871: The Thing About Things

Summary

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This American Life – Episode 871: The Thing About Things

Date: October 26, 2025
Host: Ira Glass

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Overview

This episode explores the complex, often paradoxical relationships people have with objects—the things that populate our lives, shape our memories, tug at our hearts, and sometimes, seem to run our lives instead of the other way around. Through true, cinematic stories, we meet people who find themselves bound to beloved items in ways that are both touching and hilarious, with “things” acting as curses, emblems of love, and repositories of identity.

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Key Segments & Insights

I. Act 1: Nunzio’s Motorcycle

“Some objects have a power over us that's special. They make us do crazy stuff, stuff we probably wouldn't do for another person for years sometimes.”
—Ira Glass [10:06]

Summary:

• Nunzio, at 13 in 1975, buys a dilapidated 1966 Honda scooter from a neighbor for $50, with dreams of riding with his friends in West Albany, NY ([03:13]).
• The bike is in pieces and badly damaged; Nunzio’s talent for engines can’t make up for missing parts and money ([04:24]).
• It sits untouched for 24 years until his parents move house and Nunzio revives the project ([04:57]).
• After finding a mechanic to rebuild the engine, the mechanic disappears—eventually discovered to be in prison ([06:24], [07:26]).
• Nunzio tracks down the imprisoned mechanic, retrieves the untouched engine, and painstakingly restores the bike himself over another year ([08:48]).
• Despite decades of effort, Nunzio has only ridden the scooter about 40 times in 20 years ([09:56]).
• “The point of the bike was not riding it.” It’s a time capsule, a link to his 13-year-old self and friendships ([07:12]).

Notable Quotes:

• “None of those choices were acceptable to me. The most important thing here for me was keeping it all original. To have the exact bike when I took it at 13. Still today.” —Nunzio [06:53]
• “It was really a piece of time of me with my friends at that age.” —Nunzio [07:12]

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II. Act 2: The Petrified Wood Curse

Reported by: Aviva de Kornfeld

Summary:

• Ted, as a boy in the 1970s, steals a large chunk of petrified wood from the Petrified Forest National Park, encouraged by his dad ([12:14]).
• Decades later, his daughter finds the rock and alerts him to tales of a “curse” that afflicts people who steal petrified wood ([14:43]).
• Ted, who feels plagued by bad luck—house fire, hurricane, marital troubles, and more—becomes convinced he’s cursed by the rock ([15:15]).
• He returns the rock to the park with an apologetic letter, and soon after begins to experience astonishing good fortune, including a windfall from a $9 duck call found at a flea market ([24:02], [25:00]).
• Hundreds of people have sent rocks back to the park over the decades, each with letters begging for clemency from “the curse”; the returned rocks end up in the park’s “conscience pile” ([23:11]).
• After his “curse is lifted,” Ted finds success in a new career based on luck, and reflects on the need for stories to make sense of our fortunes ([24:44]).

Notable Letters from Others:

• “Please release me. My life is hell.”
• “You should tell people these are cursed before people take them. Sorry, but...”

Notable Quotes:

• “It was a scourge on my life. It was a shadow that was always with me. If something bad could happen, it would happen.” —Ted [16:23]
• “I got so lucky that I can’t even talk about it.” —Ted [23:58]
• “A lot of the letters come from people at the end of their lives doing a little psychic housekeeping before they go.” —Aviva de Kornfeld [26:31]
• "[I pray] the return will deem forgiveness from God, the Petrified Forest national park, and the people of the United States of America." —Ted’s letter [26:50]
• “That big pile of returned rocks, the rangers have a name for it. It’s called the conscience pile, which I find kind of moving.” —Aviva de Kornfeld [26:50]

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III. Act 3: A Few Hundred of My Favorite Things

Reported by: Jonathan Goldstein (cross-over with his podcast, Heavyweight)

Summary:

• Gregor’s problem: his elderly parents, Etta (an artist) and Milt, are deeply attached to their huge, cluttered, three-story home filled with collections—egg beaters, bisque nodders, colorful bottles, and homemade art ([29:51], [30:47]).
• Etta’s Zen-like inscriptions on her bottles urge letting go, yet she struggles to give anything away ([33:14], [33:54]).
• Milt claims he’s unattached but is complicit, continually bringing Etta new “charming” objects ([34:22]).
• Gregor and siblings debate drastic solutions: moving parents out, building a museum in an old barn, or even hypnotizing Etta to let go ([37:00], [40:36]).
• Hypnosis is dismissed, and the museum idea stalls; all await a catalyst for real change.
• That moment comes when Etta’s art is shown in a Manhattan gallery. After the exhibit, Milt collapses, prompting Etta to finally consider the inevitability of letting go ([47:49]).
• Etta begins gifting her bottles to people, carefully matching the message to the recipient. This leads to real, if slow, progress ([50:16]).
• As Etta approaches death (diagnosed with brain cancer), family members rush to care for her, and she appears at peace, “dancing” in her final days ([54:50], [55:44]).
• After Etta’s death, her children, surprised by their own reluctance to part with her things, reflect on the role of art and possessions in legacy ([56:21]).

Notable Quotes:

• “All the bottles bear messages imploring one to let go. Yet Etta is incapable of letting go of the very bottles doing the imploring.” —Aviva de Kornfeld [33:25]
• “The Damoclean sword of mortality is coming, and all we’re gonna do is sit here and watch Rachel Maddow until it cuts our head off.” —Gregor [36:19]
• “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” —Etta’s bottle inscription to Jonathan Goldstein [58:55]
• “It just feels really hard to like—her art, it feels... it’s like a part of her. Yeah, but it’s not her.” —Lexi, Gregor’s sister [56:21]
• “All of art is—it’s all just stuff. And stuff can be beautiful, but it’s there to help us get closer to the non stuff. Because, like the words Etta inscribed on one of her final bottles, all important matters are invisible.” —Jonathan Goldstein [59:04]

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Memorable Moments & Themes

• Objects as Emotional Time Capsules: Nunzio’s relentless pursuit to restore the scooter is less about utility and more about preserving identity, memory, and a moment in time.
• Cursed Objects & Life Narratives: The petrified wood “curse” segment shows the human tendency to link random bad luck to physical objects, seeking explanation and redemption.
• Letting Go (or Not): Etta’s journey epitomizes how collecting is tied to love, art, legacy, and ultimately the fear of letting go—contrasted by her children’s later struggle with the same issues.
• Family & Legacy: The question of what to do with a parent’s possessions becomes a reflection on love, inheritance, and the challenge of preserving meaning when the person is gone.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• “None of those choices were acceptable to me. The most important thing here for me was keeping it all original...” —Nunzio [06:53]
• “I think—no, I was cursed 100%. You can ask my friends and family... it was an ongoing joke... I’m a realist... I was cursed. I saw it.” —Ted [16:45]
• “All the bottles bear messages imploring one to let go. Yet Etta is incapable of letting go of the very bottles doing the imploring.” —Aviva de Kornfeld [33:25]
• “The Damoclean sword of mortality is coming, and all we’re gonna do is sit here and watch Rachel Maddow until it cuts our head off.” —Gregor [36:19]
• “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” —Etta [58:55]
• “All of art is—it’s all just stuff. And stuff can be beautiful, but it’s there to help us get closer to the non stuff. Because, like the words Etta inscribed on one of her final bottles, all important matters are invisible.” —Jonathan Goldstein [59:04]

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Important Timestamps

• Nunzio’s Motorcycle Story: [03:13]–[10:06]
• Petrified Wood Curse/Ted’s Story: [12:05]–[26:50]
• Goldstein’s “A Few Hundred of My Favorite Things”: [29:46]–[59:04]

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Tone and Style

• Reflective, intimate, sometimes self-effacing, with flashes of dark humor and irony.
• Deep dives into memory and emotion, blending the mundane with the profound—as in true This American Life fashion.
• Insightful narrative structure, moving from the specificity of individual stories to broader questions of meaning, memory, and the material world.

