young fellow who'd just gotten out of law school. And I don't think he'd ever tried a case before. I hadn't talked to him before. And I said, why don't we just try to settle this? We can settle this pretty quickly. And he said, well, I don't think we really can. And it turned out this young fellow right out from law school had talked to every single person that had been at the American Legion that Saturday night. And he knew a lot more about the case than I certainly knew or ever wanted to know, probably. But one of the things he told me was that one of the people he interviewed drove into the parking lot with his headlights on and as he drove into the parking lot he saw my client peeing over the guardrail. And my client was naturally startled and being startled, he was in a rush to zip up his fly. And he got some things caught in his fly. And it was a fairly painful experience, painful enough so that he lost his balance, went over the guardrail, and wound up with a fairly unusual injury. And so I said, we're not really gonna try this case, are we? And he said, well, unless you wanna dismiss it. And I said, look, I'm a pretty flexible guy. I can change my theory on a case on a minute's notice. And I have a new theory that there just weren't enough urinals in the American Legion that night. And he said, if you wanna try the case on that theory, that's what we're gonna do. He was a very nice guy and we went to court and we got to court and the judge was David Jenkins who had been a fraternity brother of my uncles at UVM. And I said, well, there might be some hope for this case. And we put our witnesses on. I didn't really have a lot of witnesses. I had my client and Keith had all the witnesses. And so Judge Jenkins, who I thought might be sympathetic, said after we had tried the case, I'm gonna retire to the judge's chambers for a minute and think about this. And five minutes later he came back and he said, this is gonna be a defendant's verdict and there are no damages. And on the way out of the courthouse, my client said, well, we're gonna take an appeal, aren't we? And I said, well, I don't think so. But Keith and I became good friends after that case. We both lived in Montpelier and we would see each other on the street. And Keith was just a very witty guy and he always had a joke and frequently this case would come up. And I myself was involved in politics, usually losing elections. And those would be a source of wit and humor and jokes as well. And as we became better friends, we started having supper at the last Thursday night of every month. And we had another group of lawyers that were friends of ours. We called ourselves slackers and we weren't really slackers. We were all really hardworking lawyers but we like to think of ourselves as slackers and we would get together the last Thursday of the month and we would talk about the challenges and the difficulties and the stresses of being lawyers. We thought we did anyway. There's a passage from a river runs through it where Norman McLean's father says, why is it those people who need help the most are the ones we sometimes just can't help? Either it's because we can't offer what they need or they don't want what we have to offer. The people we're closest to sometimes elude us. We can love them, we can love them completely but we can't completely understand them. And we didn't understand Keith's darkness because if we did, maybe we could have reached out to him. Maybe we didn't have what he needed or we couldn't give him what he wanted. But on January 11th, 2017, Keith took his life and a story that was once funny was heartbreaking. Thank you. Brazil, Hamrell. Let me take you back to 2011, August. The phone rings, it's a Sunday evening and the phone rings and I pick it up and a woman says, my name is Bridget O'Brien. Raciel, would you like to be a model? We can pay you $200 for a half a day's work. This Bridget O'Connell was calling from JDK which is a big was, a very big advertising agency on Battery and Maple Street. Being a model at 73. Makeup, clothes, wow, all right. I said, yeah, okay, I can do it, okay. Well, she said, I have to come, I have to take pictures. I have been asked by JDK to find five women between 60 and 80 and we'll see how that goes. So she came Monday morning and took a bunch of pictures and at five o'clock I got a call from Amelia at JDK. I had been selected and Amelia says now you need to come nine o'clock tomorrow morning to the JDK advertising agency and you need to bring a couple of changes of clothes. You need to bring earrings and scarves and different shoes, okay, and off, I packed up a little suitcase and went down and would you believe it was a real shoot. There was a stylish, there was stylists, there were photographers, there was a makeup artist, there was even somebody for the hair, wow. And so there was three of us and they dressed us and undressed us and dressed us and undressed us until they got exactly what they wanted and then they took us to North Champlain Avenue in front of, across from Nuenand there is an old firehouse that's there and they posed us and they took photos and they gave another pose and we were treated like royalty. They gave, brought us breakfast, they did portraits. I tell you what an afternoon, what it was in