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- [00:00]
Intuit Representative
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- [01:02]
Apple Representative
Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.
- [01:32]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by squarespace.com if you have a story to tell. Whether it's about starting a new business or sharing photos from a recent adventure, Squarespace gives you an all in one platform to bring those stories to life online. With modern templates, mobile responsive design, simple drag and drop tools, and 24 hour support, you can create a professional website or online portfolio in just a few minutes. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, head to squarespace.com and use the offer code themoth2. Okay, so we've taken care of all the business I think and paid the bills. Now let's get to the stories. This week we bring you another full hour of stories from our Moth Radio Hour. We've got great stories from Adam Savage, Krista Tippett, Hector Black. These were great shows and we're really happy to bring the stories to you. So here you go. The Moth Radio Hour.
- [02:40]
Kathryn Burns
From prx, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Kathryn Burns from the Moth and I'll be your host this time. The Moth is true stories told in front of a live audience. And we have three stories for you this hour. Krista Tippett, the Host of the public radio show On Being tries to run away from Oklahoma and the ideas of her Bible thumping grandfather. A civil rights worker's faith was tested when he faces an unimaginable loss. And our first story from Adam Savage, who is best known as one of the hosts of the hit television show mythbusters. He literally spends his days blowing things up. So when we asked him what story he wanted to tell for a moth show with the theme the Big Bang, we were surprised but touched when he said he wanted to talk about being a dad. A little warning to parents who may be listening with their kids. Adam's story, while in no way blue, mentions the existence of sex and that related images are available on the Internet. Here's Adam Savage.
- [03:40]
Adam Savage
I have twin boys. Thing one and Thing two. I have worried. I have worried since before they were born about how to properly prepare them for the world, how to give them the best information to be good humans and have good lives. I think of their brains like computer programs, like computers. And they're running all this custom code. It's not all my code. Unfortunately, only about 10% of the code they're running is mine. And the problem is, I don't know which 10%. I have no control over what they prioritize. See, at first it's really easy. And it's like training dogs, right? With babies, you just accept the behavior you're willing to live with. You reject the behavior you're not willing to live with. Then there's a lot of fluid cleanup. But something happened to my kids the moment they started to leave the house for daycare, for kindergarten, for first grade. Well, two things happened, actually. The first thing is they started getting information from sources other than me. They started running outside code. The second is they started behaving like people that I'd never met before. And then I would get this call from the school. Is there anything worse as a parent than the call from the school? Hello, Adam, this is the school calling. We just wanted to let you know that at 2 o'clock today, out in the yard, you failed as a parent. I'm pretty sure that's what they said. So you get them home at the end of the day, you figure, all right, time for some parenting. Sit them down. What do you talk about? Well, if they stole something, you talk about honesty. If they lied about something, you talk about honesty. That's a regular refrain. They hit someone. You talk about anger management issues and you use other words like use your words. It's all like you're trying to run code to get them. To get them to not do the same behavior the next time. And how are you doing running that code from the looks on their faces, I wasn't doing very well. My kids very early on perfected this blank stare. This, this. I'm not going to give you anything to get upset about within these parameters and I'm just going to wait for you to be done. This is not an environment that's conducive to running deep code. And the stakes are high. I remember being five years old. I remember being in kindergarten. I got pushed off a swing by a classmate named George, who was black. And he stood over me while I was out of breath, not even having a breath to cry with because I was in so much pain. And he laughed at me. And I went home and I asked my mom. I was really unhinged by the fact that he was laughing. Not the injury, but his delight in my injury. And my mom sat me down and she said, well, black people have a lot to be angry about. With white people, there's a long history and it's a difficult one. She explains slavery and racial matters and everything. I understand what she was doing. She's trying to give me some context. She's trying. My five year old brain doesn't know context. What she said was, the situation's bigger than you currently understand. What I heard was, you're part of the problem. And for the rest of my life, even today I meet a black person, some part of my brain goes, I hope they realize I'm one of the nice ones. So the stakes are high, but what can you do? You get the call from school, you bring the kid home, you talk to him. And then somewhere in the fourth grade, we hit the real talk. Apparently, according to the daycare teacher, my son, Thing 2, had gathered his friends around him. Come here, I got something to tell you. Clearly inspired by one of the inappropriate movies I'd taken him to, he explained that when you get older, you get a girlfriend and you have sex with her like it's a bar mitzvah gift. So I get this call, I figure, all right, time for the sex talk. Feels a little early, but all right, sit them down on the couch in front of me. And I say, so you know, guys, this happened and I just, I just want to know what, what do you know about sex? Do you know what sex really is? And they're like, yeah, we totally know, dad. We totally know. We have no idea. None. So I'm like, okay, good. There's no Reason not to be technical. So I go into some fairly great detail about their private parts. How they work, what they do, where they go. And I'm embarrassed, too. Two things are happening with them. One is they each grab a pillow and hold it in front of them like a giant shield. Hilarious. Clutching at this look on their face, I look up and I see the look on their face. And that look is one of undivided attention. It's full of terror and embarrassment too, but attention. And in that second, I become a complete fan of talking to my kids about sex. When else am I going to run code this pure, this deep on a level that's really getting to them? So we have a bunch more sex talks over the next few years and they go, fine. I say some funny things, I say some real things. I think I'm really getting to them, but the whole time all I'm really thinking about is how to approach this aspect of their lives that I didn't have to deal with when I was a kid.