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Conclusion

Through stories of a long-lost motorcycle, cursed rocks, and a house full of found-object art, this episode considers the way “things” help us hold on to our past, define ourselves, and ultimately learn, slowly, to let go. In their own unpredictable ways, the objects in these stories demand attention, restitution, and even change. And as the show gently reminds us, sometimes it’s only by working through our relationship to our things that we make peace with letting them, and life, move on.

Transcript

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[Ira Glass]

Hey there, it's Ira here before the new episode starts. In case you missed the little update we dropped in the podcast feed last week. I'm going to summarize it here quickly. It's been a year since we launched our this American Life Partners program and the good news is it's going great. People who signed up as life partners now pay for almost 25% of our budget, which is huge. And sincerely thanks to all of you who signed up. But looking ahead, we need that number to be 50%. That's what will protect us and keep the show going in the current environment, where it is just harder to bring in advertising revenue and where the federal government no longer funds public radio, which affects the stations who run our show and pay us money to run our show. So here's my short pitch on why you might consider becoming a live partner, if you haven't already. I'm guessing that what you probably like about our show is that we find great stories, big and small, with, you know, feelings and funny moments and a picture of the world and everything else that makes a good story. And what I say is the thing you like is surprisingly expensive. For every story you hear in our show, we run at many more stories that go nowhere, that we abandon at different stages of the process. And in the stories you do hear, we labor over each step of making those as a team. We do draft after draft. We're adjusting how people get introduced into the story and how the story unfolds and which parts to linger on and which to speed through. Then of course there's fact checking and scoring with music. This is not how most podcasts are made. Of the 400,000 plus podcasts that are being made right now, most of them are, you know, they're interviews or their conversations with without all those extra steps. We would like to believe that there is still a future for this old school way of making a show and we see that future with your help. And you know, you get stuff when you sign up, you get bonus episodes. There's a greatest hits archive that you get in your podcast feed. You get to listen without any ads, but you don't have to want that stuff. You just need to want the thing that you're going to hear after I'm done with this message. News stories made with care. Sign [e-mail] LifePartners that link is also in the show Notes Again, this American Life.org LifePartners When Nunzio first saw the bike, he knew it was a little honda motorcycle from 1966 with an engine so small that officially, I think you're supposed to call it a scooter. It was in a neighbor's yard. He was 13.

[Nunzio]

I absolutely remember it. Yeah, it was against a shed. Grass has grown all over it. It was red, but they have not taken care of it. And somebody put flat black paint all over the thing. Tires are flat, There's a couple pieces missing from it.

[Ira Glass]

It's funny. So when you see it, it's kind of a wreck of a bike.

[Nunzio]

Yeah, it's a wreck of a bike with a dream of I'm gonna be the cool kid in the neighborhood with my friends and buddies.

[Ira Glass]

His plan was he wanted to ride it around the railroad tracks with his buddies. They would hang out there or in the woods with their bicycles, get cigarettes from the older kids or a beer now and then. This was West Albany, New York, 1975. Lorenzo described this to me. The only thing I could picture was Stranger Things or the film Stand by Me. And then a friend of his brought that film up to describe what it was like. Anyway, Zannunzio pays his neighbor $50 cash with money he earned mowing lawns. Nunzier wasn't great at school, but even at 13, he had an unusual talent for fixing things and for engines. Like he fixed his own lawnmower engine at that age. And he was excited to get the scooter home and to work on it in this workshop under his parents porch. When he did, he discovered, okay, so.

[Nunzio]

The engine was seized. Come to find out, it was missing the overhead valve assembly.

[Ira Glass]

Also holes in the gas tank, carburetor needed rebuilding, battery was shot.

[Nunzio]

So now, you know, I kind of realized like, I couldn't realistically cut enough lawns to get enough parts to get it running at that age.

[Ira Glass]

Okay, so, so you're 13, you realize like, this is going to be a big job. Do you just put it aside? Like, what happens?

[Nunzio]

I, I, I, I set it aside and it sat there for 24 years.

[Ira Glass]

During that near quarter century, he lay in pieces all over the ground under this porch, he says. But he didn't forget it. He'd think about it now and then. Always intended to get back to the scooter, do the rebuild that he couldn't afford as a kid. It ended up taking him on a much more circuitous route than he could have imagined. Basically, what happened is that in 1999, Nunzio's parents sold the house. He collected all the parts from the under the porch and hauled them to where he now lived with his wife and his two young kids at the time. Laid the stuff out in his garage and finally got to work. He started searching for scooter parts. This is 1999, before everything was on the Internet. So it took some doing. Says he spent about a year piecing the thing together. Finally got the engine barely running. Realized that he needed somebody to do a proper rebuild of the engine. Found a shop, Schenectady. Put the engine in a cardboard box, dropped it off. Guy said, great. Give me four or five weeks. I'll have it for you, good as new.

[Nunzio]

I called him like a month later. I'm getting to it, you know, things have been busy at the shop. Don't worry about it, you know, I promise you we'll get to it. I called back in, like, two, three weeks. Hey, I got it all apart. I need the manual. I said, okay. Took me like a few weeks to get it. So another three weeks go by, and I deliver it up there. So here we go. Hey, when can I get it? Hey, it's going to take us a few weeks.

[Gregor]

We got it all apart.

[Nunzio]

We're working on it, looking great.

[Ira Glass]

More months pass. Finally, six or seven months in, Nunzio says he calls the shop and the phone is disconnected. He drives there, seems to be permanently closed. Goes to the literal phone book, remember 1999. Calls people with the guy's last name. Finds two relatives, he says, who say they haven't seen him. He knows he should just buy another engine, Either a new engine or another old engine from the 1960s from the same model bike. But just can't bring himself to do it.

[Nunzio]

None of those choices were acceptable to me. The most important thing here for me was keeping it all original. To have the exact bike when I took it at 13. Still today.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Why? Because.

[Nunzio]

It was really a piece of time of me with my friends at that age.

[Ira Glass]

Years go by. He kind of gives up on this engineless, hopeless bike. Finally, one Sunday night, kids are in bed. He goes on behind and searches for the name of the guy he left the engine with and learns. No wonder he can't find him. The guy's locked up, convicted on an illegal dumping charge. Nunzio figures out where he's doing time and visits him the very next day.

