A (0:00)

Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college, help your community build a new playground, or help a child make it to that dream competition with GoFundMe. It's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 190 million people every week. Ordinary people meet their goals and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies. Want to raise money for your kid's soccer team? Or raise funds for a small business? A creative project or event? GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality and help adds up. Fundraisers you start for someone else raise up to five times more. So think right now. Who could use your help? Change rarely comes from waiting. It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change today. Start your fundraiser in just minutes@gofundme.com that's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com this is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe.

B (1:01)

Oh my gosh. Have you been to Marshall's lately? They have all the brand name and designer pieces you love, but without the jaw dropping price tags. Alright, so here's the you should never have to compromise between quality and price. And at Marshall's, you don't have to. Marshalls believes everyone deserves access to the good stuff and that's why their buyers hustle around the clock. To make it happen for you, visit a Marshalls store near you or shop online@marshalls.com.

C (1:36)

I'm Maggie Smith and this is the Slow Down. My maternal grandmother, the matriarch of our family, died 25 years ago this year. She still visits me in dreams now and then. Her name was Elizabeth, but everyone called her by her middle name, Anne. Her grandchildren did not call her Grandma or Mimi or one of the more conventional titles. No, we called her Dabble, and I was to thank or to blame for that name. It was something I'd babbled as a baby and it stuck. My memories of Dabble are still as crisp and as pigmented as ever. All these years later. She drove a gold Datsun. The radio station she preferred played what I would now call elevator music. Instrumental, but not classical, more like easy listening, like Muzak. Dabble, driving around in her dachshund, whistled like a warbler. She whistled more musically than anyone I'd ever heard. She could bake and she gave great hugs, but in many ways she wasn't your typical grandmother. She was divorced, living in her own apartment alone. She worked out of necessity in a men's store in a nearby mall. My mother would take my sisters and me to visit her there, and I remember walking among the racks of suit jackets and pants and shirts, like walking in grass as tall as I was. Sometimes we would hide in the racks. I remember the smell of wool. It was a special treat when she would walk us down to the cookie shop in the mall and buy us M and M cookies as big as our heads. Or she would take us to lunch in the cafeteria of the Lazarus department store. Grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk never tasted so good. Today's poem touched me because it made me think of my grandmother. It made me think of her care, but also about the life she had after her marriage ended. I know her life didn't look the way she'd expected it would. I wish it had been easier still. She could whistle like a songbird. Country Night by Laura Newburn My mother's father was cruel to my mother's mother. I know this, but knowing means nearly nothing. The man seen by me was a tall man who beautifully wore a hat in the old way, standing beside the door of a car on a dust road. Like a sentence, the poem is half in sunlight, half in shadow, sometimes cloaked in a dark night, my grandfather driving Nat King Cole on the radio and my grandmother humming along. I'm in the back, little and deeply in love with him and with her and the pines rising up and away from the world on either side of the car. And how, he would say, as we rode through the dark, a wolf is going to come out of those trees and eat you. I know that is a story for children. I know. My grandmother hummed like a warbler yellow glow in the deep wood for most of her life. The poem, like a sentence, is sometimes in sunlight, even at night the bird will sing. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter. And find us on Instagram at slowdownshow and blueskylowdownshow.org.