- [09:03]
The Internet.
- [09:05]
We didn't have 247 delivery of porn to every device strapped to our bodies. Don't get me wrong, I wanted that. But I had to find my porn by the side of the highway. And I was grateful. So I'm about to tell you about the experience of catching my kids surfing porn. And I'm going to tell you one kid's story. The thing you should know is both stories are nearly identical except for a couple of details. In both cases, I got an email late on Sunday night from their mom, who I'm divorced from. We share custody, sending me a link dump, probably just before her computer was totally crippled by malware of their search terms. As a side note, I have my children's first porn search terms. It's like almost better than their first steps. Thing two's first search term, nudies, not what he was looking for, turns out to be some sort of areola hiding garment for sheer dresses. The other thing. Thing two was the first one to be caught. And the other difference between the two of them is I attempted to play bad copy cop with thing 2, and I was met with a complete stonewall. And then I thought about it and realized I'm not really that angry about what happened. I mean, actually pretty sanguine about it and we could talk about it. So when it came around to Thing One, I didn't go through Bad cop. He merely got in the back of my car and as we drove to breakfast early Sunday morning, I said, listen, what you did is totally reasonable. Being curious about what people look like naked is a rational and normal response to the world. And it is a reasonable curiosity for you to have. No one's in trouble and I'm not mad. Now, is there something you want to tell me? And there's this pause in the backseat, that pause that you know as a parent means, ah, I've got them. And he says, I searched for big boobs. Somewhere in my head is an interrogation room and a two way mirror behind which two detectives are high fiving that I've just nailed the pert. And I start to talk to him about what he saw and how he felt about what he saw. But again, all I'm thinking about really is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Not what he saw, but what he's going to see. So I tell him, you got to be careful out there. It's reasonable to be curious. But your curiosity is going to pay off really, really unpleasant dividends pretty quickly. What do you mean? Well, there's some, there's some really awful stuff out there. Genuinely, genuinely awful stuff. Then I see in his eyes actual curiosity. That's bad. I don't want that. So I tell him, you're gonna see things you will never be able to unsee. Things that will stick in your brain and ruin moments for you because they'll show up and screw over your brain because it won't be able to think about anything else but that horrible thing you saw once, which you're 12. And now I see fear in his eyes. And I realize he's 10 or 11. I'm still reasonably omnipotent. I've maybe scared him away from the Internet for a year, but not much longer than that. So how am I going to prepare him for what he eventually sees? I thought about myself at his age. I thought about my classmate Cesar Ortega bringing a skin mag to middle school and showing us pictures that I found upset. And I thought, what would I have wanted to see? What would I. Sorry, not what would I want to see. What would I have wanted to hear at that moment? What would have helped me with that? Didn't come to genuine preferences until later. And then I thought about my mom trying to give my 5 year old brain some context about racism in the United States. This conversation between my mom and I occurred only seven years after the Civil Rights Act. At past, this stuff was fresh and is fresh to our generation. And I think about that in direct contrast to the blissful lack of racism in my own children who've grown up, been lucky enough to grow up in such a diverse, liberal city as San Francisco. And then I think this is where cultural change really occurs generationally. And if the stakes are this high, I better get this right. I better be concise and succinct. And then it hits me what I'm supposed to say. And I say, the thing you gotta understand, bud, is the Internet hates women. And I recognize there's probably those out there who are thinking that's an incredibly broad brush to paint the Internet with. But let me put it this if you could look into someone's brain the way you search the Internet and the Internet was a dude, that dude has a problem with women. I realize this is the code that I want to run, and he's old enough to run it. I want him to realize that even by the chance dint of his gender, if he's not part of the solution, he might very well be part of the problem. And I want him thinking when he talks to women, I'm one of the good ones. Thank you.