[Nunzio]

So they bring him in there. It's just like the movies. You're sitting at this table, and there's a piece of glass 10 inches between the two. You're not allowed to put your hands over the glass. And he comes out, and he sits at the table. And the first question he says to me is, do I know you? And I said, yes. I gave you my scooter engine years ago, and I want it back.

[Ira Glass]

Okay. Probably not the answer the guy was expecting.

[Nunzio]

And he said to me, you tracked me down to prison for a scooter engine? I said, yes. I had it still 13, and it's important to me. I want to get it running. He goes, yeah, I have it. And he was extremely helpful, really nice. And he gave me the address. And he said to me, you tell him I sent you there. You tell him you visited me in jail, and you tell him to give that engine right back to you.

[Ira Glass]

They got along so well. Nunzio ended up staying and chatting, he says, for close to an hour. And when he went and retrieved the engine, it was still in the original cardboard box. He'd left it in for everything. He'd been told on the phone that they were working on it. It's nearly done. Just a little more. He saw nobody had ever touched it. I found and talked to the guy that Nunzio remembers, the repair shop owner. And for the record, he remembers none of these events from 20 years ago. And at first, he insisted that none of it ever possibly could have happened, but then talked a little more. He relented a little and said, maybe it did. Nunzia told me that once he got this scooter engine back, he took a year meticulously rebuilding it himself to bring the whole bike back to cherry condition. This project he decided to take on in 1975. He finally finished three decades later. So much work. I had to ask. It's been 20 years. Like, how many times do you think you've ridden it in 20 years?

[Nunzio]

Oh, I mean.

[Ted]

30.

[Nunzio]

You know, 40.

[Ira Glass]

That doesn't sound like a lot.

[Nunzio]

No, it's not.

[Ira Glass]

The point of the bike was not riding it. Some objects have a power of us that's special. They make us do crazy stuff, stuff we probably wouldn't do for another person for years sometimes. Today on our show, we have stories of people caught in that kind of servile relationship with objects that they supposedly own. But in each of these stories, as you'll hear the objects seem to be the ones calling the shots. From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Support for this American Life and the following message come from AT&T. There's nothing like knowing someone's in your corner, especially when it really counts, like when your neighbor shovels your driveway after a snowstorm or your friend saves you the last slice of pizza. Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, although proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com guarantee for details.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Ira Glass]

This American Life act one a rock and a Hard Place so let's start today with an object that a guy got a long time ago that first meant one thing to him, and then it came to mean something very different and much more important. Aviva de Kornfeld talked to the guy and has this story.

[Narrator/Producer]

When Ted was six years old, his mom had just remarried and his new dad had this idea for all of them to go on their first big trip as a family, a road trip.

[Ted]

He thought it would be cool to take the family on a trip out west. And we stopped at every attraction. We went to the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, and we also went to see the crater in Arizona. It was a huge time for us. I mean, for me personally, it was like the first experience I remember going anywhere.

[Narrator/Producer]

The important stop for our story, the Petrified Forest National Park.

[Ted]

I remember driving through the forest and I just, I don't know. I was that age where I flipped out over everything.

[Narrator/Producer]

Petrified wood is kind of worth flipping out over. It's crazy to look at because it's. It looks like a tree. You can see the texture of the bark and the grain of the wood and the tree rings. But it's a rock. Plus, in the process of becoming a rock over millions of years, the wood gets this rainbow coloring from all the mineral deposits, so it looks kind of magical.

[Ted]

I remember seeing an area that we went to where there were a bunch of different trees laying on the ground, like all in a Row. And I remember begging my dad, please, you know, and so I guess I bugged my dad enough that he finally let me pick a piece. I got to pick it. And of course, I picked a big chunk.

[Narrator/Producer]

How big was.

[Ted]

Was significant?

[Narrator/Producer]

Like the size of a baseball? Is that what we were talking about?

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Yeah.

[Ted]

Probably more like the size of a football.

[Narrator/Producer]

Oh, really big?

[Ted]

Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty hefty. You know, I remember my dad, like, pulling it out of the spot it was in, you know? So now that tree had a chunk missing.

[Narrator/Producer]

Ted's dad was the kind of guy who would bend the rules for his kids.

[Ted]

So I remember him saying, okay, well, we're going to put it in the trunk, but don't say anything when we go through the gate, you know, because.

[Narrator/Producer]

You knew you weren't allowed to take it.

[Ted]

Yeah, we hid it in the trunk under some clothes. I remember when we got to the hotel that night, we unwrapped it and brought it into the hotel room. I mean, he didn't have to do that, but he made a big deal out of it. And, yeah, I remember my mom writing a postcard to my aunt saying that Teddy. That's what they called me. Teddy. Teddy got a piece of petrified wood from the forest. And then I. You know, after that, when we got home, I really didn't think about it.

[Narrator/Producer]

Much until One day, over 40 years.

[Ted]

Later, my daughter said, hey, she's a senior in high school. She comes in the kitchen, and she says, hey, dad, that rock out in the garden, is that a petrified wood? I said, yeah. And she said, where did you get that? You know? And I said, I told her the story. When I was a kid, we went to Petrified Forest, and I took it. She said, that's what I thought. She said, I found this interesting article online, and it says that people who have taken petrified wood are cursed. A light bulb went off. I was like, this could be it.

[Narrator/Producer]

The idea that this petrified wood may have cursed him. This made a lot of sense to Ted because he thought he'd been cursed for years. For as long as he could remember, he'd had very bad luck. No matter where he was or what he did.

[Ted]

Couldn't catch a break. Could not catch a break.

[Narrator/Producer]

The bad luck found him when he was at home.

[Ted]

We had a house fire when My daughter was 2 years old. When she was 3 years old, Hurricane Katrina. The eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over our city in Mississippi and put six feet of water in our house.

[Narrator/Producer]

The bad luck followed him abroad, too.

[Ted]

I got a bad infection in El Salvador and lost my hearing in one.

[Narrator/Producer]

Side when Ted went hunting for bird nests with his friends.

[Ted]

We're in the middle of the woods. I fell on a broken root beer bottle. It was like there was nothing else around. And I cut my hand up. I still have a scar.

[Narrator/Producer]

There's more.

[Ted]

I hit a deer driving through San Antonio full on and totaled my car.

[Narrator/Producer]

Oh. And the bad luck came for his love life, too. His marriage started falling apart.

[Ted]

I think that's pretty unlucky.

[Narrator/Producer]

Are there other things?

[Ted]

Yeah, of course. You know, I can give you 6, 10, 12 examples, whatever you want. It's something that was with me always. It followed me everywhere. It was a scourge on my life. It was a shadow that was always with me. If something bad could happen, it would happen.

[Narrator/Producer]

Is it possible that that's just stuff that happened to you and not that you were cursed?

