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The Moth
Travel Tales: Emma John & T. Richard Corcoran
00:24:53
In this special podcast episode, stories all about the transformative qualities of travel. This is the first episode of a two-part series, and this week we'll hear from Emma John and T. Richard Corcoran. Emma John brings a friend's young daughter on a trip to rekindle the magic of Venice. T. Richard Corcoran undergoes a test physical and courageous fortitude while cycling to raise funds for AIDS.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:32]
Dan Kennedy
Hey, welcome to the Moth podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Thanks for tuning in for another batch of stories. This week. We're going to take a look at the distances that we go, the distance we go for vacation, for health, for living a life filled with purpose that really that escalated right there. We've gone from vacation to a very lofty goal, but we want to talk about the changes we find in ourselves when we return. It's part of a two episode little series that we'll be doing on this same theme. And to start off, we want to jump right in with this story from Emma John. Emma shared this story at a special event we held with Afar magazine. Here's Emma John.
- [02:15]
Emma John
It's late at night. I'm 13 years old and I am lying in a four poster bed next to my sister in Venice and the door to our room bursts open and in rushes a woman in pink silk pyjamas and she is yelling at us, gondolier. Gondolier. The woman's name is Annie and she is my mother's best friend and she is single and in her 30s and has never been left in sole charge of children before this. We are in Venice because my grandmother has just died and our grandma lived with my family since my Sister was born and my mum has just spent the last six months nursing her through a terminal illness. And it's been a rough time on our family. And Annie thought that my parents could do with a break, so she offered to take the kids away to her favorite city, which is why she is now exploding into the room and flinging open the shutters. And as she does so, we realize what she is so het up about. Because out in the darkness, somewhere in the canals beneath us, is the sound of singing. There is an actual real life singing gondolier somewhere out in the dark nearby. There's no time to lose, says Annie. No time to get dressed. So we slip on our shoes and we just pull a coat over our pajamas and we hurtle down the stone steps of our building, chasing through the maze of Venice's footpaths and bridges, which are, by the way, lit only intermittently by by sporadic street lighting. We lose ourselves repeatedly in dead ends and blind alleys. We have to navigate by the sound of the music, so each time we hear a new snatch of aria, we pelt across empty piazzas. Now, in my case, I'm wearing pyjama bottoms that are too big for me, so I am having to run, holding these things up at the waist so that they don't fall down around my ankles. We emerge very suddenly onto a tiny stone bridge and we catch our first sight of the gondolier. His low boat is passing smoothly through the water towards us, carrying a smooching couple who look quite surprised to see three females in their night clothes giddily staring and pointing at them. One of them, me, actually bent double because I'm puffed out from the running, but I am also still trying to keep these wretched pajamas up. But the gondolier looks at us suavely and waves. And as the boat passes beneath the bridge, he sings to us. And I feel like I'm in a movie. And it is without doubt the single most romantic, thrilling escapade of my 13 year old life. That whole week in Venice left a huge impact on me. It introduced me to arts and culture in a way I'd never experienced before. It left me with a love of Italy that I've never shaken since. And it formed this bond with Annie that just grew stronger and more special as the years went on. So 20 years later, I am 33 and single and childless, and Annie is married and her daughter Neve has just turned 13. So I offer to repay the favor. I take Niamh to Venice to experience some of the magic of that place that I felt when I was a teenager and hopefully to be the same kind of crazy, inspiring chaperone that Annie was to me. And we stand in St. Mark's Square together for the first time, surrounded by the golden lions and the glittering mosaics and the breathtaking basilica. And I ask Niamh what she thinks, and she shrugs and says, I've seen stuff like this before and I am crushed. But it's okay. I think we've plenty of time and there's lots more here to impress her. So I pack our schedule with activities. We do the glassblowing at Murano and the fish market at Rialto, and we do the frescoes at the Doge's palace and the beaches at the Lido. And I even get the waiters at Harry's cocktail bar to serve her a Shirley Temple because the Italians are really laid back about children being around alcohol. And frustratingly, none of this impresses Niamh at all. And every time we finish one activity, she looks up at me through her wispy blonde hair, her wide blue eyes emanating boredom, and she says, what we gonna do next? And these words begin to pierce my heart because every time I hear them, I fret about, what am I doing wrong? And I am obviously boring her. So I try to up my game. And I book us into a workshop at a costumier's, and we spend the