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The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: Live from Portsmouth
00:52:47
In this hour, a special live edition of The Moth from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Hosted by Dame Wilburn, with additional hosting by Jay Allison. A mother tries to model confident behavior after moving to China; a man goes on a dangerous rescue mission;...
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- [00:01]
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- [01:43]
Jay Allison
From PRX this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show and this time we bring you stories from a live Moth mainstage event produced in partnership with the Music hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Your host for this show, poet, storyteller and writer Dame Wilburn.
- [02:04]
Dame Wilburn
Good evening. How are you doing? Nice, nice, nice. I want to welcome to the Moth at the Music hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I can't tell you how excited I am to be here, how much I love this town and I love y'all. It's been a good couple of days. So our theme tonight is high anxiety. And I have not been in Portsmouth long, but Portsmouth has caused me some anxiety and I'd like to tell you why. So I'm from Michigan and in Michigan. Thank you. Thank you, friends of the north. I bring you greetings from the tundra. The second tundra. Y'all got it too. I like to know what time things are happening and what time things are happening is part of my thing. But I also like to know how long it takes to get somewhere. Now, in Michigan, we measure this in minutes, in hours. And you know, we say things like, well, that's about an hour away and I would love to. Well, Portsmouth kind of does the same thing. But apparently there's a caveat to Portsmouth and this part of New England that's called traffic. So when you ask someone, well, how long does it take to get there before they give you a number? They give you, what could possibly go wrong? They're like, well, it depends. I'm like, what do you mean? Time is a thing? Like, it's got a beginning and an end. What do you mean, it depends? Well, hmm. Okay. And I love this one. This is the one I heard the most. Well, on a normal day, that's about 45 minutes. And I'm like, well, how many normal days are there? Well, I'm like, do we. Is there any kind of timeframe for what's gonna happen? And I love how no one will just say no. They won't just say no. And then I love when I try to answer the question. So someone asked, how long does it take to get from here to Boston? My response was 45 minutes. Six people around me went, well. I'm like, okay, so what are the well times? And the well time? I love, it's 45 minutes. And there's always that person who drives like a fool. So the person who drives like a fool is like, oh, I can get there at 30. And then there's this other person that's like, well, it could be a day. You know, that seems to be the caveat. It's like, well, how long does it take to Maine? You get to Maine. Maine is literally on the other side of the bridge. How long does it take to get to Maine? Well, okay, the map says four minutes. Well, it all depends. Seriously, four minutes depends. And then last night, I found out that it does depend because it took 25 minutes. But I can't express to you how beautiful I find this town, how wonderful everybody has been to me since I've been here. Love it. Thank you so much. So when I asked our first storyteller, tell us about a time that made your heart race. She said, I was snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, and I saw a shark. My first thought was, will it eat the pregnant woman? Does it know I'm pregnant? But she also wanted me to tell you that in the end, she didn't get eaten. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Katherine Palmer.
- [05:44]
Katherine Palmer
Over the years, I've had a number of parenting theories in the hopes of achieving my parenting goals. These theories are not based on data, and I frequently abandon both my theories and my goals. But the one goal I was dedicated to was that my two sons would grow up to be individuals who were comfortable and confident in new situations. My obsession with this goal is I am rarely comfortable or confident in new situations. In fact, if it were up to me, I would never go anywhere new and I would not meet new people. But as a college professor, it's rarely up to me. And I go new places and I meet new people all the time, and I secretly dread every minute of it. I'm good at what I do, but I have to force myself to do these things. And my goal for my boys is that they would grow up to be people who welcomed new experiences and didn't secretly dread every minute of it. So the working theory was that I could create confident new experience seeking adults by modeling confident behavior, even though I wasn't actually confident myself. I had their entire childhoods to test this hypothesis. So I started by moving my family to China when the boys were five and eight years old. I figured if I could fake confidence traveling to and living in a foreign country that bore no resemblance to our life back in the States, I would have succeeded. So the key to faking confidence is planning, leaving nothing up to chance. So I plan, and I check my plans and I recheck my plans until I drive everyone around me crazy. And I knew a move to China would require the highest level of planning I had ever attempted. So my two sons and my husband and I flew from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Beijing and then on to Chengdu, China, where we would be living. And as I got off the plane, I immediately was aware that nothing was familiar. Not the sights, not the sounds, not the smells. So far, mission accomplished. So we settled into Chengdu, and I found I was very content to be picked up every morning by a driver, driven to my teaching assignment, and then delivered back to our apartment in the afternoon. I was very comfortable teaching, but when I would get back to the apartment, my boys were ready for a new adventure in their new city. And on the weekends, these adventures often included trips to the art market. Now, back in the States, I only shop for food because you have to shop for food. I don't shop for other things like gifts and clothes, because that usually means going somewhere new and having to interact with new people. The beauty of grocery stores