[Ted]

I think. No, I was cursed 100%. You can ask my friends and family. It's. It was an ongoing joke, you know, you gotta call it like you see it. I'm a realist. Like, seeing is believing. So if you see a vase on the table, there's a vase on the table, Right? I was cursed. I saw it.

[Narrator/Producer]

So for decades, Ted lived in fear of the next bad thing happening. And then his daughter told him about that article she'd found.

[Ted]

I couldn't believe it. I read the article. I was like, holy cow, this could be it. You know? And I read the story, and I was like, oh, my God. I didn't realize that I did such a bad thing.

[Narrator/Producer]

Well, you were so little.

[Ted]

Yeah, I was real little. But I guess that doesn't matter when it comes to, like, something like a curse, right? I mean, there's no age limit on it.

[Narrator/Producer]

It's unclear where exactly this idea that petrified rocks curse people came from. I tried to run it down, but no one knows. And it didn't matter to Ted anyway. All he knew was that he was cursed and he needed to get that wood back to the park as soon as possible, handily. He happened to be working at the post office at the time. So the next day he went to work and grabbed a priority box, flat rate, because the rock was so heavy.

[Ted]

Yeah. My daughter told me, hey, you should write a letter. You should apologize for it. You know, whatever you have to do, you have to end your curse. So I said, I will. I'll write the letter, you know?

[Narrator/Producer]

Ted carefully swaddled the petrified wood and bubble wrap to protect it and Placed it in a box along with his letter. It cost him $22 to ship a steal if it breaks a curse. The petrified forest national park has a long history with rock thieves like ted. In fact, that's why they became a national park in the first place. Local residents worried about the area being totally stripped and petitioned to turn the land into a park to protect it. Years ago, there was a study that found they could be losing wood At a rate of 12 tons per year. And so for decades, the park tried all kinds of tactics to discourage theft. Vehicle inspections, fines, supervised tours, Preemptively gifting people a little piece of wood bought from private land near the park. You might think that park rangers invented the curse as a deterrent, but no. But somehow, word spread, Making Ted just one of hundreds of people who have sent pieces of petrified wood back to the park. Matt Smith, the ranger in charge of processing the returned rocks, says that a rock arrives roughly once a week, Often with a letter attached. There are now over a thousand letters in their archive. It seems strange to me. So many people all came to believe their bad luck came from a rock and felt compelled not just to return the rock, but to apologize and explain themselves. I wanted to read the letters for myself, so I flew out to the park in Arizona. Ranger Matt set me up with a desk and plopped down two big boxes stuffed with letters. I spent a full day sifting through them. The first letter the park ever received was from a guy in India and 1935 from there. The letters are organized by year, Mostly handwritten. The letters have a kind of frenzied urgency to them. Like this one. Please release me. My life is hell. Or this one, which is oddly accusatory considering they're the thief. You should tell people these are cursed before people take them. Sorry, but lots of people go to great lengths to detail their woes. Pages and pages that feel more like a journal entry than federal mail. The list of hardships attributed to the rocks are wide ranging, including, but not limited to, layoffs, car accidents, robberies, cancer, divorce. A lot of beloved family dogs died. One guy had a failed vasectomy, Another fell through the ceiling of his house, and one person's fiance cheated on them with a Norwegian woman. There are a lot of mentions of idiot husbands and apologies on their behalf. And tons of people who didn't even take the rocks themselves, but somehow looked at their lives and concluded that everything bad happened because of the rocks their parents or grandparents had stolen. Like a weird, petrified version of inherited trauma. One Woman sent back a rock with a letter in the hopes of restoring her luck, and then promptly sent another letter after she'd realized she'd sent in the wrong rock. In some letters, desperate people describe the ways in which their lives have been horrifically derailed. And then at the bottom of the letter, a park ranger who's examined the rock has written a little note in pencil wood, not from park brut. What's striking about reading so many of these letters back to back Is how terrible and ordinary the pain they're recounting is. They're describing all the awful parts of life. The parts you know intellectually are on the table but still feel shocking when they happen to you. I can imagine what a relief it could be to discover you'd been cursed, because how nice would it be to get an explanation for why it's all so difficult? Plus, it means you just might have the power to undo it. I talked to a few different rangers about this phenomenon. People stealing and returning their rocks, and they were all surprisingly blase about the whole thing. They don't want people to steal rocks, obviously, but it turns out the amount they're losing every year really isn't that big of a deal. Over time, they figured out that they're not actually losing 12 tons of wood per year. Plus, people returning rocks, that's just more work for them. The rangers can't determine where exactly in the park the rocks came from, so all the return rocks just get tossed into a pile. Ranger Matt took me to see it. It's big, maybe 15ft wide, a few feet tall, with rocks of all sizes. How many individual rocks do you think are in this pile?

[Gregor]

I have no idea. I guess if I had, I don't know, 20,000, 50,000, something like that.

[Narrator/Producer]

People are crazy. Look at this one. I know if I were gonna steal a rock, I would take that one.

[Ira Glass]

The little pretty ones.

[Narrator/Producer]

I won't, though, because it's really not a good time for me to be cursed. No, no.

[Gregor]

Nobody wants to be cursed.

[Narrator/Producer]

Yeah. Have you ever gotten a letter from someone after they returned the rock saying that the bad luck and the curse that had been lifted?

[Sponsor/Announcer]

No.

[Nunzio]

No, I never have.

[Gregor]

God, I never even thought of that. No. Nobody's written back and, like, hey, by the way, you know, everything's better now.

[Nunzio]

I mean, if.

[Gregor]

If it is for them. I. I love that.

[Narrator/Producer]

I wanted to ask, did anything change after you sent the rock back?

[Ted]

I got so lucky that I can't even talk about it.

[Narrator/Producer]

Actually, he could. Couldn't resist. After Ted Returned the rock. He came into a lot of money. Unexpectedly, he also stumbled into a great below market rate deal on a house. He did get divorced, but that, too felt like good luck. Ted doesn't know for sure if returning the rock is what changed his luck, because that was actually just one part of a much broader reckoning for him. But whatever it was, he says it worked. These days, his luck is turned around so much that his whole job is based on having good luck. He goes to estate sales and flea markets looking for treasures and sells them online. Like this one time, he's poking around at a sale in an old house and found an old, cool looking duck.

[Ted]

Call, you know, for hunting. A duck call, you know, weren't you into it?

[Narrator/Producer]

He bought it for $9 and posted it to a hunting Facebook group. Within an hour, he got a message from a guy who said, call me right away. So Ted did.

[Ted]

He said, this is a very special duck call. I'm a collector. And he said, I'm willing to give you $5,000.

[Narrator/Producer]

Oh, my God. You started this story cursed, and now you're just riding your good luck.

[Ted]

Yeah, pretty much, I think so.

