Look Away—Or Don’t: The Moth Radio Hour

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This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Kate Tellers.

“The other night I was walking home from the subway”

with my two children, ages 8 and 10. We had just crossed an intersection when we heard squealing tires immediately followed by the crunch of metal. When we turned around, there were two people lying in the street next to a smashed up motorcycle.

I knew two things immediately. I had to call 911, and my children could not witness this. I quickly told them to turn around with their backs to the street and me, as I described to the dispatcher what I was witnessing. After help was confirmed,

I turned around to my children to see their tiny backs rigid, lit up by flashing blue and red lights as a sound of sirens grew closer. They looked so innocent. I do not regret preserving some of that. Sometimes the right thing to do is to look away.

“And other times we need to look life straight in the eyes.”

In this hour, we'll explore stories from people who are grappling with this conundrum. And for all you big-hearted people out there, I confirmed with the detective later that the two men in the intersection survived.

They will, thankfully, be fine. Our first story comes from Ali Griswald, who told this at a story slam in London, England. Here's Ali. So I love my flat except for its window.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the window. It's even double glazed.

The problem is that it looks directly into my neighbor's shower.

This is the main window in my flat. It's the one I face when I'm sitting on my couch. When I'm eating dinner at my table, it's impractical to keep it covered at all times. It is unavoidable as were they when they were showering.

I've never met my neighbors in the building next door, but I feel they were intimately acquainted. They were either very clean or very dirty. I'm unclear which, but as far as I was concerned, at least one of them was in the shower at all times,

and often both of them together having enthusiastic shower sex. I considered what to do about this. I thought I'm an adult. I should be able to work out a mature solution. To this problem, we all live on the top floor of our respective buildings,

and it would be perfectly reasonable for them to assume they're in the privacy of their own home. I felt like it was my civic and neighborly duty to let them know. So I decided to go about it in the most British way possible by writing them a very apologetic note.

I started with, I'm sorry, which after several years of living in this country,

“I think is the best way to start a conversation with any British person.”

So I say, dear next door neighbors, I'm so sorry for the awkwardness of this note. I just wanted to let you know that your shower window isn't as opaque as you might think it is. Actually, it's pretty easy through, in case you wanted to get a curtain, wishing you well kind regards all the best, Ali.

Early the next morning, I tiptoe over to my neighbor's flat. I've addressed the note to top floor flat because I don't know their names. I don't even know their flat number. I put it through the mail slot, and I run back to my building. A week goes by, nothing changes.

The shower ring and the shower sex continue a pace. At this point, I'm forced to conclude there's one of two options. Option one, they read my note and they don't care. Option two, which seems to me far more likely, they didn't get or didn't read my note. I resign myself to the situation and in the meantime, I tell everyone else in my building about it, too.

And so a couple months later, my neighbors and the flat directly below mine, Alex and Georgia, come by with some news. They tell me that the flat in the building next door is up for sale, and their friends are buying it. They've already told their friends about the shower window, and their friends are planning to get a curtain.

I'm like amazing in what an incredible sitcom level solution to my sitcom level apartment problem.

Home sales close slowly in the UK, but several more months down the line, their friends moving.

“I know this not because Alex and Georgia tell me, but because one day new people are in the shower,”

and their taller. I won't go into too much detail other than to say that when you are seeing people through their shower window and their taller, more is available at I level. So I go back to Alex and Georgia. I say hey guys, I see your friends moved in, but maybe you could remind them about the shower. They tell me that they're seeing their friends for dinner in a few weeks,

and they can bring it up then. In the meantime, they come over to my flat to sort out a problem. We're having in the building just in time to see one of their friends step into the shower. Alex and Georgia pressed their faces to my double glist window.

“That's Pete said Alex, that's all of Pete said Georgia.”