is the people who work there don't care what you buy and they leave you alone. So I don't enjoy grocery shopping, but I am very, very good at it. If you judge success by time in the store, I've made my boys very efficient shoppers. We only go to one grocery store and we know where everything is. I actually time myself when I grocery shop. It's as if I'm working towards some sort of qualifying trials for the grocery store Olympics. But it was clear that in China, we would be shopping for things other than food. And the art market became the place, our go to place for doing this. The first time we went to the art market, I quickly realized that very little English was spoken there and our Mandarin is not what it should be. I was immediately overwhelmed by the bargaining that was going on and the vendors calling to us, trying to get us to buy all things Chinese. These are situations I dread. All the noise and commotion. And I alternate between wanting to scream to just make it all stuff, or wanting to run from the noise. These are not good options if you're trying to model confident behavior. So on that first visit to the art market, when I really thought I couldn't tolerate anymore, a man appeared out of nowhere. He was ageless, but clearly old and his English was impeccable. And he quickly integrated himself into our shopping that day, giving us advice and helping us negotiate. He would become our shopping guide for our art market excursions, guiding our purchases and being reimbursed by the vendors. And just as he would appear out of nowhere when we arrived at the art market, he seemed to disappear the same way, giving my boys the sense that he was magical. I thought he was magical as well, because unwittingly, he'd become part of my plan. Not only did he make shopping tolerable, he made me look like a confident shopper in a foreign country. So it turned out while we were in China, my husband would have a birthday. And my husband was born in the year of the rooster. So what better, more culturally appropriate gift than a statue of a rooster to celebrate his birth year? So I waited for a day when he was busy so the boys and I could go on an art market shopping adventure. By now, I had a zone of comfort in Chengdu. To work and back with a driver, to the grocery store and back with a card that said very specifically in Mandarin where I was going and to the art market because of our shopping guide. So as we left that morning, the boys did not realize that we were looking for a gift for their dad. They just knew that we were looking for a statue of a rooster. Young children are not good at keeping secrets related to surprises. They just don't get the timing of when you should tell the secret. So my solution to this was to tell them that we were never going to tell their dad about this trip. And I really emphasized that he could never know. So as the boys and I left, we fully expected to see our shopping guide when we got to the art market. And honestly, I wouldn't have attempted the outing otherwise. But he was nowhere in sight. I had no way of contacting him. So this was not something I could plan. And my first reaction was to turn around and head back to the apartment. But I stopped myself. I could do this, and the boys were my motivation. After all, the vendors had always been very kind to use whatever English that they knew to help us with our purchases. We were only looking for a statue of a rooster. How hard could that be? So the art market is outdoors and it's organized in long rows of open air stalls. I braced myself and I approached a likely vendor. And I saw that he had a chart of all the animals of the Chinese years. And suddenly I felt very confident. I would point at a rooster and then I would show with my hands that I wanted a statue of a rooster and not a picture. And I did this fully aware that my boys were witnessing my incredibly calm approach at bridging this communication gap. The vendor watched me, and the next thing I heard was, no cock for you. And then, without taking a breath, he yelled down the long row of stalls, the white lady needs a cock. Who has a cock for her? Needless to say, I hadn't planned on this. And suddenly I was surrounded by well meaning men holding various sized statues of roosters, all calling to me, I have a better cock. I have a cheaper cock. But the focus seems to be on the size of the cock that I want, with lots of calls of, you want big cock or little cock? I am now awake in my worst nightmare. And the nightmare is not being bombarded by this word or having the boys exposed to it. And the nightmare isn't even the noise and commotion. The nightmare is that the boys are witnessing me panic and completely lose control of this situation. I feel like I'm literally drowning and pulling them with me. It would have been hard to model less confident behavior as I grab their hands, announcing, I don't like anything, any of the cocks, and bolted from the art market. On the ride back to the apartment, I wondered what I could possibly say to lessen the impact of this fiasco. But I stayed silent. I'm originally from New England and this is a common strategy. We. We pretend something hasn't happened by not talking about it. Yeah. So we got to the apartment and my husband had already returned and he greeted us with, I didn't expect you back so soon. Evidently this can't go unanswered. So my younger boy says mom was looking for a cock but couldn't find one she liked. Always a fan of new words, he's adopted this vocabulary. This is followed by his older brother admonishing him, saying, you weren't supposed to say anything. Mom said to never tell. At this point, my husband and I are both laughing. I'm laughing because the trauma of this event has been lost on the boys. The only thing they've taken away is that I'm a discerning shopper and would not settle for the wrong item. You never know what you're modeling for your kids and I'd like to tell you that back in the States that I'm more confident, but I continue to be uncomfortable in a variety of everyday situations and I continue to cope with this by over planning when my older boy was ready for high school, this included insisting that we take the public bus and practice getting to his building. And when I offered to write it all down for him, he turned and said, I found my way around Beijing on the subway. I'm pretty sure I can find my high school. And I smiled because after all, that had been the goal all along. Thank you.