- [14:35]
Kathryn Burns
That was Adam Savage. Adam has been making his own toys since he was allowed to hold scissors, and he's an artist whose sculptures have been showcased around the country. To see a video of Adam and his Mythbusters co host Jamie jumping off of buildings, crashing 18 wheelers and blowing up cars, all on purpose and in the name of science, go to themoth.org while there, you can share any of the stories you've heard in this hour with your friends and family. You can also listen and share moth stories through our app, which is now available on iOS and Android. We're also on Facebook and Twitter hemoth. In a moment, Krista Tippett will talk about what it's like being raised by a man so strict that he believes Southern Baptists were the only ones going to heaven, Methodists and Presbyterians out of luck.
- [15:21]
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange.
- [15:29]
Prx.Org this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Kathryn Burns from the moth. In 2010, I became a parent for the first time. Those first months are a precious time in your life, but also completely exhausting and kind of isolating. But then one morning, a voice came over my public radio station. Her name was Krista Tippett, and her show is called On Being. And for an hour, I'd be transported out of the micro universe of my nursery. Years later, when she agreed to tell a moth story, I was particularly thrilled. Here's Krista Tippett live at the moth.
- [16:12]
Krista Tippett
So there's a story that my children loved to hear and wanted to hear over and over again about my childhood when they were little. And we called it the Gaggy and the Snake story. Gaggy was my grandfather, the Reverend Calvin Titus Perkins. Everyone called him C. T. And the memory I had was of. So he was a roving evangelist, he was a preacher, but he never had a big church for any period of time. He. He pastored tiny little country churches and he would kind of bring them back to life and move on. And this story was a memory I had of a day, I believe it was a Saturday, when my grandfather. I followed him to the little country church of the moment. He was mowing the lawn, and I was poking around in the building and in a shed out in the yard, and I was looking at something, and I looked down beside me and there was this enormous snake coiled and just looking up at me. So I race out of the shed. My grandfather hears me. He comes to rescue me. In my memory, the snake follows me out of the shed, rears up. It's taller than my grandfather. He has a hoe which he swings, and in one fell swoop he kills the snake. He has vanquished evil. He's vanquished the serpent. And that is a perfect story to capture my grandfather. Faith for him was a battleground. The world was a treacherous place. It was full of dangers. It was full of temptations to sin. He was an expert on sin. And the result of that was a list of don'ts of rules to avoid sinning. I didn't have to follow all his rules. My mother had. But it was very clear to us that he would prefer that if we would. You weren't supposed to drink or smoke or play cards or dance or go to movies or even go swimming. Because if you went swimming, you might have to wear a revealing bathing suit and you might tempt someone to think about sex. And the older I grew, the more I was sure that all of these rules really, really came back to trying to avoid having us think about sex. I went far, far away to college, and that whole religious world of my childhood just really ceased to make sense. I also, as I felt, grew very smart and learned things that I hadn't known before. I learned in a history class that why Southern Baptists were Southern Baptists. It wasn't anything I'd ever wondered about it. It wasn't a question I'd ever asked. And the reason was that Southern Baptists were the ones who wanted to keep their slaves. I had learned that Southern Baptists were the only ones going to heaven. I mean, Methodists didn't even have a fighting chance. So I went home for Christmas that year. I didn't confront my grandfather. That's not how I would approach him. I asked him, gaggy, why the Southern and Southern Baptist? And he hesitated. I don't think he knew the answer. And then he finally said, well, Jesus was born in the south of Galilee. And, you know, I was furious. And I think I was disgusted whether he was being deceptive, whether it was willful ignorance, whether he wasn't brave enough to say, I don't know. I was done with his religion, and I became a very political person. I ended up in my twenties in divided Berlin. I ended up on this great geopolitical canvas where. Where good and evil was being acted out again. And it was very easy to do that in a grand way in that Cold War world of the 1980s. But in that place, too, those clear, crisp distinctions really left me wanting. I knew people on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall who had nothing and who created lives of dignity and beauty and poetry and intimacy and meaning. And I knew people on