I suggested this problem was more urgent than dinner, and maybe we could send them a text. A few days later, I'm sitting on my couch when I see it. It is a historic day in my flat. The curtain is going up. It is like the opposite of the Berlin Wall falling. I text all my friends, the news. A few weeks later, Alex stops by and he knocks on my door. He tells me that he's been over to the friends for dinner and they were looking at photos of the

listing of the flat from when it was up for sale when he noticed something odd about the kitchen. In the kitchen, you can see the fridge, and on the fridge, there is distinctly a single piece of paper. So Alex seemed all the way in on the photo, and there, Larry but unmistakable,

“and all of its awkward apologetic glory, was my note, not lost, not on red,”

but displayed in a place of honor for everyone to see. Thank you. That was Ali Griswal. Ali is a writer and former investigative journalist,

living in London. This is her first story for the month. She still lives in that same flat,

but is happy to report that there have been no more shower incidents. Our next story is from Mesha Merrill, who told this at a story slam in Miami, where we partner with W-L-R-A. Here's Mesha. Hey, I'm nervous. Okay, so, when I was a kid back in the 1990s,

yeah, it's all that long ago. My mom used to take my sister and I over to blockbuster video, and she would say, "Go pick out any video you want, and then we pick it out and we'd rent it, and we'd bring it home, and she would make a copy of that video for us to keep." So we could watch it whenever we wanted. Right, so that's illegal, and we did it for many years, and eventually blockbuster kind of cotton,

and the VHS tapes would arrive with a sort of lock on them that prevented us from being able to copy them. So we found another video stored called new concept video, which was in Miami Beach, was a great local video store, and we started doing the same thing there. And it was kind of a blessing because new concept had this entirely different collection of movies, like all these eclectic independent movies and foreign films, and my mom was in heaven because she's a real film buff,

and she could kind of culture my sister and I, a little with all of these eclectic movies. So, you know, while she had her head buried in like the indie film section, I wandered around as a nine or ten year old in this video store and found another section, which had this like partition with a red, like velvety curtain, and I would hook my head through and see this, you know, like ocean of just like fleshy, just porn, it was porn.

And I was amazed and mesmerized because, I mean, not only, you know, it was amazing,

but it's also, I had no idea what sex was because we didn't discuss these things in my family,

I kind of think of her a little bit as like an Annie Hall, like a real-life Annie Hall. She's very beautiful, and very funny, and warm, but neurotic, and throws on like outfits that

don't really work, but they look amazing on her. So, she's like that, but she's also

Kurdish and Muslim. So, along with this Kurdish, Muslimness comes a lot of other, you know, baggage, in my opinion, like, especially basically, which is sexually repressed. So, you know, and so we didn't talk about sex growing up, and she protected us a lot from that conversation, which meant that these videos that she was copying, she wouldn't just copy them, she'd also edit them. Sensoring out anything that she thought was too sexy or violent. So, she just cut all that stuff out,

“and so that means like, you know, when I think about watching a movie as a kid, I really can't”

remember one movie that I watched that didn't at some point just freeze with two characters on screen, like, clearly about to kiss, and then frantically fast-forward. And I was desperately trying to look past those grey squiggly lines on screen, but I couldn't see anything because it was just this chaos of fast-forwarding all the way through the scene, and then it would stop in the movie would continue. And she did this without fail with every movie that we rented. And then what happened

is, like, just to be safe and cover her bases, she wouldn't just, you know, cut out, like, sexy scenes. She also cut out just huge portions of the movie because she was suspicious that maybe there's

“some, like, subliminal sexual content in there, which is not quite picking up on, and just to be safe,”

let me cut out, like, this massive portion. So, like, for instance, like, Greece, like, the movie Greece, which I loved. My sister and I would watch Greece, and the way, I watched, I thought, like, wow, like, would a weird kind of, like, avant-garde experimental movie

when really it was this incredibly conventional musical because she had cut out, like, a third of

the movie. Then there was the Wizard of Oz, which, I don't know if anyone remembers, there were these flying monkeys in the movie, which terrified my sister. So, she made another version without flying monkeys in it, which I have to say did not affect the story at all. So, still a great movie without the monkeys. So, yeah, this is the way I grew up and how I watched the movies, and, you know, I eventually, like, wanted to see the original format of these movies and I did,