- [17:27]
Dame Wilburn
Ladies and gentlemen, Katherine Palmer.
- [17:30]
Jay Allison
Katherine Palmer is an audiologist and university professor. She lives in Pittsburgh where she and her husband have raised their two boys. She's a frequent storyteller at mall story Slams. To see a photo of Katherine, her husband and sons on a rickshaw in China, Visit our website themoth.org Support for the moth comes from 20th Century Fox's the Post. Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks unite to bring audiences the true story of the COVID up of the Pentagon Papers and the journalists who risked everything to expose the truth in theaters everywhere January 12th, the Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by prx.
- [18:20]
Intuit Representative
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- [18:57]
Jay Allison
This is the Moth Radio Hour from prx. I'm Jay Allison. And we're bringing you a live event from the Music hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The host for the show, Dame Wilburn.
- [19:09]
Dame Wilburn
When I asked our next storyteller tell us about a time that made your heart race? He said, when I met my wife's parents for the first time, the family dog threw up on my foot. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Joe Lentini.
- [19:39]
Joe Lentini
I'm a climber, which is fairly remarkable given the fact that when I first climbed, I was petrified of heights. Every time I went out, I'd say to myself, if I ever get out of here alive, I will never do this again. But when you're 16 years old and you get back down to the ground, the exhilaration overwhelms the terror. And every time I went out, the terror was a little less. The exhilaration was a little more. And I loved it. I loved it. And I started climbing in all my free time on weekends. Weekends became weeks, weeks became months. I was a dirtbag climber. When I was 19 years old, I triggered an avalanche high up in a gully, a long, narrow ice gully. And I was nearly swept hundreds of feet down, probably to my death. I knew 5% of what I needed to know to be in that place. And by luck, just by luck, that 5% is what I needed to survive. I spent a lot of time after that learning about the science of snow. A few years later, I was offered a job teaching climbing in northern New England. Well, I didn't know if I could share my passion with my profession, but I would get paid to go climbing, and that's not so bad. So I moved to North Conway, where there was a small group of hardcore climbers, climbers just like me. We worked together, we climbed together, we trained together, we lived together. We did everything together. We were a community. We were a family. That ability to be on the rock where nothing existed in the universe except what I could touch with my hands or my feet, to push myself to my complete limit, and then, when necessary, to push a little further. There was a young climber, part of our community. He was local. His name was Albert. We were on the cliff together one day on different climbs with clients, and his client was having trouble standing up on his feet. He was leaning into the rock. That's not good when you're rock climbing, especially hundreds of feet up. And he looked down at him and he said, stand up. Stand up like a man. I grew up in a house in New Hampshire whose kitchen floor was steeper than this. That was the type of intensity and drive we all had. Part of my community, part of my family. I was asked to be in an elite new mountain rescue team. Elite, because when you're high up in the mountains at 2 in the morning and it's 20 below and the wind's blowing at 70, you need to know that the person on your shoulder is solid, and they need to know that you're solid. Winter in the mountains is where I like to spend a lot of my time, guiding clients up Mount Washington. And one weekend there was a nor'easter coming in. I could see it on the maps. It was a big one. But I knew it wasn't going to hit until a little later in the afternoon. And I said to my clients, we will not be able to summit today, but if you want, we can get up to treeline. We can feel the oncoming storm. They were game. When we got two thirds of the way up the mountain and got above the scrub pines and onto the exposed rock, we were feeling the oncoming force of the storm blowing 50, 55. It was probably about 10 degrees. The wind was like hands on me, moving me around, trying to push me out of balance. The cold was trying to find any gap in my face mask or goggles to try to freeze little bits of flesh I had pushed as far as I was comfortable with. I didn't have to say anything. I simply pointed down and we headed down the mountain. And soon we were down in the shelter of the trees. When we were there and the face mask came down and the goggles went up, everybody's eyes were the size of silver dollars. I took my clients back to town and then headed home. The storm was really beginning to break at this point. It was really beginning to rage. I got home, I had my plate of pasta and my two glasses of cheap red wine, and I went to bed. But in the middle of the night, the phone was