the western side of that wall who had everything by any definition, and whose inner lives were impoverished and none of that was dependent on politics. And so I found myself asking questions which I very reluctantly realized were spiritual and religious questions. Questions of why are we here and what makes for a worthy life? What are we to each other? I resolved that I couldn't possibly take religion in myself or in the world seriously if it couldn't be very different from that world of my childhood, of my grandfather. I had to be able to apply my mind. I had to know that it could be relevant and reconciled with all the complexity that I had experienced in the world. I ended up taking myself to the British Isles, and there I discovered this world of the great mystic writings, people like Julian of Norwich and Brother Lawrence, the cloud of unknowing. I listened to the BBC, and I discovered this quantum physicist, John Polkinghorne, who had also become a theologian later in life and who talked about how he could take what he was learning about the cosmos as a quantum physicist in chaos theory. And he could find echoes in that, that could infuse his sense of the nature of God and what happened when he prayed and what happens when we die. I gained this ever larger sense, that mystery, that both reality and mystery are much larger than we can possibly imagine. And that mystery is absolutely rooted in physicality and rooted in both the mess and the beauty of human life. And I found this described most exquisitely in the Bible itself. I was also very drawn to a Celtic idea of thin places, thin places, thin times. The idea that there are places where we can experience that the veil between heaven and earth is worn thin, where the temporal and the transcendent seem to touch. And I had experiences like that. And I remember standing on the west coast of Scotland, which is one of these places, which is physically both bleak and gorgeous at the same time, and feeling like, here I can breathe God. And so I followed that feeling. I went to divinity school, I studied theology. And the funny thing is, all of that took me straight back to my grandfather. If I was thinking about my sense of who God is or what it means to be religious, it was all infused with him. But what I realized, it wasn't infused with his rules. It was infused with his physicality, with the fullness of him, which was full of contradictions. He was strict, and he was also one of the funniest people I knew. He was playful. He once broke his ankle chasing me around the house. After he retired from preaching, he bought a farm and. And he planted vegetables and he had pecan trees and he built birdhouses. In fact, he was one of the earthiest people I knew as well. I even had experienced enough of the world to be smarter than I was as a sophomore in college. And I realized that even his rules had some incense to. Had some sense to them. They had some intelligence behind them. Only a couple of generations ago, things like drinking and gambling addictions, alcoholism, before AA, before the 12 steps, these were death sentences. They were things that devastated lives and families. And so in another time did getting pregnant under the wrong circumstances. And I remembered and cherished the fact that my grandfather actually had a very interesting mind. He had a second grade education, but you could throw a mathematical problem at him and he would be able to calculate this thing in his head in an instant. And you could. You could pull out a calculator and you could check it, and it was very strange. He didn't know what to make of it. We didn't know what to make of it. It was kind of a party trick. But I think that it was something. It was something that he held in tension and not a creative tension. He held it off to one side of this other so important part of who he was in the world. I don't believe he had ever felt that his mind was invited into his faith. I came through all of this and ended up creating a radio show where I take up these animating questions behind religion and spirituality, this question of what it means to be human and look at how that runs through 21st century lives and all the disciplines we're engaged in the 21st century. And I kind of came to feel early on that I was, you know, that I was doing this. I was doing theology and I was leading this life of conversation, asking these questions for my grandfather, with my grandfather, when 15 years after I heard John Polkinghorne on the radio in England, I had him on my show. I was talking about quantum physics and theology, somehow with Gaggy in mind, asking questions he couldn't have asked. But I always, you know, I was also in this 21st century world, not just talking to Baptists and the occasional Methodist, but Buddhists and Jews and Muslims, atheists. And I really could not imagine that that would ever be something that he would be comfortable with, that he would give his blessing to. And that was a real source of sadness for me. When I wrote my first