I watched them, and I have to admit, I mean, I was pretty disappointed with the original's, because they were really fake and phony, and they had these stories that made sense and, like,

a plot that was, you know, had a throughline and an arc and a beginning and a million and then,

and I really like what my mom did, because the movies she made, these versions, my mom's versions, they, they reflect a lot more accurately, my life. They're scattered, they make absolutely no sense, and there's very little sex in it. That was Misha Merrill. I asked Misha about some of the edits his mother made to the movie Greece that made it so avant-garde. He told me that she cut out all of the early scenes

of Danny and Sandy kissing on the beach. He thought it was an intentional decision that the audience know absolutely nothing about their backstory, a full choice. In a moment, spice grannies on a plane and beauty on the other side of bravery. The more a 3D hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media and Woods Hole Massachusetts.

“. It's a great idea and it's always different. That's what music is for.”

How do you feel about it? With Shopify, you can help to a real help. Start a test for a single-euro promonet on Shopify.de/recorder.

about really big things, things here in the news. But most times, the little mysteries are the best.

“Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know, I've never seen this happen.”

I've got skirts, I've got shorts, this is true. Mysteries, of every size, each week, this American life, wherever you get your podcasts. This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Kate Tellers. Our next story in the show about the choice of when to look is from Madeline Berenson, who told this at a slam in Denver where we partner with public radio station KUNC. Here's Madeline.

So, I had boarded the plane to Portland, Oregon, where I was headed for my grandson's third birthday.

And in my hand, I had my boarding pass, and on my boarding pass was printed my row and seat 8B.

“And when I got to row 8, I saw that the women in seats A and C both had gray hair.”

And since I am also a woman with gray hair, I found it kind of funny to be completing this little trio of Crohn's on a plane. And when I sat down and I got a better look at my seatmates, I thought it was even funnier than I thought, because each of us had a very distinct style that reflected a different persona. So, we were kind of like, you know, the Spice Girls Granny Edition. The woman in the window seat C A was fit and pin, and she was wearing all Patagonia,

sporty granny. The woman in the aisle seat was wearing this like drapy velvet dress and a crystal necklace, Mystic Granny. And I was in the middle in one of my cotton vintage dresses that I paid like $3 for. Drift store granny. So, you know, I'll put together in a row like this. We look like a real-time 3D Buzzfeed quiz. Which modern, funky granny are you? And I was kind of proud of that. And I was feeling very pleased with myself about the way we were redefining the post-menopausal woman.

Right? Like, look at this world. You don't have to devolve into the stereotypical cranky, judgemental, busy body who's in love with Barry Menolo. You know, you can still be yourself. Not that there's anything wrong with Barry Menolo. Anyway, then the score just couple comes on the plane and stops at the row in front of us, row seven. And I don't know their names because they only call each other babe the rest of the time. But for the sake of this story, we will call them

Brittany and Dan. And Brittany took a look at her boarding pass and she saw that they were assigned seats be and see and she turned to Dan and she went ballistic. She was like the middle seat. Are you kidding me? The middle seat. How many times did I tell you? I needed the window seat.

“That was the only thing you had to do. The only thing. Oh my God. You screw up even the”

simplest thing at which point the man in seven A had turned his back to them, closed his eyes and was now pretending to fall asleep. Sporty granny, mystic granny and I kind of shot each other a yikes look and Brittany was going on and on, listing all the ways that Dan was ruining her life. And every now and then Dan would say something like sorry babe. Sorry babe. But it just made it worse. She was like I don't want you to be sorry babe. I just want you to not be lame.