the morning, it was fabulous. Something though was bothering me, okay. I mean, this was a high end shoot. I said to Amelia, who's paying for this? And what are you gonna do with the photos? And she said, Lulu Lemon. Lulu Lemon, the high end yoga company, real high end fancy tops and bottoms. They have the big store, little store on Church Street. Lulu Lemon is paying for this and it's going to be in one of the runner's magazines in December. I am not a runner. I don't know about runner's magazines. So I go down to Barnes and Noble. You know, they have all the sections. I stand in front of the runner's section, okay, and look at all the different titles and I ask the guy, when do you get in the December issues? He said at the beginning of November. So I had a month to wait. November 1st, I was up down. I was there. I was there and I began to look through all the magazines and I take runner's world off the stand. Thief through runner's world, whole page. That's me, circulation 600,000. I am a storyteller. That was one choice story. So I made copies of the photo and I told a story to everybody. My dentist, my doctor, PT 360 still has it hanging and I signed each of these copies. Larry, Novens. Six words. Six words spoken to me at the end of an evening of great tragedy. Six words spoken to me by a man who stepped out of character, a man who at any other time would have been a threat to me and possibly dangerous to me. When I was growing up, my family lived on a small wooded road. Before they paved the road, it was called Shady Lane. My dad commuted from our home about an hour south to New York City where he was a reporter. He was a correspondent for CBS News. And one night when I was in sixth grade, he came back home with some news for us. Excuse me. Two months later, instead of walking home through a shady road, I walked by a security guard and opened a heavy door into an 11 story apartment building, walked up three flights of stairs because the elevator didn't always work, and into a small apartment where the room my sister lived in doubled as a dining room. There was a small balcony off the room, which we weren't allowed to go on because it looked like it might fall down. The building was probably 10 or 15 years old, but it looked like it was 50 years old. Our 11 story apartment building was one of many on a very broad, wide street. About two miles down the street was the Kremlin. We were in Moscow in the heart of the Soviet Union in the darkest and coldest days of the Cold War. When I started school there, I went to an Anglo-American school. The other kids in my school were children of other reporters, children of diplomats, Western people. I had friends from France, from Norway, from England, Canada, from Argentina, from Israel, and friends from Japan. I went from this school. I had very little opportunity to meet with Russians, but I had one Russian friend who I met, and one time he took me and another American friend of ours to the movies, and when he got home, his father found out what he had done and took out his belt and whipped him in punishment. And not only did that, but in order to make the punishment public and to show the rest of the world what his son had done, and mostly to protect himself from any accusation that he'd allowed his son to hang out with Americans, he shaved his head. It was a very, very different world. Several months after we moved there, I saw my first parade go through Red Square to celebrate the Russian Revolution. I remember the sound of tanks rumbling across the cobblestones of Red Square and the sound echoing off the walls of the Kremlin. I remember also there were APCs and these enormous mobile missile launchers, but what I remember most clearly of it all was the sort of thunderous sound of thousands and thousands of soldiers use stepping across Red Square looking over their right shoulders at the Kremlin leaders standing on top of the mausoleum of Lenin's tomb on Red Square. Opportunities in those days in Russia to listen to music were few and far between. I could turn on the radio and there would be two stations basically in Moscow that either played patriotic Russian music or classical music. It was not the kind of music that this 12 year old budding music fan really wanted to listen to. So every once in a while, when my parents would go out, I would have a chance to listen to the music that I wanted to listen to. And one Friday night, shortly after the parade, my parents went out to dinner at the apartment of the Time Magazine correspondent. They lived on the other side of town. And so I took from my dad's office his zenith trans-oceanic seven band shortwave radio and managed to tune through the jamming and the jammed radio stations to find the voice of America broadcasting in English. And I could listen to the music that I was beginning to love and the music that I found enjoyable. And around nine o'clock in the evening, the music suddenly stopped. We interrupt this broadcast for a news bulletin. President John F. Kennedy has been shot and gravely injured in Dallas, Texas. Details to follow. I knew this would be important to my dad. I called him where he was and I said, here's what I just heard on the radio. He goes, I'm on my way home. Get my typewriter, get ready. As soon as I get