book, which was a kind of spiritual memoir. I ended up having to write a lot about him. And I wrote this whimsical passage, which was edited out of a very early draft, where I imagined that after all of this, somehow wherever my grandfather was beyond space and time, he was cheering me on. And I imagined my grandfather, who was a teetotaler all of his 90 years, raising a glass of champagne in my honor. And as I say, I edited that out very early on because it wasn't serious enough and might erode my credibility. But later in the process of writing, I took myself again back to that magical. Those magical British Isles, at this time to the west coast of Ireland. And I was there with a bunch of writers. And a lot of these other writers were taking a pilgrimage to the local lady who read stones. And this is the last kind of thing that I would ever take seriously or consider doing. But everyone else came back and they would tell these stories at breakfast every morning about how she had seen inside their souls. She had told them about things that she couldn't possibly have known. She talked about their past and their present, their future, People who are living and who are dead. So I finally thought, okay, fine, I'll try it. I'll do it. I find myself then, about a day later, sitting with this absolutely beautiful view over something like the Bay of Mishkish with this woman named Mary Madison, who has the most beautiful, ageless, wizard like face. My feet are bare in a bowl full of stones from the Irish coast. And she is, in fact, telling Me things she can't possibly know. She knew nothing about me. She doesn't even ask your name or what you do. She told me about my work. She told me about myself. She described my children exquisitely. And then she started describing this gentleman she was seeing. And clearly it was my grandfather. And here's what she said. She said, he's proud of you. She said, he's not as serious as he looks. She said, I think he was pretty stern in his lifetime. He must have had a lot of rules. She said, he realizes now that he was even too strict with himself, that he denied himself some things. And she said, he realizes now that we can become close minded when we could be investigating. I don't know what happened in Mary Madison's house that day. I don't know what she taps into. It's in that realm of mystery for me, which I honor. I do know that since that day, I, oh, I have felt that I have my grandfather's blessing. And I forgot the best part. When she finished describing him to me, she said, he's raising a glass to you. He's toasting you. Maybe he's toasting all of us right now. I knew on that day that I had his blessing and he has mine. Thank you.
- [31:32]
Kathryn Burns
That was Krista Tippett. She's the host of the Peabody Award winning radio show On Being and the author of the book Slave Speaking of Faith in the New York Times bestseller Einstein's God. Krista and I recently spoke, we talked more about the concept of thin places that she references in her story. So what are some of your favorite thin places?
- [31:53]
Krista Tippett
I definitely would say I had thin, thin places in childhood. And I actually think maybe in childhood there's something about children that they're a little bit more open to that. In my story, I talk about, I spent a lot of time in church, but I would say the thin places for me would not be the fact of being in church. But some of those hymns that were associated with that church of my childhood were just very transporting, you know, and if I hear them now, decades later, decades after I've ever sung them in church, there's, there's, you know, there's something beautiful and grounded and they come from someplace that's just a lot bigger than any of the containers they get put in.
- [32:40]
Kathryn Burns
That was Krista Tippett. You can find links to episodes of Krista's show and see a photo of Krista with spiky berlin hair@themost.org Coming up, a Quaker is tested in an almost unbelievable struggle to forgive.
- [32:56]
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange.
- [33:04]
PRX.org this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Kathryn Burns from the Moth. Our last story is from Hector Black, who was 88 years old at the time of the telling. We first heard about Hector's story when he was interviewed for the oral History Project StoryCorps. Hector is an organic farmer who lives outside of Nashville, and he wears denim overalls wherever he goes. He's the only storyteller to whom I've ever said the following. You know that part of your story where you get arrested during the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King personally leads a protest on your behalf, and then his wife comes over and cooks for your family while you're in jail? You need to cut that because it's the least important part of your story. A warning. Hector's story centers around an act of violence, so you may want to pause this program for 15 minutes. If you're with kids. Here's Hector Blatt live at the mall.