Babe, can you understand that? Can you just try to not be so lame? Can you even try? Oh my God. So she went on and on and on, all through the boarding process, all through takeoff and it was getting worse. It was getting uglier and meaner and at one point I realized that mystic granny and sporty granny and I were all holding hands and sort of just kind of like we were bracing ourselves against this ugliness and this horror. And then I also realized that we knew this story.

We had seen this before, right? The beautiful abusive woman and the broken man under her spell

who can never do anything right is responsible for everything and can fix nothing.

And when we got to altitude and Brittany was still at it, mystic granny broke.

you are not the only person in the world. There are other people on this plane and your

childish selfish tantrum is upsetting all of us. It's time for you to stop. And Brittany turned and looked at her and she burst into tears. And she got up and she went off to the bathroom and she stumbled down the aisle, sobbing all the way. But now, sporty granny had something to say. So she tapped down on the shoulder

“and she said, "I don't care how pretty she is. It is not worth that abuse." And you know what?”

You deserve more. And realizing that we had just morphed from the granny spice girls into the granny Greek chorus, I thought, "Well, now it's my turn to add something." So I said, "Yeah." I said, "That's not love. That's not love." And Dan was looking at us between the, you know, the space between seeds feed and his eyes as big brown eyes were filled with tears. And he said, "Mind your own fucking business." So just then, Brittany comes back from the bathroom and she's still crying and she falls into

her seat and she leans against Dan and she's whimpering, "Oh my God, she was so mean. She was so mean to me and Dan's like, "Oh no babe, I'm sorry babe." Meanwhile back in row eight,

“we granny's weren't feeling quite so spicy anymore. We just kind of slowly retreated into our own”

little personal spaces and cranky granny in the window seat, closed her eyes and went to sleep. Judge Mantle Granny in the aisle seat pulled out a book and started to read and me in the middle, busy body granny. I put in my ear buds turned on my music and listened to my love songs playlist all the way to Portland. So my favorite playlist and I know what you're thinking and know, there is no Barry Mantle on it. Not one song. Thank you.

That was Madeleine Barrinson. Madeleine is a writer, ski instructor and a blissed out wife, mother and grandmother who passionately believes that Minding One's own business is highly overrated. To see a picture of Madeleine wearing one of her obviously vintage finds, please visit TheMoth.org. Did you know that we have a pitch line that you can call and tell us a two minute version of a story that you want to share on a Moth stage? We listen to everyone. Here's one that I love,

that reminds us that what we look so closely at one day may not be worth a second glance tomorrow. This pitch came in from Arnold Bremon. This is a short part of a long humorous story.

“Of all the 2000s and performers that I presented, I think F.O. Merman was probably one of the most”

memorable. It was the late 1970s and she was in her early 70s. I was quite concerned that her voice

wouldn't be as powerful as she was in her head down Broadway. At rehearsals, she was absolutely

alleviated that fear. Her voice could be heard from miles without a mic. At performance time, the Broadway Bell sang Dan Stepa Storm and had the audience at the edge of their seats. After the finale, the audience jumped up and cheered the great legends. Backstage, Merman was Merman. She was totally herself loud, rash, and boisterous. A hundred fans waited at the stage door. She was flattered when I told her what she said. Now that's terrific. I'm now

getting rid of them. The following morning, before taking my start to the airport, I opened the local paper on the banner headline. The old star should retire to old performers' homes. The audience jumped up out of sheer sympathy. I praised she hadn't seen the review. She had and said to me, "I had to come to this piss out little town to get a view like that. There were 200 letters of complaints to the editor. The editor sent them on to me and I posted them to my star. I received

a wonderful letterback that hangs on my wall today. It ended. Don't worry about that untrue and

unkind review. I never pay any attention to them anyway. I always say yesterday's newspaper

wraps today's fish fondly effort." Sing out, Ethel. Those are wise words.

hour or others from the Moth Archive. Sometimes the choice to look is not simple. Our next story