[Narrator/Producer]

These days, Ted feels better in all kinds of ways. Like things had been put right in his life. Like the rock, which is back where it belongs. He'd felt guilty about taking it. That's true for a lot of people. The vast majority of the hundreds of letters I read mentioned guilt. Most people felt bad about having done the wrong thing and just wanted to try and make it right. A lot of the letters come from people at the end of their lives doing a little psychic housekeeping before they go. Some of the letters are so simple. Like, what else can I say? I was wrong and I'm sorry, or I don't regret much, but I regret taking this rock. I found Ted's letter in the archive, too. Handwritten. He says, I pray that the return will deem forgiveness from God, the Petrified Forest national park, and the people of the United States of America. And he apologizes. That big pile of returned rocks, the rangers have a name for it. It's called the conscience pile, which I find kind of moving. We make mistakes, and so often our attempts to make things right fall short. But I think if you're the kind of person who takes the time to mail a rock back to a national park years after taking it, you're probably on the right track.

[Ira Glass]

David de Kornfeld is one of the producers of our program. Thanks to Ryan Thompson, who noticed some of the letters on display on a trip to the park and then made a book of the letters called Bad Luck Hot Rocks. That's how we first heard about the story. Coming up. Donna the Goldstein leaps in to help a family who are not entirely sure they want or need his help with the stuff they own. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio. When our program continues, support for this American Life and the following message come from at&t. Whether you're calling your parents to say Happy anniversary or checking in with your kids before bedtime, staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, although proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com guarantee for details.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Support for this American Life comes from GoodRx. GoodRx can keep your family protected this cold and flu season with discounts on flu shots. And if you do get sick, GoodRx offers savings on cold and flu meds. Compare prescription prices and instantly find discounts of up to 80%. GoodRx is not insurance, but works with or without it and could beat your copay price. To save on flu shots plus everyday medications, go to goodrx.com tal.

[Ira Glass]

Support for this American Life and the following message come from Sierra. When dialing customer support for a simple question, you may have had the experience of being placed in what seemed like an endless wait. That's why there's Sierra, a platform created for businesses that want to provide better, more human customer experiences with AI. No counter responses, no hold music, just real solutions fast. Better customer experiences built on Sierra. Find out more at Sierra. AI it's this American Life. Myra glass, Today's program the thing about things, stories of objects that in one way or another become our bosses. It's like we are doing their bidding. It's like we're working for them. We arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2, a few hundred of my favorite things. You know, sometimes our attachment to things can be a real problem. You definitely can get too attached. Jonathan Goldstein is a longtime contributor to our show. His own show, Heavyweight, is back now with new episodes after a long hiatus. And one of the new episodes is about some parents whose stuff has become a problem for their kids. As always on Heavyweight, Jonathan jumps in to help. What I love about this particular story is how it unfolds over time, over years, actually, and then arrives at the end at these moments that I don't know. I don't want to say too much about this. You should just hear them. Here's Jonathan's story.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

All right, you ready? You rolling? You got levels? Me, me, me, me, me. Okay, go.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

This is Gregor. Gregor is one of my oldest friends and today he's coming to me with a problem.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I'll take it from the top. Okay, So I have two parents, Milton and Etta.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Etta and Milton are both push 90. And Gregor's problem is that they refuse to move out of their house. It's the same three story Victorian Gregor grew up in. He was 12 when the family first moved in. He still remembers the excitement as they unloaded boxes from the moving truck or moving trucks.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

You know, normal people move with like a big giant 18 wheeler moving truck. I believe when we moved we had six moving trucks.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

One for the family's belongings, the other five for the collections. Some people collect coins, some people collect comic books. Gregor's mother Etta collects collections.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

She has like maybe 200 egg beaters. Antique egg beaters she has. Do you know what a bisque nader is?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

No.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

In occupied Japan, people bought these little figurines where the head would wobble back.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

And forth like a bobble headed doll, something like that.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Anyway, she probably has 2,000 bisquen otters.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Then there are the 19th century weaving looms, the handmade baskets, the medieval scythes. Etta Ehrlich is an artist and her collections are the source of her inspiration. Etta sees beauty in everything, and in her hands, everything becomes art. She'll sculpt lint from the dryer. She'll put googly eyes on a splatter of dried bird poop.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

My mother has been unbelievably prolific in making art for like the last 35 years to a degree where now the living room is like full to the brim with a million pieces of art. And every week she probably makes five or ten more pieces of art.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

None of this would be a problem except that a large cluttered house is becoming increasingly dangerous for Gregor's elderly parents.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I fear the more conventional fears. I fear my mother falling down a flight of stairs, or my father. I mean, there's all kinds of dark things that can happen in a house full of staircases.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

And so Gregor wants to move his parents into a smaller apartment, something more manageable. That's his plan?

[Etta]

Yeah, that's his plan, but that's not my plan.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

This is.

[Etta]

Etta, the practical thing is we can't be in the house too much longer. I'm 88. Yeah, but to move out of the house isn't simply a question of selling the furniture. It's My God, what do we do with all this?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

All this, all the collections, is what's keeping Etta in the house. And of all her many collections, of all her milking stools and antique rolling pins, it's her collection of fragile, colorful bottles that is perhaps the biggest impediment to moving. By Gregor's estimate, Etta has thousands. Wine bottles, perfume bottles, old decanters, bottles washed up from the bottom of the ocean. As well as being an artist, Etta is a Buddhist. And her bottles are not just bottles, but a series of meditations. Because on each of the bottles, in fancy fonts and careful calligraphy, Etta places a message in the form of a Zen like riddle.

[Etta]

I turn my noose to tightropuse and madly dance upon it. Isn't that gorgeous?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

That's very nice.

[Etta]

There you go. You want me to give that away for nothing?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Other inscriptions are stop schlepping your old being into the future. Or we cling to illusions of control. After hearing a few, I start to recognize a theme. All the bottles bear messages imploring one to let go. Yet Etta is incapable of letting go of the very bottles doing the imploring or much of anything else. There is a little bit of a paradox or there's something to kind of be struggling with here.

[Etta]

You're very, very sharp. That is exactly, exactly true. These works which talk about being stuck with the grasping level I suffer from that.

[Gregor]

I could leave tomorrow.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

This is Gregor's dad, Milt. If the taxi pulled up right now, you would jump in.

[Gregor]

I'm ready to go. Yeah, I'll stop you there. He's never taken a taxi in his life.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

But if I pulled up right now.

[Gregor]

You'D get it uber duber. I don't get attached to furniture and bottles and stuff. I'll just reinforce that point that while my father may posit that he's a Taoist and not attached to anything, he is very much complicit, relentlessly bringing home the raw material through which my mother turns the art out.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

When was the last time you brought something home, Milt?

[Gregor]

Yesterday. I'm always interested in what she's doing, and I often find the raw materials walking around in the woods or anywhere. Find stuff. Her only requirement is if I find something, it has to have what she calls charm.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

As for Milt, what he's charmed by, exceedingly charmed by, is Etta. Milt is a poet, and after over 60 years of marriage, he still writes poems about her, rhapsodizing about the way she creates Art or cooks or the way she dances. Milt says he can watch Etta dance all night. He just doesn't understand her being so chained to her belongings.

[Etta]

I'm stuck, but I am not coming up with a solution that's any better, am I?

[Ira Glass]

Yeah.