- [34:01]
Adam Savage
Thank you. The story I want to tell tonight begins in the late 60s when my wife and I and our three little girls, we moved to Atlanta because we wanted to be a part of the civil rights movement. And the headquarters were there for all the different organizations. And we got a job in a very poor black neighborhood. And, well, there were a lot of kids used to come over to our house and play. And one of them was named Patricia. She's eight years old, looked like her hair hadn't been braided in many years. And almost just terrible impetigo sores down her legs. And she kind of fastened herself onto our family. She was one year older than our oldest girl. Her mother was an alcoholic, and often they had no place to sleep, so they'd come over to our house when their mother lost the apartment and they'd spend the night with us. And then when it came time for us to leave, she asked if she could come with us, and my wife and I said yes, and we went eventually to rural Georgia, and she lived there with us and blossomed. She had a beautiful sense of color. She made her high school graduation dress, painted a mural on the high school wall. She went on and graduated with highest honors from Fisk and got a degree in library science and went back to Atlanta, working in the public library with children such as she had been often unloved and uncared for. She had a house in a changing neighborhood, and one night in November, she Came home late from work in a crack addict who was stealing for his habit. Saw no light on in her house and went around the back, broke in the window, stole some things and took him to the local crack house. Got his first hit of crack. He was walking around the neighborhood again, and still no light on. So he wanted a massive dose of crack. Dose of crack. So he took a whole bunch of things and Trish came home. While he was gathering them up, he hid in a closet. She opened the closet door and fell backwards. And he tied her hands behind her back. And I learned later that they had a conversation together which sounded exactly like Patricia. She told him to get help with his drug habit. She told him where there was food in the refrigerator. He told her to put burglar bars on the back of the house and always leave a light on. And he asked about the sewing dummies that were in the house. And she told him that a woman named Susie, my wife, had taught her how to sew. And she made bridal gowns as a sideline for income. He got a lot of stuff and got a major hit of crack. Coming by the house again. He thought she would be free by now, but the lights were still out. So he went in again and he asked for sex. She said, you'll have to kill me first. And so he strangled her and violated her body. When we learned about this, it was the darkest thing that had ever happened to our family. We'd known death, but not like this. At the hand of another human being. I'm a Quaker. I don't believe in violence. And I yelled out, I'll kill the bastard. I was furious. Furious at what he had done to our child. I wanted him to hurt. It's very beautiful where we live in Tennessee, along the state scenic wild river. And I go walking, and these visions of what had happened to Trish would come crashing in on me. And I couldn't control them. They would just come and haunt me. No matter where I was or how beautiful it was around me. It was like he had control over me. He was pushing my head in the mud. I wanted to know who he was. I wanted to know what had happened to him that made it possible for him to do such a deed. My first reaction was that he was a monster. He was no human being. He deserved no compassion from me. And little by little, they learned a bit about his life. That he was born in a mental hospital. When he was 11 years old, his mother took him and his younger brother and little sister to a swimming pool. And she was saying God was asking her to drown them as enemies of God. God. He and his little brother got away and stood there while she drowned his little sister in front of him. And at one point later on, he told me he felt relief that she was not going to be tormented any longer. I couldn't help but think what I would be like if the woman who brought me into the world had tried to destroy my life. It wasn't that I was trying to excuse what he had done, but I felt for him as another human being suffering. There was a hearing in Atlanta, the final hearing in his case. I'd written the judge earlier on the advice of a friend of mine who was against the death penalty and told the judge how much we loved Patricia and how much a part of our life she was. My youngest girl couldn't remember life without Patricia. At the hearing, they read all the charges against him. And I just sat with my wife Susie and held her hand and cried. And I was thankful I was deaf, that I missed. Couldn't hear a lot of what they said. After he was sentenced to life without possibility of parole, those of us who knew Trish were given an opportunity to say how the crime had affected us. Her cousin got up and said, I hate you, Ivan Simpson. That. That's his name. I hate you because you took my beloved cousin away from me. I hate you because you'll see the dawn and she'll never see the dawn again. And I hate you because my taxes are going to feed you. She was weeping. And then it was my turn. And I printed out a statement because I didn't know how. How steady my voice would be. And again I just said how much we loved her, that she was not our daughter by any claim of birth, but she was our daughter by every claim of love. And at the end, I said, I don't hate you, Ivan Simpson, but I hate with all my soul what you did to my daughter. And then the very last thing I had to say, as though I was almost turned around, he was behind me, and I turned around and faced him. When I said my last. I wished for all of us who had been so wounded by this crime. I wish that we might find God's peace. And I wish this for you also, Ivan Simpson. And our eyes met for the first time. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. I'll never forget the look. It's like a soul in hell. They were going to lead him away, knowing he'd spend the rest of his life, he'd die in jail and he asked to come to the microphone. And twice, with the tears streaming down his cheeks, he said, I'm so sorry for the pain I have caused. I'm so sorry for the pain I've caused. That night, I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about this. And I felt he was a man off the street. He had nothing. And he'd given me the only thing he had. He'd asked me to forgive him in those words. And I know he could have said, to hell with all of you. My life is over. But he didn't. And I knew then that I had forgiven him. And I felt a peace that I hadn't had in a long time. And I felt a great burden lifted from me. I started writing to him. He wrote back. And one of the things he said was that he missed God's touch. Ever since he had killed Patricia, he felt as though God had abandoned him. But he said he felt he heard God's voice by way of compassion in what I'd said in the courtroom. We sent him a Christmas package. And I said, my God, what are you doing? What are you doing, you know, sending a Christmas present to the man who murdered your daughter. And I knew I had to do it, because I think when you forgive someone, you start to care about them again. And I knew he had no one. No one in the world. We had a small group of people in Cookeville. We thought we'd maybe get together with other people who had lost loved ones to violence like this. And I remember one woman whose brother had been killed 15 years before coming in and telling her story. Her brother was a doctor. He was killed by a man off the streets. To her, a nobody. And she was as angry as if it had happened the day before. And I knew I didn't want. That was no way to live. That was not life. A friend of mine told me that when you hate, you take poison and you expect the other person to die. And I think that's true. My wife and I went to South Georgia to visit Ivan in prison. Took a long time to arrange it, but we felt it was again something we needed to do. So I think what happened there was we were sitting down and talking together for two and a half hours. It was just extraordinary. And because I'm very deaf, I was sitting very close to him. He was unshackled, of course. And when it got time for us to leave, he stood up, and I did, too. And it seemed the most natural thing in the world that we had our arms around one another. And it was an unbelievable moment that I could have my arms around the man who murdered. And I think forgiveness is possible for the worst. And I do believe we all need forgiveness. God knows. Thank you.
- [50:58]
Kathryn Burns
That was Hector Black. Hector served in the army during World War II and graduated from Harvard in 1949. When we were working on the story, Hector and I spoke a lot about how he found compassion for Ivan Simpson by focusing on the abused child Ivan once was, hector said. I couldn't help thinking that here we are, the richest country the world has ever known, the most powerful, and there was no one for this little boy. Our friends at the public radio show Radiolab recently visited Hector in Tennessee and had them read a number of the letters to and from Ivan Simpson. To hear those letters and to see pictures of Patricia, go to themoth.org that's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll listen next time.
- [52:00]
Your host this hour was the Moths Artistic Director Kathryn Burns. Kathryn also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moths directorial staff include Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin, Janess, Jennifer Hickson and Meg Bowles. Production support from Jenna Weiss Berman and Brandon Echter. Special thanks to Bianca Gaver, Ellen Horn, Michael Garofalo and The Public Radio DIY website transom.org moth stories are true is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from Tin Hat, Jamie Sieber and Lawless Music. The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, with help from Vicki Merrick. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the public radio exchange PRX3. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org There.
- [53:20]
Dan Kennedy
You go, another full episode of the Moth Radio Hour right here on the podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show as much as we enjoyed it. This podcast is brought to you by stamps.com you've probably heard that the cost of a stamp just went up to 49 cents. But not if you have stamps. With stamps.com you'll pay less for postage than you would at the post office for first class mail, Priority and Priority Express Mail packages and more stamps.com makes it easy to buy and print discounted stamps and shipping labels using your own computer and printer. And right now, listeners of the Moth Podcast get a special offer including free postage. Go to stamps.com, click on the microphone and type in Moth. This podcast is brought to you by squarespace.com if you have a story to tell. Whether it's about starting a new business or sharing photos from a recent adventure, Squarespace gives you an all in one platform to bring those stories to life online. With modern templates, mobile responsive design, simple drag and drop tools, and 24 hour support, you can create a professional website or online portfolio in just a few minutes. For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase on new accounts, head to squarespace.com and use the offer code themoth2 hey Colorado the Moth Mainstage is coming to Aspen on Thursday, March 13th. For tickets and for a list of all of our upcoming tour stops, just visit themoth.org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy.
- [54:49]
Kathryn Burns
Is a writer and performer living in New York and author of the new novel American Spirit. Available now.
- [54:57]
Dan Kennedy
Thanks to all of you for listening and and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. The Moth Podcast and the Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.