“is from Liz Mills, who told the set of grand slam we produced at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco,”

where we partner with Public Radio Station K-A-L-W. Here's Liz Mills. My brother William is nothing short of who duty when it comes to getting out of things he doesn't want to do. Literally no excuse or strategies beneath him, and I'm really ashamed to say I've often been his accomplice. Nearly 15 years ago he called me from his college dorm room and told me he was totally screwed for a research paper the next day. And so me, his ghost writer, since high school,

assessed the situation and there was no way I could write 15 pages on the Ottoman Empire by the next morning. And so I said, "William, it looks like you're going to have to say our grandmother died." And he was like, "Liz, I did that at midterms." And so I joked, "How about grandpa?" And he said, "I did that one too." Suffice to say, even Houdini runs out of tricks at a certain

“point, and William certainly did. He failed the paper. But the good news is, when it comes”

to the higher-stake stuff, William always rises to the occasion. About six years ago, he and I

run a bus on the way to Mountain View, and the driver lost control of it, hit the median we flipped, and out of nowhere William turned into a real-life Clark Kent. He was saving the day, running around, helping people up, bandaging people up. He was making us laugh. In the middle of the dark, highway, when it was pretty scary, he was our brightness. So it probably comes as no surprise that a thrill-seeker, like William, ended up in an unconventional path. About a decade ago,

he became a skydiver, and a skydiving instructor, and then a base jumper. Which means he's spent over 10 years climbing up mountains and jumping off epic peaks with only a parachute on his back. Pretty insane, but kind of cool. And so despite the fact that I'm epically less epic than him,

I still am always his get out of jail free emergency contact. And I do that because I love him.

He's amazing, and one of my favorite people. So no surprise that I ended up in Switzerland two years ago when I got the call that he needed my help. He and his best friend Nate ran this bucket list trip to the Swiss Alps to jump off this mountain called the Iger, as a way to celebrate their newfound sobriety and just beginning a new life chapter. But things weren't going according to plan and enter Liz. My task of the day was I was standing

at a police station in some random town in the Swiss Alps and getting a list of to-do's. I had to sign a mountain of paperwork, make a ton of calls, pick up his shattered sunglasses, cremate his body, bring him home. My big brother William at 32 had jumped off the Iger, soared like Superman, seen the world from a vantage point very few ever will and not made it out of life. Greath defies words. And as I sat there with the police officer, I was shaking.

I felt outside of my body and I could barely process the fact that William, who got out of everything, some sort of magical part of him got out of everything, hadn't made it out of life,

where was the magic? As always, leaving the police station, the officer handed me one more thing,

an SD card. William was wearing a GoPro when he jumped off the mountain, because base jumpers do that, and so he had the final minutes of his life recorded. So I know what you're thinking, I hope Liz threw that out and forgot it ever existed, but of course I didn't, because I had some sick belief that sister loyalty meant I had to experience that too. I threw it out of my head for a while though, but a few months after his diet he died, I broke. And then like a manic frenzy,

I pulled the video up on my computer, and I just imagined if I hit play, what I regret it, but I just be screaming out the screen, William pulled a parachute earlier, pull it now, it's now or never, you've got to do it now. I hit play. And the video was nothing like I expected. It was really cool. I saw from his vantage point being at the top of the mountain,

“looking around at some of his great friends, he was saying a love you man. How epic is this?”

He was doing high fives and everything. I saw, as he brought his toes closer to the edge, and then he jumped. And for 45 seconds, when I was watching the video, it was the two of us, looking at this incredible escape ahead of us. This valley, it's beautiful. We looked to the left and to the right, and we took it all in, and I understood it. I mean, why stand at the tipy top of the

terms? William started based on being when he was in a really bad place, and it was a hobby that

“became a passion and a passion that turned him into the best version of himself. It was a part of”

the way he healed from bouts of tremendous depression throughout his life. So William's final gift to me was he showed me a way that healing has many different paths, some of which are bananas, like jumping off mountains, and all of them are hard, but it's worth it. It's taken a huge amount of courage of the past two years for me to learn how to simultaneously hold grief and devastation with joy and hope. William was the one who showed me there such beauty on the other side of bravery.