home, we'll go down to the broadcast studio and go to work. So by the time my dad got home, we knew that President Kennedy had died. I jumped in the car with him. We went down to the central telegraph office, which is where he broadcasted from. Went in the side door up to the second floor. They assigned him a small studio. It was about 10 by 10. If you can imagine a small building, a small room, 10 by 10, one small window, one overhead light, a small wooden table, two chairs, a microphone and a set of headphones. And my dad started broadcasting and talking about what President Kennedy's death might mean to US-Soviet relations. Well, after a couple of hours there, and this started after nine o'clock, so I was getting near midnight. I'm getting bleary-eyed. I had been a very long, emotional, difficult day. And I said to my dad, I'm gonna step outside and just get a breath of fresh air. And so I put on my coat and went out into the cold November night in Moscow. And in those days, it was actually almost safe to go outside. It wasn't like it is now. So I walked down the stairs. I went out the door. I walked up to the corner to Gorky Street, which is the main street in Moscow. It was on that street that the parade through Red Square began. And I turned to my right to walk toward Red Square. I could see it in the distance, probably about half, three quarters of a mile away. You could see the tall walls, red brick walls of the Kremlin and the entranceway into Red Square. And as I took a couple of steps, I saw something move in the shadows. And it was a form and it emerged from the shadows. And it was a man and he was tall and he was wearing a long, heavy coat and one of those thick Russian fur hats. And he walked right up to me and he stopped and in heavily accented speech in English. He said, I'm very sorry about your president. And I don't remember what I did. I don't remember if I responded to him or if I said anything. I don't remember turning around. I don't remember walking back to where my dad was. I don't remember anything else about that evening, but I remember those six words. And I remember that man who obviously knew who I was and was there watching to see what the Americans might be doing. I remember that man stepping out of his role, stepping out of who he was to share a moment of empathy and human kindness and connection with me. And obviously, I'll never forget that. So I looked at the future and I think maybe in another year, you know, somebody will be having a dinner, somebody will be telling a story and they'll talk about someone who stepped out of their role, someone who reached out to them and shared a moment of sympathy and a moment of humanity with them. And I hope that the person they're talking about can be one of you. Thank you. Mark Stein. I used to hang around a lot with the Druids in central Vermont. Anyone here spending time with the Druids? Ivan and Fern. So one of the things I did with them once was a fire walk. You know, 10 feet of flaming hot coals. And in my mind, the question was not, can I walk on fire? Because anyone can walk on fire. The question in my mind was, can I walk on fire slowly? You know, because I have in my, you know, one part of my brain that's the part of my brain that understands cause and effect and the need for self-preservation. And that part of my brain obviously wanted me to walk quickly in sort of a mincing step across the fire to minimize contact with the fire. But the part of my brain that loves a story wanted to walk slowly across the coals with a kind of a serene expression on my face, which is what I did three times. The third time I actually paused for just a second in the middle. And I don't know why, but my feet were not burned. I had had a similar experience many, many years earlier. I was living and working in New York, although for this period I had briefly moved across the river to North Bergen, New Jersey in a really ill-conceived bid to save money on rent. So, yeah, it was a bad idea. So I had spent the whole day working in the magic department of the costume and novelty store where I had a job. I was really tired. I just wanted to get home. So I was making my way to Port Authority. Now the bus terminal for New Jersey Transit back then in Port Authority was this big enclosed concrete structure. And you got to your bus by going up an escalator into this like sealed glass booth where you would wait for your bus and that prevented you from dying of carbon monoxide asphyxiation while you waited to get to New Jersey, which I guess was kind of a mixed blessing. So on this one particular day I got to the top of the escalator and I looked down the length of the glass booth and halfway down is a police officer and he is standing with his back to the corridor and his hand planted against the wall and he has pinned to the wall this young, very pretty woman who looked really drunk. And he was kind of aggressively flirting with her in a way that I thought was a real abuse of the power dynamic. So, you know, what am I gonna do? My bus is right there. So I walked down the corridor and I got past this police officer and I guess some part of me brushed into some part of him because I hear him shout at the back of my head, excuse me, excuse me. So I turn around and he's like facing