afternoon creating and decorating Venetian masks, the kind, you know, they wear to the masked balls. And this reminds me of how during my teenage trip, Annie would tell my sister and me spellbinding stor about secret societies and deadly jewels and Casanova. And I recount all I can of these to Niamh, hoping to inspire her with some of the exotic romance of the place. And she finishes her mask and she gives it a satisfied nod. And she looks up at me and says, what are we gonna do next? I had pictured her being overwhelmed with excitement. I had imagined us sharing the same kind of wild, extravagant fun that Annie and I had had. But I see none of that in her eyes. And in fact, I have the heartbreaking feeling that she is just waiting out this week, longing to be home. And meanwhile, I am spending every moment of this vacation fretting about what we do when the next distraction runs out. And by the middle of the week, I am at peak levels of anxiety and I have run out of ideas. So one morning, while Nev is still asleep, because I, by the way, am exhausted and sleepless, I grab my phone from the side of the bed, and I sneak it under the bedclothes and I frantically text Annie, help. What did you do with us? Question mark, question mark, exclamation point. And she messages back a few minutes later. Took siestas, sat in the square and made you draw things. Now, I haven't sketched since I was a teenager, but before we left, Annie had slipped a hardcover, spiral bound sketchbook and a tin of pencils into the top of my suitcase. So that morning over breakfast, when Nev asks, what are we gonna do next? I point at the book and I say, today we are going to draw things a little way from our apartment. She picks a spot with a view of an ancient, crumbly building and we sit down and we open the sketchbook across our two laps and we begin our wobbly line drawings. But as we sit there and I catch sight of Niamh's face concentrating very hard on this casement window in front of her, I have a wisp of memory from 20 years before of my sister and I sitting next to each other, chewing on the ends of our pencils and sharing an eraser between us. And as I now become absorbed in the columns with their leafy capitals, a new feeling descends on me, kind of like a piece. And we sit there for about an hour in mostly silence, before Niamh looks at my picture and tells me she thinks it's very good. I like the way you've made it lean to the left, she says. And I look at hers and I tell her hers is very good too. And she smiles and she says, let's do some more. So we go looking for new subjects. Wells, palazzos, the bell tower of the Santa Maria Gloriosa. And when we've done and we've had enough, we walk around town feeling really proud of our achievements. And suddenly anything seems possible. And Niamh suggests that we play a game. She says, I'll flip a coin. Heads we go left, tails we go right. And now the afternoon is an exciting, exciting adventure. And it leads us through pretty squares lined with olive trees, and it takes us to expensive shops that sell silk scarves, which we wrap around our heads like movie stars and expensive grown up perfumes, which we spray all over each other until we stink. And eventually we pop out again at St Mark's Square, only this time Niamh wants to go in the basilica. So we stand in line for the obligatory half hour, during which time my now delightful companion bubbles with conversation. Look at that cute dog. Oh, I love small dogs, not big ones. Though. When did you get your ears pissed? I want to get mine pierced, but Mum says, not until I'm 16. Have you read the Pittacus law books? Oh, they're amazing. Let me tell you how they start. So we are within spitting distance of the vast cathedral door when the marshal on duty looks at Niamh and points at her skirt and shakes his head. The skirt is too short. It might offend God. He can't risk it. Niamh leans over to me and whispers, it's okay. I've got this. And she grabs her skirt and she twists and wiggles and wiggles and twists until the hemline is reaching her knees. Of course, this means that her waistband is now barely covering her butt. So as we walk up the aisle of Venice's most holy and magnificent edifice, she has her hands clamped to her midriff, desperate not to expose herself. And we're in fits of giggles. And the more we try to suppress them, the worse it gets. And we're getting strange looks. And by the time we are up at the altar, she is doubled over with laughter and I am looking at a giddy 13 year old who is holding her skirt just as I had to hold my pajama bottoms up 20 years ago. And finally, we are sharing the magic of Venice.
- [13:55]
Dan Kennedy
That was Emma John. Her first book, following a memoir of teenagers, obsession and terrible cricket, was named the 2017 Wisden Book of the Year. Emma's also a contributing writer at Afar magazine, where her work has taken her everywhere from the opera in Vienna to bluegrass festivals in North Carolina. Her next book, Bluegrass in the Backwoods, which is about her musical journey through the American south, will be published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in spring 2018. Our second story on the podcast this week comes from T. Richard Corcoran, and he told this at a Moth community showcase that we had earlier this year. The theme of the night was unfinished business. Here's T. Richard Corcoran, live in New York City.