[Etta]

You know, except dying. And that's not a solution. No, it's not a solution for Greg. He's left holding the whole thing.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Of Milton, Etta's three kids, Gregor is perhaps the one most ready to serve the child. His parents hand a to do list when he comes to visit.

[Etta]

I mean, he talks mean, and that's because he has meanness in him. I'm not saying he doesn't, but he's also a very kind, giving, generous, loving person.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Yes, he is. Yeah.

[Etta]

Yeah. Don't tell him I said so.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Inaction is a choice. Not doing anything. Something's bound to happen sooner or later, and just sort of watch the second hand sweep around the clock face until somebody's dead is the most passive and weakest possible way to exist and die. It just feels like, you know, the Damoclean sword of mortality is coming, and all we're gonna do is sit here and watch Rachel Maddow until it cuts our head off.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

And so, because Edda can't let go, Gregor wants my help in pulling off a most extravagant workaround, One that will allow Etta to both keep her stuff and still move out the plan of action that Gregor wants to present to her.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

What if you don't get rid of your possessions and we make a museum of your stuff?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Gregor explains to me the details. It seems that in the 1960s, Etta and Milt bought a 200-year-old farmhouse with no running water or indoor plumbing. Gregor's plan is to convert the barn into the Etta B. Ehrlich Museum, convincing one's mother to downsize by way of a feral farmhouse museum that by Greger's own admission is probably a breeding ground for the hantavirus. Has all the makings of a classic cockamamie scheme. But this is just the beginning. For his plan to build a museum to work, Gregor will need his siblings on board. So as his emotional envoy, I begin by phoning his sister, Lexi. Lexi is the level headed one of the three, and I want to get her read on the plan. I mean, is it realistic that he'll be able to turn the barn into a museum like that? Perhaps this plan is a bit half baked, but I figure I might have more luck getting Gregor's brother Dimitri on board. Dimitri's never been afraid of a scheme that runs a little pink on the inside. So I give him a call. We haven't spoken since I moved from New York, where Dimitri lives, to Minnesota.

[Gregor]

I hate to see a Minneapolis area code when you call. It makes me sad your business doesn't.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Bring you to Minnesota.

[Gregor]

I'm guessing it does sometimes. I interviewed Prince for a cover story. Everyone warned me to be very careful with Prince. He's very touchy.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Dimitri is a martial arts instructor who has kickboxed his way across Thailand. He's also a journalist who interviews celebrities.

[Gregor]

So I went there, waited all day.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

For the interview, and a musician who had a song go platinum three times in Belgium.

[Gregor]

He was like, hey, you want to jam? And I was like, okay. So I wound up actually jamming with Larry, Graham, and Prince for, like, 20 minutes.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

What?

[Gregor]

That was one sentence.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Before Dimitri can launch into his next sentence, I jump in. So your brother Gregor.

[Gregor]

Yeah, I'm familiar with him.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

He has this plan, which maybe you're also familiar with. When I'm finished rehashing Gregor's museum plan, Dimitri offers a laundry list of issues.

[Gregor]

There's a 99 to 100% chance of getting Lyme disease walking out of your car to the barn because it's high grass, a lot of deer getting poison ivy. There's also, like, horrible black mold because, as you know, the farmhouse burned down when my albino baker friend Theo stayed there and lit a fire, and the roof and the whole house burned down.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

And along with his friend Thea's trouble, there was also his friend Sonam's trouble in that cursed place.

[Gregor]

My friend, who spent 25 years as a Buddhist monk under the Dalai Lama, had to use a broom to fight off a very large raccoon that was in the house and was, like, growling at us, like, just horrifying.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

But for Dimitri, even more daunting than the rabid raccoons is changing his mother's mind on the matter. Whenever he's tried to clear space in his parents home, it refills overnight, suggesting Etta's problem can't be solved by physical means. Instead, he thinks the problem has to be attacked at its psychological root. She needs to learn how to let go. And for this, Dimitri has just the solution.

[Gregor]

Well, maybe. Maybe hypnosis. It stopped her from smoking, which is probably a more powerful psychological and physical addiction than collecting things.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Etta was a pack a day smoker, a habit she hung onto for nearly 30 years.

[Gregor]

Our friend, who was a hypnotist, said, oh, I can hypnotize you. And she went into the session thinking, this isn't going to work. The whole time the hypnosis was going on, she was like, this isn't working. This isn't working. And then she walked out and never smoked again. He was an interesting person too. His name was Saul Feldstein. He actually had one of his eyeballs was like hanging out of his face. And like, it was like a sort of early commune hippie thing.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

And like having grown up on TV sitcoms of the 1970s, I'm well aware of the power of hypnosis hanging out of his face. Hypnosis gave Fred Flintstone the self control to stop eating brontosaurus burgers. It gave the Fonz the confidence that jumped Snake Canyon on his motorcycle.

[Gregor]

One of his eyeballs.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

As a boy, I always wondered what it would feel like to have my full potential unlocked through the hypnotic arts.

[Gregor]

Hanging out of his face. And he was very successful as a hypnotist.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Wow. Unlike building a museum, hypnosis requires neither time, effort, nor those awful stanchions that snap back with that loud thwacking sound that make everyone turn around and stare at you. Fully convinced that Saul Feldstein is the solution to all of our problems and that museums belong in a museum. Dimitri and I say our goodbyes.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

We're slating in on part two. Johnny discusses post talking to Dimitri. Here we go.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

I need to tell Gregor that I like Dimitri's idea much better than his, but I need to tread lightly. From Cain and Abel to Stephen and Alec Baldwin. I know how competitive brothers can be. And unlike the Lord or Alexander Ray Baldwin, I don't want to be seen playing favorites. Do you think you're that, like, hypnotism has a role in this?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Well, I hear that, like, your voice went up an octave when we started talking about hypnotism and you got excited about hypnotism.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Well, Dimitri seemed to think that it would. That it could help.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Okay, so the two of you should go see a movie together.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Going to movies is Gregor and my thing. Clearly I'm arousing some jealousy. I need to keep my arguments away from Dimitri and grounded in the merits of hypnotism. This whole barn thing as the symptom, but through hypnosis.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Why are you saying it with like, the weird accent on the word hypnosis?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

I mean, do you think that hypnotism has something to offer here?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

My short answer would be, absolutely not. I think it's a waste of time. Hypnosis, hypnosis, hypnosis Hi, Johnny, how are you?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Hey, Dimitri. Hi. I've got your brother Gregor on the line with me.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

We've met.

[Gregor]

Hi, how are you?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Can you make the case to your brother?

[Gregor]

Sure. I just think that, you know, there's no harm. There's certainly no nothing to lose. It takes 15 or 20 minutes. And she's proven that she's very susceptible to hypnotic suggestions. So why not try it?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I agree with all those points. My main feeling is that getting someone to stop a behavior like smoking is much, much easier than getting someone to change their personality, which is harder to hypnotize someone out of.

[Gregor]

That may be true. I wouldn't disagree.

[Ted]

There.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Swept up in a wave of brotherly bonhomie, I decide it's a safe space to cautiously share my one secret boyhood longing. And along the way, I could get hypnotized that as something too.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Yeah, a lot of stuff.