The video ended. I was devastated. It felt irrecoverable. I could not imagine watching this video it sickened me, but I paused and truly it took a few seconds. I realized the magic in it because

William really was feeding me. He was always escaping all the way to the very end. He escaped

social norms, the predetermined path, the idea that the way things are, or the way they're supposed

“to be. He evaded that misconception we all have, that the possibilities presented to us in life”

are representative of all our actual options. He didn't escape death, obviously, but none of us will. And my God did he show me the extraordinary beauty of a life well lived. That was Liz Mills. I asked Liz what it was like to share her brother with a room full of strangers. She said, sharing William both his life and his death with the mouth audience felt very right. He lived life in such an epic way as if he was intentionally teeing me up for a lifetime of moments

where we could share the spotlight. Him as the protagonist, me as the storyteller.

In a moment, a Hawaiian man goes hunting for the last music of Kohala when the Moth Radio Hour continues. He's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character. But he doesn't understand.

“He's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character.”

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He's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character. He's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character. He's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character. He's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character. He's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character.

He's a master of the character, he's a master of the character, he's a master of the character. This spring, the Moth Mainstage is traveling to cities around the country with stories of the American dream. Find a sitting near you at the Moth.org/mainstage. This is the Moth Radio Hour, I'm Kate Tellers. Our final story was told by Boots Lupinui at our mainstage in Honolulu, Hawaii,

where we partner with Hawaii Public Radio. Here's Boots.

This is a story about magic. Not the kind with the top hat and the rabbit and the holiday beginning of the song and half.

It's always the holiday beginning.

I saw real magic when you see a magician and they tell you where to look and you still amazed when the trick happens. I'm going to tell you right up front where to look. So the magic I witnessed happening in Kohala. Kohala is a beautiful place as full of stories.

Some of them are well known like the one about how the people of Kohala saved the infant coming from being killed. Hiding in from whole armies so that he might grow up and fulfill the prophecy and unite our islands. Kohala did that.

“I was born here on Oahu on the Windward side in Kanyu, right?”

But my roots reach back to Kohala. We'd visit as kids and I knew that place was special.

A few years later, I saw the amazing documentaries of Eddie and Mona Khamai.

Documentaries about special places and a way of life that was disappearing all too quickly. And I knew I wanted to make stories like that. But regular guys, we don't get to do that kind of stuff. So maybe better we just leave it to the professionals like Eddie and Mona Khamai. But in the early days of 2017, Eddie Khamai passed away.

And that line of storytelling and later that same year, my wife showed that we moved to Kohala. And we hadn't even been there for very long when I ran into a couple of guys I hadn't met in years to great Hawaiian musicians. They come over for dinner, they bring their wives and their instruments, of course. In that order, of course.

[laughter]

“We moved to the living room, the cases pop open, the guitars and ukulele come out, and we start playing.”

We're playing old Hawaiian music, we're playing local music. There was on the radio when we were kids. There was a couple of eagle songs and they were all kind of music. That jam session lasted until four in the morning. Yeah, our wives were thrilled.

But the whole time I'm sitting there and I'm thinking about how good we sound. We sound like we're already a band. I think I want to keep this feeling. I want to feel this again and again. So later that day, I tell my wife that I've had these ideas for telling stories for years

for making documentaries.

But I never thought I could do that kind of thing.

But Eddie Khamai only had so long to tell stories. And I don't know how long I have to tell stories.

“I told her I wanted to go hunting for the old unrecorded songs of Guahala.”

I call them heirloom songs and ask the old families if they could share any songs. My wife foolishly agreed to help me because let's face it. She married a musician and an artist and now apparently a storyteller. So clearly she has poor judgment. But she can write grant applications.