ringing. There were two climbers missing on Mount Washington. The team assembled the next morning, but the nor'easter was passing us. We were on the backside of it, and the backside of it means that the counterclockwise flow is now pulling cold arctic air down on us. The winds were accelerating. The temperatures were plummeting. We searched, but the winds were blowing 70, 80. It was 20 below zero. And the wind wasn't just moving me around, it was knocking me down. The cold wasn't looking for little bits of flesh. It wanted my hands and my feet, and I couldn't feel them. We searched all day, and we never found a sign of the two Young climbers from Pennsylvania who had come up on their own to do a climb on Mount Washington. The next morning, we gathered again and headed up into Huntington Ravine. And we broke up into teams of two to climb all of the gullies to see if we could find any sign of the two young climbers. Albert and his partner Michael, radioed that they were going to go across the plateau and down a different trail, while the rest of us worked our ways back down to the bottom of the ravine. We hadn't found any sign of the climbers. That was it. We were done for the day. We got in the Snowcat, which is a giant tracked vehicle that could hold our entire team, a dozen of us, and we were going to pick up Albert and Michael. I felt a sense of relief. We were done for the day. I had been beaten up, knocked down, and cold for two days, but I was going home, and the rest of the team was healthy. And then the radio came alive. Avalanche. Avalanche. Michael was screaming, Avalanche. The world sort of turns really quickly. All of a sudden, the Snowcat accelerates down and over and up into Tuckerman's Ravine. When we got to the trailhead, two of our team jumped off, went to a first aid cache to get avalanche probes. Long aluminum tubes, 10ft long that you push down into the snow looking for missing people. We got up to the avalanche debris, and as we looked around, as I looked up, I could see a hand poking through. Michael had poked a hole through the snow to create a breathing hole. Two of our team went up to dig him out. The rest of us stood shoulder to shoulder. We took our probes. We pushed them down into the snow as far as we could. I pushed down, lifted up. Then in unison, we stepped forward. I pushed down. I hit something hard. I didn't know, was it Albert? Was it just a block of ice? I had to know because every second counts. And it broke through the ice to my left. One of the team yells, I've got him. I dropped my probe. I headed over. I grabbed a shovel. I got in line. When it was my turn, I dug with as much strength and as much speed as I could. 20, 30 seconds, and I just fell to the side. Somebody took my place. I got my breath. I got back in line. It was my turn again. I dug as hard and as fast as I could, and there he was, three or four feet down. There was Albert's head. We started to dig around him, but he wasn't breathing. We cleared snow around him and carefully moved him up onto the snow. But he still wasn't breathing. We tried to get a breath in to start cpr, but the breath wouldn't go in. And I saw the gash under his chin. He had snapped his neck. The wind was still howling. The snow was swirling. I was standing there with 12 of the toughest people I have ever known in my entire life, and everyone's crying. We gently took his body and put it into a litter, strapped him down and carried him down to the Snow Cat. As we went down the mountain, I sat there in the open back, just looking at the lifeless body of my friend. When we got to the bottom, there were reporters, so I bolted to my car. I had to tell his girlfriend before she heard anything. I was almost at her house when I saw another car pull her over. I got out. As I walked forward, another friend was telling her what had happened. And I stood there in front of her, and she was screaming. I didn't have any words. I was numb. I was just crying. The next day, two young climbers were found on the other side of the mountain. They had severe hypothermia. They were close to death. They had massive amounts of frostbite, and they were going to lose limbs, and I didn't care. My friend was dead, and these two idiots had caused it. A lot of bourbon was consumed, a lot of crying. But life went on. I kept climbing. I kept guiding. Every year, I'd head up to the site of the avalanche just to be there, just to look and think about my missing friend. I had nightmares almost every night. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, seeing the body of my friend in the snow. And then a friend of mine, Marie, told me that she had talked to one of the climbers, one of the idiots who had caused my friend's death. And he was moving to town. He wanted to live in my valley so he'd be accessible for people to talk to, to confront. He had been faceless to me. He had just been the object of my hatred. And now he was going to be there. One day, I was walking down the street and across the street at a coffee shop called the Muffinry. It was warm out, and there was a young man sitting there in shorts, and he had pipes for legs. I'd never met Hugh, but I knew who this was. I walked towards him. I had so many emotions running through me, but I walked towards him. And as I picked my hand up, he picked his hands up to protect himself, like I was going to take a swing. But I didn't. I Just reached forward and I put my hand out and I said, hi, I'm Joe Lentini. I saw a young man who had made a mistake. Over the next weeks and months, he lived in my town. I'd see him on the cliff. He was a gifted climber. When asked how tall he would have been because with his pipes he could either be five foot or up to six, four, he said he didn't know how tall he would have been because he was only 17 when he lost his legs. In everything I've ever read he has said or heard him say, he has never failed to acknowledge what his actions caused. I'm still a professional guide. It's what I do. This month. It's been 41 years. I'm still a member of the Mountain Rescue Service. I can be called at any time to go out into the mountains. Recently, I was on Cannon Cliff, a very large cliff in Franconia Notch, where we were pulling two young climbers who had gotten trapped high up on the cliff. And after we pulled them off and got down, some of my team members were saying, what fools, what idiots. But I looked at them and I saw myself and I saw you, and I saw young climbers that maybe pushed a little too far. Thank you very much.
- [32:18]
Dame Wilburn
Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Lentini.
- [32:21]
Jay Allison
Joe Lentini is still a professional climbing guide. And about being a team leader for the New Hampshire Mountain Rescue Service, Joe says, in a small way, I can give back to the mountains that have given me so much. And Hugh Herr, the man in Joe's story. He went on to become a biophysicist and develop wearable robotic limbs for amputees. For a link to Hugh's TED Talk and to see photos of Joe and his climbing buddies, go to themoth.org by the way, we found Joe when he called our pitch line and told us a short version of this story. You can do that too. The number is 877799 moth. That's 877-799-6684. Or you can record your story idea right on our site, themoth.org stories that come in on the pitch line end up being told on Moth main stages all over the world. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange. PRX.org this is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show, and we're bringing you a live event from the Music hall in Port Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The host for this show was Dame Wilburn.
- [34:12]
Dame Wilburn
When I Asked our next storyteller. Tell us about a time that made your heart race, she said. When my boy was little, he almost fell off the Leaning tower of Pisa. But of course, that's before they put up the rail. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Elizabeth Browning.
- [34:41]
Apple Representative
When I was 11 years old, I took a train from the west of England to where My mother lived 200 miles for the summer holidays. And I wasn't looking forward to the summer holidays because there were no children there that I knew in the place where my mother lived. And usually you could invite a friend from school to come, but this time I didn't have anybody. The one thing that I really, really looked forward to that summer, every summer, was that I could go swimming. I loved to go swimming. And there was a swimming pool in the town where my mother lived in Rochester, that was. It was rather grim. It was a sort of large, bleak looking swimming pool with just grubby little changing rooms and a small cafe that sold only cheese sandwiches and hot mugs of tea. But I loved it. I loved it so much I could go there to the swimming pool and swim all day and eat my cheese sandwich and cup of tea and then come home. So that was my plan for the summer. And as soon as I got home, I started working on getting some money to go swimming, because it cost money to go swimming. I think it was about a shilling at that time, along with the cheese sandwich. And first of all, my mother lived with her partner, Uncle Vic, who was a doctor. And my mother was a sort of social person. I didn't see very much of her. She wasn't very interested in children. But Uncle Vic was sort of the stalwart of the family and he was quite strict, but he was the source of money. And I went to him as soon as I needed to and said, please, could I have some money to go swimming? And he said, well, Elizabeth, you know, you're 11 years old. I just think you're. It's time for you to start caring about other people, doing something for other people. Not just playing and swimming, just do something for other people. I said, well, what can I do for other people? And he said, well, you know, I have patients. I have an old lady, for instance, who really lives alone and is quite lonely and she would love to have a little come and visit her. And I said, no, I don't want to visit an old lady. I'm not going to spend the summer visiting old ladies. Now the next source of income was my mother's nanny, Auntie Mae. She Lived in the same town. She had taken care of my mother since she was