[Gregor]

Yeah.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

And immediately regret it. What do you mean a lot of stuff?

[Gregor]

I mean that smug smile they could work on.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time.

[Gregor]

Being more able to look people in.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

The eye, not always hide behind a microphone.

[Gregor]

Actually, you know, there is all joking aside, there is a new hypnosis that works on what's called voluntary baldness syndrome, where they realize that a lot of men are sort of doing it on purpose.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Why would. Why would someone do that on purpose?

[Gregor]

Well, it's just that it turns out that hair loss is more of like an act of willful insolence, often. And a cry for pity.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

I used to love my hair.

[Gregor]

Well, if you loved it so much, why did you get rid of it?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

First of all, I find it offensive. And Gregor, chime in here because I'm sure you're equally offended.

[Nunzio]

No.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Dimitri used to be bald as an egg and then he willed it back on.

[Gregor]

I think if you did at the same time with my mother, we can get a two for one deal.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Package deal.

[Gregor]

I'm just saying it's science. If you read the New England Journal of Medicine, it's like.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

With Gregor and Dimitri aligned and friends again at my expense, I set out in search of the one eyed hippie hypnotist Saul Feldstein. But it turns out Saul died in 2019 at the age of 91. So I reach out to other hypnotists, all of whom pretty much hang up on me once I explain the project. So hypnotism is out, the museum is out. I'm stuck with my crap personality and Etta is stuck with her house full of crap, and Gregor is still at an impasse. But things are about to change. Gregor tells me that Etta has been offered a show at the Carter Boat Burton Gallery in Manhattan. Etta is an outsider artist, so the offer of her own exhibition feels like finally, at the age of 88, she's being invited inside. The show, with its formal invitations and coat check, feels like validation. It's the kind of opportunity Etta has always hoped for. And for Gregor, it feels like an opportunity for her pieces to find good homes outside her home. The show opens on March 21, 2019. Gregor and I make a plan to speak the morning after so we can tell me how it went. When we speak, what Gregor tells me is that things that night took a wild turn. Do you want to. Do you want to explain?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Sure. I flew into town for my mom's art opening. Okay. We're here at the art opening. It's a pretty good crowd, and everyone's eating wine and cheese, and it's great.

[Ira Glass]

But it's so loud.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

It was almost like a cartoon version of my mom's success story in that, like, some stranger guy came up and was like, you're a beautiful woman.

[Gregor]

You're beautiful.

[Narrator/Producer]

Thank you.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

It's very nice to see her my age.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Her ego was buffed from many sides. Everything going great.

[Ira Glass]

Hello.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Gregor's dad Milt, on the other hand, wasn't having as good a time. He spent most of the evening in the corner, nibbling on crackers. At the end of the night, Gregor approached him.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

What'd you make of that?

[Gregor]

Oh, it's very nice. A little bit exhausting.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

He seemed like even though he sometimes talks in a quiet voice, he was especially quiet, like I could hardly hear him.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

On the drive home, Milt conked out. When the family couldn't rouse him, they realized he wasn't just sleeping, but completely unconscious. Etta began yelling, wailing Milt's name. He was driven to the hospital, where the EMTs lifted him onto a gurney. The doctors thought he might be having a stroke, but they couldn't say for sure. In the waiting room, Etta turned to Gregor and said, you might as well order the dumpsters right now. Meaning, you win. Empty out the house, because if Milt isn't coming back to it, that's it. How do you know when the Damoclean sword of mortality isn't just dangling above you but actually falling? How do you know when it's time to pick up the remote? Turn off Rachel Maddow. And finally, act the night. A milestone in Etta's career was meant to symbolize a turning point, and it was just not the kind she was hoping for. Milt was eventually sent home from the hospital, but his claps signaled a change for Gregor, too. For so long, he'd been saying maybe it's time. But maybe it was time to stop saying maybe.

[Etta]

Hello?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Hi, it's Gregor and Jonathan.

[Etta]

Oh, and I thought this was a scam call. How do you like that? How are you?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Well, I wouldn't be so sure. It's not.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

We haven't finished the call yet.

[Etta]

Right. So what's the pitch?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Johnny wanted to dredge up a bunch of painful family issues.

[Etta]

Oh, sure, why not? The painfuler, the better.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

I want to talk with Etta about the night of the art opening and the way it affected her thinking about remaining in the house.

[Etta]

I won't be able to stay here alone. Either I will become ill or Milt will become ill, and I. And I. I need somebody to help me. There is a new little piece in my head that says things are going to change.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

In the aftermath of the art show opening, as Etta's new reality sunk in, another plan began to take shape, one that Etta came up with. Her idea is to pair each of her message on a bottles with the right person. In this way, each one will find the right home.

[Etta]

I now have a whole shelf full of stuff that I'm now earmarking to give away.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

That's something that you've not normally done?

[Etta]

No, I only gave very few things away, you know, to my best friend or to the kids or something like that. Very few. Very, very few.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

You think it's at the beginning of something, more of this to come?

[Etta]

Yeah, yeah. It has to be. It has to be. I take it very seriously. When I think of giving a person a bottle, I have to think, would it be good for that person?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Okay, now we're rolling.

[Ira Glass]

All right.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

A few weeks later, I call Gregor to see how Etta's bottle drive is coming along.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

So she called me this morning saying, I thought of the perfect person to give the perfect bottle to, but I'm afraid it's going to hurt his feelings.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Okay.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

She wants to give you a bottle.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

She wants to give. Okay, well, that. Wow, that's. That's really nice. Why? Why would that hurt my feelings?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

You know, if you give someone a bottle that says, like, I wish, like I was present, then it's sort of an implication that you're not present, you know what I mean? It could be interpreted sometimes as like a sort of a criticism. So I don't know how you'll take it.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Well, did she tell you what my bottle says?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

That's as much as I can say at this point, as much as I'm authorized to say.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Even though I should know better. Know how? Gregor will dangle this knowledge over my head like a cat dancer. My curiosity gets the better of me, and so I keep asking Gregor what the bottle says, which he uses as an opportunity to dissect my personality. All I can say, he says, is that it addresses some of your deep seated issues.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

Despite all your insights about other people, you sort of tend to remove yourself from the collective and put yourself in the position of, like, journalistic observer.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Uh huh.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

When you have these insights, you know, your dime store insights, you bolt on at the end of things where you're like, maybe we all need someone to run to that hallmarky nonsense that you tend to spout at the end of this. What are you, jerk?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

You feel comfortable just saying something like that to someone telling me about my dynasty?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I knew you were gonna take it the wrong way.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

What's the. What's the right way to take that?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I think sometimes you sort of make yourself resistant, like, oh, I don't matter. I'm just the fly on the wall to watching the human condition. As you know, people live and die and suffer, and babies are born and old people lowered into the ground. Oh, when the dirt hits the coffin, that reminds me of my sponsor. I think you just. You use the thing to remove yourself from what's actually going on.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Okay. All right.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