- [14:45]
T. Richard Corcoran
Wow, that's bright. So one day in early spring, a day kind of like today, a friend of mine asked me a really provocative question. She said, if money were no object, what would you want to do? And the answer surprised me. I said, I'd like to take a bike trip to the south of France. I didn't even own a bike. I probably hadn't biked since I was like 14. And I didn't even know I had this idea in my head. But it was crystal clear that the this is what I wanted to do. I'm not sure. Why? But maybe it was because of the fact that I had just been given back my life. See, like seven years before, I had tested positive for hiv. And back then that was pretty much a death sentence. It's just a matter of when. For the next six years I was healthy and just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And then it started to drop. And in two months I lost like £20 for no reason. And then I got pneumonia and was laid up in bed for weeks and weeks and I was preparing to die. But just in the nick of time, the new antiretrovirals came out. ARVs and saved yay. And saved my life. Literally snatched me from death's door. And I had a full Lazarus effect. I went from thin and weak to gaining all my weight back, having full health and full energy. And then my friend asked that question. So I ordered a bike. Then one morning at the gym, I saw a brochure for the Boston to New York AIDS ride. It's like 280 miles over three days biking from Boston to New York. And I thought, I have a bike on the way. I'm HIV positive. It's a good cause. So I signed up. It was great. They had these training rides. You'd meet on the weekends and sometimes on the evenings and bike 10 miles, 15 miles, 30 miles, 40 miles, needed to work up to 100 miles because that's what you had to do on the ride itself. That's called a century. But my bike ride to France was in July and the ride wasn't until September, so I got some training in before. And then I went to France. I had to bring my bike to the bike shop to have them pack it up to take it on the plane. You can't quite wheel it down the aisle. And they showed me what they were going to take apart and they told me how to put it back together. And I was like, okay, I got that. And then I left the bike for them to pack up and ship to the airport so I could get it on the plane. And when I got to Nice International Airport, I opened the bike box and it was taken apart way more than they had told me they were going to. And there were no instructions. And here I am standing on the sidewalk in front of the airport in my full biking gear that I had changed into. You know, padded shorts, jersey, helmet, clicking shoes for my clips, looking at my bike and all these pieces, not knowing how to put it back together. And I literally started to cry. What I forgot to tell you is that the year before, when I almost died, I was in a. I had been in a 10 year relationship that actually did die that same year. And we traveled a lot together. So this was the first trip I was taking by myself. But when something would go wrong on the trip, his job was to cry and my job was to be the strong one. And here I was alone and crying. I was kind of confused. And then I realized I also needed to be the strong one. So I stepped up and I wiped my tears and I figured out how to put the bike back together and it didn't fall apart. And I started my 18 day, almost 500 mile bike trip alone in the south of France. It wasn't easy. The thing I forgot to mention is I had 50 pounds of luggage on the bike. When you're biking alone, you have to take everything with you. There's not someone driving it up behind and saying, here, here's your luggage. So it was really hard. And the south of France is really hilly. Thank God I had signed up for the aid ride. It wasn't a plan, but those training rides, I wouldn't have been able to do this without them. So the French people were great. I remember one guy yelling after me, bon courage. Great expression. It means good courage. I wish we had that in English. But I guess it really did take courage to do this. And the countryside, the farmland. I remember one vista of fields and fields of lavender that they were farming because someone has to grow this stuff to sell it. But it was so gorgeous and I couldn't see another human being, another car, another bike all by myself. And I realized then that this was really like a meditation on wheels. I got back to the States, I still had the AIDS ride to do in about a month or so. So I got back on the training rides at some point. I'm not sure when it was, but I found out about a group of riders that did the ride and they were called the Positive Peddlers. And what they were a group of riders that were HIV positive and willing to be out about their status to put a face of HIV on to the ride for the reason the ride was happening. And I thought, well, I was out about my status to my immediate family and to my close friends. But I wasn't really that out about it. And it's risky. I mean, people judge you. It's a sexually transmitted disease, you know, it's hard with dating and it's just risky to be out about it. And I thought, I need to step up. And I joined the group in short order. The leader of the group sort of flaked out and I thought, okay, I'll take the lead. Then on the ride itself, I found out that we were given jerseys that on the back said positive peddlers. For bikers that come up and pass you, it was like, okay, they'll know who I am. And on the ride, the morning of the ride, they gave us like a six foot tall pole with an orange pennant fluorescent that you had it attached to your back wheel that would go like this as you were riding so that people would know they were approaching a positive peddler. But the great thing that really came out of that is that, you know, everyone knew I was a positive peddler as the others. And the conversations and the things that people shared that they felt free to share about loved ones they lost about why they were doing the ride. It was probably the reason I was doing the ride. So I did the ride the following year. I became a training ride leader and then I became the chair of the training ride leaders and did the ride again. And then I trained the following year. And then one Sunday in January, I was reading the New York Times and there was an article about Al Gore at the UN talking about AIDS in Sub Saharan Africa. And that even though the new drugs are saving lives in this country and the developed world, they were just too expensive to save lives in Sub Saharan Africa. I couldn't believe it. I got viscerally angry. Probably the angriest I've ever been in my life. A few days later, I was at my acupuncturist and there's a beautiful woman there named Evan who was HIV positive and very out about it. She's sort of my role model. I walked in the door and I overheard her across the room saying, I'm going to the international AIDS conference in South Africa. I was hanging up my coat. I didn't even know what it was, but I knew in a flash I had to step up. And I said, I'll be there.
- [23:55]
Dan Kennedy
That was T. Richard Corcoran. T is an entrepreneur and New Yorker. He's also the board chair of healthgap, an organization dedicated to seeing that all people with HIV have access to life saving medications. He says he hopes that he'll get to lead the organization as it goes out of business by ending the global AIDS pandemic. As far as getting back in the saddle to ride, that has taken a little bit of a back seat. T got a brand new beautiful bike from his sisters for his 50th birthday as encouragement really to get back into the sport. But that was 13 years ago and that bike still has not been ridden. Okay, maybe one day. T that's all for this week's podcast. Be sure to tune in again next Friday for more stories of transformative travel. Until then, from all of us here at the Moth, have a story worthy week.
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TurboTax Sponsor
Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock on and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller.
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Dan Kennedy
With the Moth Podcast production by Timothy Lou Lee. The Moth Podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.