a newborn infant, and she'd taken care of me a little bit, too. And she was rather like a grandmother, and she was very kind to me and generous. So off I went to see Auntie May, and I arrived at her house. She had a boarding house for working men. And she was there in the kitchen, and I loved to go there because she was a great cook. And while I ate one of her Cornish pasties, I said to her, auntie May, could I have some money for swimming? And she said, you know, Elizabeth, you're getting a bit old to go swimming every day. You're 11 years old. I think you should start doing things for other people. What, is she in cahoots with Uncle Vic? Why? And I said, auntie May, Uncle Vic wants me to go and spend the day with an old lady. I'm not going to do things like that. And she said, well, look at that. See that jar on the windowsill there? Yes. She said, that jar is full of silver paper. And I use the word silver paper, meaning foil. That jar is full of silver paper. And you know what it's for? No. It's. I'm saving up for a guide dog for a blind person. I said, how can you get a guide dog for a blind person with a jar of silver paper? She said, no, you. You can't get a guide dog for a blind person with one jar of silver paper. But if hundreds and hundreds of people are saving their silver paper, their milk bottle tops, their chocolate wrappers, their cigarette wrappers, soon, well, maybe in a few years you could get enough silver paper together and redeem it, and with the money, you could buy a guide dog for a blind person. I thought, that's ridiculous. I mean, how many years have I got? And I'm not going to do that. So I went home, and that night I was reading the Evening News. That was a national paper, and it had a children's section, and the children's section had a letter section, and you could write a letter to the Evening News. And if you got the letter of the week, you would get five shillings. Five shillings was enough to go swimming five times. So I thought, okay, I'll write to the Evening News and I'll win that five shillings. So I wrote to the Evening News and I wrote, I'm a little girl. I'm a little girl home for the holidays with no friends. And I decided to spend my entire holiday saving up silver paper.
- [40:32]
Katherine Palmer
For a.
- [40:33]
Apple Representative
Guide dog for the blind. And I sent it off. And a couple of days later, I looked in the paper and they printed my story, my letter. But it wasn't the letter of the week, so I didn't get the five shillings. So really I was back to square one. No money, no swimming, nothing. So a couple of days later, the doorbell rang. My mother and I went to the front door, and there was a postman, and he. He had a van. And he said, does Miss Elizabeth live here? And my mother said, well, yes, my daughter Elizabeth. And he said, I've got some parcels for her. And, oh, word, it wasn't even my birthday. And he brought in this great big sack and he shot out all these brown paper parcels on the hall floor. And my mother said, what is this? What have you done? Do you know what this is? And I said, no, because I'd completely forgotten about that letter. Because, you know. And so we opened one of the parcels and silver paper poured out. And my mother said, what is this? And I said, oh, you know, I wrote a letter to the Evening News about, you know, helping save up for a guide dog for the blind. Mother said, what? Well, this is ridiculous. I mean, you can't save up for a guide dog for the blind. I said, I know. Well, Auntie Mae's doing it. And I thought I'd do it, too. And she said, well, I don't know if we can. I don't know what we're going to do about this. And the next van full of parcels came, and soon the entire hall was filled with mountains of brown paper parcels. And goodness, my mother said, I know what we can do. What we'll do is we'll call a local newspaper and we'll have them take over the whole business of the silver paper. And, you know, we'd opened a few of these parcels, and they were so sweet. People wrote, what a wonderful little girl you are. And I thought, I am, really. And my mother said, let's call the local newspaper. Let them take it over. They can store the silver paper until they redeem it, and then you can answer the letters. And that seemed like a great idea. But the newspaper said, but we want to do an article on Miss Elizabeth. And so my mother said, well, that's all right. Come on, do an article. And a reporter came, and a photographer came, and they took all the parcels of silver paper and poured them out onto the living room floor into a mountain. And they sat a chair in the middle of it. They told me to put on my school uniform so that I looked like a Very proper little girl. And I sat on the chair reading one of the letters with my mother behind me feigning interest. And the article, I mean, this was a local paper. They didn't have much news. The article filled almost one half of a page. And the title was, the Postman always calls at Ms. Elizabeth's door. And then I became really famous in Rochester because everybody knew me as the little girl who was saving up for a guide dog for