You're like, you know what would really make this thing sing? Now, let me just get a shot of you throwing your art off the bridge. That's what we need to finish this.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Over the next couple years, Etta continues to slowly search out the right homes for her bottles. Whereas in the past, Etta was only able to give away a few, Gregor estimates that she hands out about a hundred. During this time, Milt is in and out of the hospital with cardiac issues ranging from fainting spells and high blood pressure to an actual heart attack. But then, in the summer of 2021, it's Etta who receives some bad news. Two years after Gregor and I first spoke, Gregor phones to tell me his mother has been diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctor found nine metastases in her brain. They went to three different hospitals in five days, and the consensus was that it wasn't a matter of months, but of weeks in what felt like only Days, Etta went from carrying laundry up the stairs to needing to be carried up the stairs herself. With Etta's illness, Gregor decides to move in. The whole family does, into the big packed house they grew up in. A hospital bed is set up on the main floor in Etta's old office. And Gregor wakes up at sunrise and sits at Etta's bedside in silence. He speaks with her, makes her comfortable. He tells her it's okay to go, that everything is okay.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I stayed there for six weeks, eight weeks, and sort of did the bedside vigil. As she slowly died.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

In those final weeks, Gregor saw a change come over Etta.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

In the years running up to her death, she would say things like, listen, there's a rolled up rug in the attic that's worth a lot of money. Make sure that they don't, you know, cheat you out of that one. That was always kind of a sort of joke, sort of real thing. But when the actual room of death and dying was happening, that stuff didn't really come up. It felt more like she was at peace with a lot of stuff. And a lot of the stuff she told me. She would be laying there with her eyes shut, but smiling. And I'm like, you know, mom, what are you thinking about? And she was just. Just with her hand, she would indicate that she's, like, dancing by just flowing her hand in the air. It felt like a great death.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

The words on the bottles had finally sunk in. In the end, Etta could dance out of the world gracefully, no grasping.

[Ira Glass]

It's.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

It's the living who are left to grasp.

[Narrator/Producer]

Since my mom died, it feels like it's harder to throw things out than I thought.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

This is Gregor's sister, Lexi again. Like Etta, Lexi is an artist. And like Gregor, she's surprised by how after all the years trying to get her mom to let go of her stuff, she herself is finding it so hard to let go of that very same stuff.

[Narrator/Producer]

It just feels really hard to like her art. It feels. It's like a part of her. Yeah, but it's not her.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Producer]

I had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day, who is, of course, really, you know, grief stricken. And he was saying, why do people make art? And he thinks the reason people make art is so that they're not forgotten when they die. Like you do something that remains in the world.

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I think of her a lot.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

Do you still carry with you your mother's love? Do you feel it?

[Jonathan Goldstein]

I carry her with me. I mean, in the way that, you know, When I experience something, I can't help but hear my mother's voice making fun of me for my description of what I'm experiencing. I might be describing something, telling her about just some quotidian thing in the day. You know, this is a nice sunset, but it'd be nicer if that truck weren't backing up. And I can hear her being like, why are you so rotten? What is wrong with you? I mean, that type of thing.

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

You can try to move your aging parents out of their house. You can treat death like a to do list with items to check off, but ultimately, you can't control how people live or die. Even after Etta's death, Milt remained in that very same house. It's Dimitri and his own family that move in so that Milt doesn't have to be alone. And over the next few years, Gregor, in fits and starts and with disregard for what anyone thinks, continues to work on the museum. Only it's become less about a full fledged museum open to the public, and more of just a place to honor his mom. And then one day, Gregor texts, saying he found a sealed box in the Victorian with my name on it written in Etta's hand. When the box arrives, I unravel what seems like yards and yards of bubble wrap. Etta had taken great care. The bottle is a beautiful blue, the blue of a childhood toy. It's curvaceous and feels good in my hand. Upon it, Etta laid out her words to me.

[Etta]

I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. See what I mean?

[Aviva de Kornfeld]

I do. But how dare she? I'm kidding. Cue the outro music. Cue the dime store insight. Whether it's to a museum in the wilds of upstate New York or to a landfill, none of us knows where we're flowing. In the face of that, we need to learn how to let go. My feeling about what comes after death is constantly changing. I don't have a spiritual practice, so all I have is a feeling. And my feeling today is that bodies are vessels, just like colorful bottles are vessels, just like podcasts and houses packed with stuff. And all of art is it's all just stuff. And stuff can be beautiful, but it's there to help us get closer to the non stuff. Because, like the words Etta inscribed on one of her final bottles, all important matters are invisible.

[Ira Glass]

Jonathan Goldstein. That story is part of the new season of his show Heavyweight. It was produced by produced by Phoebe Flanagan, with help from Khalilah Holt. And Stevie Lane. If you do not know Heavyweight, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. I have to say one great episode to start with is Jonathan's original season one episode that's called Gregor about his friend Gregor who you just heard, who in that episode is on a mission to get justice from the pop star Moby.

[Narrator/Producer]

Stuff.

[J]

Life is not about flame.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Never.

[J]

I feel like I can't get enough. I got to sit on myself.

[Ira Glass]

It's just love. Rome was produced today by Aviva de Kornfeld. People who helped put the show together today include Bia Bennen, Michael Khamite, Suzanne Gabber, Cassie Halley, Seth Lynn, Tobin Lowe, Catherine Raymondo, Stone Nelson, Robin Reed, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Rummery, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Swatala and Marie Lisa Robertson.

[Gregor]

Texter.

[Ira Glass]

Our managing editor, Sara Abderrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Berry. Special thanks today to Emma Munger. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by prx, the public radio Exchange. A reminder that if you like our show and listen to it a lot, please consider signing up as a this American Life partner. Do it for the stuff you get or do it simply because you want to help us keep making the show the way we do it now. [e-mail] LifePartners thanks this week to life partners Fabian Frey, Kathy D, Anastasia Ragland and Nancy Berault. Thanks as always to our program's co founder, Ms. Tory Malatea. After just one week making maybe 1,500 homemade AI videos, he's quitting. Sora.

[Ted]

It was a scourge on my life it was a shadow that was always with me.

[Ira Glass]

I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American Life.

[J]

I got everything I need a lot more than I don't but no matter what I got there's always something I want 30 days, no payment I just gotta try it it's such a deal I can't afford not to buy it Fantastic. Plastic drastically reduced industrial strength organic prune juice all you can eat at the buffet bar and no money down on a brand new car it's just stuff it ain't nothing but a bang Just stuff Life is not about playing Whenever I feel like I can't get enough I got the seat on the sale it's just stuff.

[Ira Glass]

Next week on the podcast of this American Life. As of this year, refugees are basically not allowed into the United States, except for one lucky group.

[Gregor]

Oh, yeah, no, we're all coming over.

[Narrator/Producer]

No, we'll See you soon. Wow.

[Ira Glass]

On our way around the corner, winners and how they made themselves winners. We get to know them. That's next week on the podcast on your local public radio station. This message comes from Schwab. Everyone has moments when they could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education and human help when you need it. This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab can help. Download the latest episode and [e-mail] financialdecoder.