off like I guess he's grandstanding for this woman he'd been flirting with. You know, and the cause and effect, you know, self-preservation part of my brain is going, Mark, your bus is right there. Just get on the bus and go home to New Jersey. And the part of my brain that loves a story also hates a bully. So I turned around and I look at the guy and he goes, excuse me. So I said, you know what, you're a jerk. And then I turned around and started walking towards my bus and he shouts at the back of my head, asshole, faggot. So I turned around and at this point, the cause and effect, self-preservation part of my brain has gone on vacation to the Bahamas and has turned on the auto responder on its email, right? Like, sorry, I didn't get your message, Mark will return your email when he's done getting his ass kicked tonight. So I turned around and I looked at that cop and I said, what did you call me? And he goes, what did you call me? And ran up to me and slammed me into the wall and spun me around, grabbed my briefcase and handcuffed me behind my back. So now he's got the handcuffs in one hand and my briefcase in the other and he starts walking me down towards the precinct. Now I have a lot of experience with bullies and I have found that what infuriates a bully the most is a tone of voice and manner that says, I find you absolutely hilarious and completely fascinating and a little sad. I have perfected this tone of voice and manner over many years of being an insufferable smartass. So we're walking to the precinct and this cop says, you walk behind a police officer, you're lucky I didn't spin around and shoot you. So I said, well, if it's that dangerous to walk behind you, you picked a pretty bad place to stand and he said, oh, you're pretty smart, aren't you? So at this point, I craned my neck way around and said, as a matter of fact, I am very smart. So he said, oh yeah, maybe you should be a training sergeant to which I responded, maybe you need training. So yeah, things were going great for the part of my brain that loves a story. So he takes me down to the precinct and handcuffs me to the wall where I stand for three and a half hours. The first thing they did was they took my briefcase and opened it up, unzipped it and dumped it out on a table. Well, I'd been working at a magic store all day. So my briefcase was full of like trick decks and spools of invisible thread and a rubber frog, which one of the police officers picked up and looked at me with this look of just unconcealed contempt. And I said, it's a rubber frog. If you squeeze it, it'll make noise. And I'm standing there handcuffed to the wall and my feet are killing me and my bladder is screaming. But I am faking nothing. I am loving every second of it. At one point, this police officer's partner walked up to me, a big guy, and he walks up and he says, you bumped into my partner? I've never heard anything like this in my entire life. You bumped into my partner? What if I bump into you? And he accentuated each word bump by slamming his chest into my face. And then he says, if I bump into you, you wouldn't like it. Would you? In fact, you'd be intimidated. So I looked up at this guy with my best look of sort of like casual open curiosity and said, what? And he just kind of got this confused look on his face and walked away. There was one kind of tense moment at one point, one of the police officers walked past me and then said to his buddies, hey, look at him just standing there like nothing's even the matter. And another one looked back and said, yeah, we could change that in a hurry. At this point, cause and effect self-preservation marks sort of like checked his email and was like, whoa, Mark's in a little bit over his head this time. Better order another margarita. And went back to vacation. Finally, after three and a half hours, they unlocked me and gave me an arrest report with a summons for disorderly conduct and told me I could get my things and go. And I knew how in their minds this part of the story goes. This is the part where I hastily gather up my belongings and shuffle out of the police station and there was no way because I was walking on fire and I was gonna walk slowly. So I walked over to the desk and started very carefully and meticulously rearranging my effects. Invisible thread goes here, rubber frog goes here and they yell at me from behind the desk, sir, could you do that outside the precinct? And I looked over and said, what this, what I'm doing right now, you'd prefer me to do this outside of the precinct? And then I closed the briefcase and I started it zipping it up. One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, slowly. And then I could slowly make my way to the door to the precinct. And at the door to the precinct that led to Port Authority, I found cause and effect self-preservation Mark waiting for me and he's like, dude, high five, you made it. And the part of me that loves this story and hates a bully was like, oh no, no, I'm not quite done here. And so I turned back around and looked at the interior of the precinct and said in as expansive a voice as I could, thanks guys, this was great. We should all do it again sometime. And then I turned around and left and my feet were aching, but they were not burned. Thank you.