So she agrees to help in with her help. I get to work. I ask all the film guys ask the musicians and everybody says yes. Because apparently everybody else in Kohala has poor judgment too. I get a grant.

I start to go fund me. I name our band the Kohala Mountain Boys. And we got to work. I put out the word on social media. Everybody I knew.

If they had any songs from any family in Kohala. And immediately I get hit. I get hit. How easy is this? One of my grade school classmates contacts me and says her grandfather,

who was from Kohala, wrote a song in 1940 or '41. So I contact her by phone and she says she knows she's seen the song. But she can't remember where. So her and her husband, they tear that house out. And in the last place they looked.

They find it. Pop us papers. And they send me the lyrics and she tells me about her grandfather. How he legally adopted her. And raised her as his own daughter.

So she could meet some of her Kohala family. It's a good man.

“What she sent me was a page of han written lyrics,”

Mako Lelohovai language. My job was to take those lyrics and put them in the song, a form of a finished song. So I took the lyrics and the time period that he wrote them. And I tried to craft the song that I thought might have been a hit on the radio here.

If you heard it in 1940. And just like that, song number one done. Super easy, right? But it's funny.

When we finally recorded that song for the documentary,

we're standing in the boonies in this ancient part of Kohala. And we're in the front of this old cabin. And we're surrounded by native plants and trees. And there's a stream running right here. We're dressed in period clothing and playing instruments that would have been available

at the time that song was written. And we're playing this old slash new song. And it could have been World War II era Hawaii. And yet, right in front of me,

“there's a camera man with a gimbal and a giant camera.”

And off over here, there's a song guy with a bank of digital whatever they are. And I've got a wireless digital monitor in my ear. It's like a 1940 colliding with 2019. But we got it done. And then, nothing.

For months, nothing.

Nobody gave me any songs.

I asked everybody I knew to ask everybody they knew and nothing. And I'm thinking, these great deliverable deadlines, they're going to come and all that money is going to have to be paid back. And I don't even know what kind of limbs I'm going to have to sell to make that happen. But it's not so magical now.

But I started this, and a small group of people stood up with me. And I knew in my bones that there's magic here. So I just had to keep trying. So I did. And a week before the film crew was to come up and shoot for the one and only time.

My base player tells me, "I know a lady who has a song, but she not will give him to you." [ Laughter ] I don't even know what that means. But I'm desperate.

So I called the phone number. She grilled me forever. And then she tells me to come to her house for round two of the interrogation. [ Laughter ] It's so Hawaiian.

I just trying to root up my intentions. Okay. So I go and I sit down with her and she tells me about her dad. About how he used to run a crew that maintained the famous Kohala ditch trail. And how he would take a couple crew members and some pack animals and hike into the forest.

And they'd stay in this little cabin next to the ditch trail for days on end while they worked on it. And the whole time missing his family. And at night he would lay in his cot. And while he's thinking about his wife and kids, the beautiful set of gardenians from all the wild gardenian bushes around the cabin.

We're come whafting in the screen windows. And he wrote a lot of song for his wife, comparing her to the lovely gardenians all around him. She thought it would have been about 1939 or so. At the end of this hour, she smiles and misses.

I think I'm giving my daddy some. [ Laughter ] And then she says, "It goes like this." And she starts humming. No, no, no, no.

That's not how. Well, that's it. That's it. After all of that, that's it. humming.

So I said, "Does it have lyrics?" And she said, "Oh, yes." And she pulls on a note pad on a pencil. And she starts trying to remember what they might have been. [ Laughter ]

Right about then, I started feeling like I was getting COVID. [ Laughter ]

“And I think I was contracting it from this song.”

[ Laughter ] But I recorded her humming on my phone, and I took her scratch paper lyrics home to write this song with now six days left.

Just like the first one I was shooting for a song

that would have been popular here back in the day 1939, when he wrote it. This one was easy. This one wrote itself. It was something about it.