the blind all by herself. So the parcels came. Then the newspaper came and picked them up. And the parcels were coming from everywhere. They were coming from the Commonwealth, they were coming from Australia and New Zealand and Canada, wherever English people had strayed and still had relatives here in England. And their relatives sent them the newspapers. And, you know, I spent the entire summer writing thank you letters. I never went swimming. And luckily the summer came to an end and I left to go back to boarding school and all the letters were sent to me. So I had to do all my schoolwork and all the thank you very much for the silver paper letters. And one chap offered to make me a birthday cake and he did, and it was wonderful. So there was money, too. But Uncle Vic kept a tight hold on the money because he thought I'd try to take it to go swimming. I don't know why he thought that. Anyway, Christmas time came and it was time to go home for the holidays again. I must say, our house did smell like sour milk because some people didn't wash their milk bottle tops. And it was rancid, you know, it's the only word for it. And my mother said, you know, you've got a. There's a call from the local paper and you better call them. And I called up the editor of the paper and I said, this is Elizabeth, the little girl who's saving the silver paper. And he said, you're not going to believe this, Elizabeth, but you have saved up enough silver paper to buy a guide dog for a blind person all by myself, along with the whole country. And you're to come up to London, there's going to be a presentation at the Society for the Blind, the Royal Society for the Blind. And you will present a guide dog to a blind person. I said, all right. They came and picked me up and they took me to the Royal Society. And there was a really sweet little girl who was blind. I didn't even know that children were blind. And there was this lovely golden lab. And first of all, they introduced me. Then they introduced Ellie, the little girl. And then we all Hugged each other, the dog, Ellie, me. Everybody cried. It was very moving. Very moving. After that, I went back home and my mother said, all right, this is it. No more silver paper. We can't have it coming in here anymore. This is what I want you to do. Write to the Evening News. That was the original paper where I didn't win the five shillings. And I want you to write and tell them that you've got a guide dog and you don't want any more silver paper. So I wrote to the Evening News. Dear readers, I'm the little girl who wrote to you last year and said that I was saving up for a guide dog for a blind person. And I did. I saved up and we got a guide dog and we gave it to a blind person. And it was a tremendous success. And thank you everybody who sent me silver paper from wherever you live. Australia, New Zealand, all over England. And please don't send any more. Please don't send any more because my mother doesn't like the smell in the house. So I wrote the letter. And guess what? My letter wasn't just printed. It didn't win the Letter of the week. It won the Letter of the Year. And the Letter of the year won £50. £50. Enough to go swimming for the rest of my life. Thank you.
- [50:17]
Dame Wilburn
Ladies and gentlemen, Elizabeth Browning. I'm gonna tell you, as a Detroiter, that's how you run a hustle. That's how you really do it. And for the rest of my life, I'm calling it silver paper. I don't care. I'm done. Go get some silver paper. What? I'll tell you later. Elizabeth Browning.
- [50:38]
Jay Allison
Elizabeth Browning was born in England shortly before the start of World War II. After moving to America in 1962, she practiced as a child and family psychotherapist for 10 years. She lives in Harrisville, New Hampshire, and now spends her time painting watercolors. And she still loves to swim. To see a photo of Elizabeth swimming at the time of her story, visit themoth.org by the way, you can share these stories or others from the Moth archive and buy tickets to Moth storytelling events in your area all through our website, themoth.org there are moth events year round. Find a show near you, come out, tell a story. And you can find us on social media too. We're on Facebook and Twitter. Hemoth. That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from the Moth. Your host this hour was Dame Wilburn Dame is a poet, storyteller and writer from Detroit. She is also Chief Marketing Director for Twisted Willow Soap company. The stories in this live event from the Music hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire were directed by Sarah Austin, Janess and Janelle Pifer. The rest of the Moss directorial staff includes Kathryn Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Lou Lee Most Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the Storytellers. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Jamie Sieber. You can find links to all the music we use at our website. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Art Arts. Moth Radio Hour is presented by prx. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website themoth. Org.