It felt like all I had to do was play it out loud and it would be real and it was. Just like with the first song we recorded in the bushes on the wall of a rock wall of a cull of patch. And we got it all done on time.

[ Laughter ] And the last day of filming, Sunday afternoon, the crew comes to me and they say, "We got all the interview footage shot. We got all the song footage shot.

But we still have no idea what the story is that we're editing this footage into. There's no way I could have story about it any of this. Now this crew is leaving to go back to the airport to fly back to Oahu in a couple of hours

and I still don't know what the story I'm telling is. So now I'm in my head running through all the interview footage, trying to play it back and it hits me

“that I've overlooked the most important piece of this whole puzzle.”

I took my eyes off of the spot where the trick was happening. Both the ladies who gave me songs for this story, for this project. One at the beginning of the project and one at the end of the project.

We're both from the same old Kohala family.

And yet they had never met.

They had never even heard of each other. I know how that was possible. But then it hit me that I can tell the finished story with one last shot. So I tell the crew to go get the first lady

the one who grew up on Oahu. Take her to the family graveyard in Kohala. It's a beautiful little plot. She'd never been there before. Don't mic her up.

Ask her to wait in the car because I don't want her to explore that graveyard on her own. I go to get the other lady, the one who grew up in Kohala. And I asked her to come back to the family graveyard

to meet her cousin of hers for the very first time.

And she says yes, and we filmed them meeting in the graveyard, hugging and kissing. The one woman pointing out the graves of both women's shared ancestors. They're holding hands and they're smiling and walking

and talking and without microphones. But we don't get to know what they're saying that's not for us that conversation belongs to their family. And it gives me chicken skin even now.

“I think about the fact that the only people who heard those words”

were those two women and their ancestors. And I was honored. I stood outside that graveyard and I was honored to just be a silent witness to this sweetness in a graveyard.

And that was it. There was the trick. It was revealed. I was watching the whole time and I still don't know how the trick was done.

But what I do know is these two guys, these two men, these two sons of Kohala. They love their family and their home so much that even after death, they're moving things around just to try and reunite their descendants

in their homeland. What kind of place? What kind of special place?

“Raises people who hold that kind of love”

and passion and loyalty even after death. Like I said, I don't know. I still don't know how the trick was done and I don't care. As I saw real magic,

I saw what happens when an amazing place raises

loving, loyal children. I saw a real magic. No, top hat and no rabbit and no holiday to get cut in half. Real magic.

Mahalo. [applause] That was Boots Lippinui. Technically, we look with our eyes, but you will see Boots Story more clearly

if you listen with your ears. To end our hour, here is the Kohala Mountain Boys playing one of the song's Boots References in his story. It's called Lovely Gardinia. [music playing]

Lovely Gardinia. You're the flower of my heart. My sweet Gardinia. You're my only sweet heart. You're my only sweet heart.

You're the flower of my heart. My sweet Gardinia. You're my only sweet heart. It's petals no way away. With fragrance so sweet.

Remember, you can pitch us at 877-799-M-O-T-H

where you can also share these stories or others

“from the Moth Archive and by tickets to Moth Story”

telling events in your area through our website. There are Moth Events year-round.

You can find a show near you and come out to tell a story.

The Moth can be found on all major social media platforms.

“That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour.”

We hope this episode has inspired you to see stories around every corner.

We hope you'll join us next time, and though we cannot see you,

we appreciate that you're here. We are my only sweet heart sweet heart.

“This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me,”

Jay Allison, and Kate Tellers, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show. Co-producer is Vicky Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Marina Clujay, Sarah Austin, Genes, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardinala, Caledonia, Karen's, Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson,

and Patricia Euronia. Our theme music is by the drift. Other music in this hour is from Epidemic Sound, and Boots Luba Nui. podcast music production support from Davy Sumner. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including a executive producer Lea Restennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and to learn all about the Moth, go to our website, TheMoth.org.