Lost and Found: The Moth Radio Hour

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Speaker 2 This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin-Janess.
In this episode, Lost and Found Stories. Heirlooms lost, old ways of life gone, and what is found in their stead.

Speaker 2 Our curatorial producer, Suzanne Rust, found out about our first storyteller, Ross Jessup, through an article in a local Missoula-Montana newspaper, and she reached out.

Speaker 2 Ross later told us, I thought it was a scam and so did my lieutenant. I told my wife about it and she said, the moth? It's not a scam.
Call them. I listen all the time.

Speaker 2 So we begin this episode, Lost in the Woods of Lolo National Forest in Missoula, Montana, with Ross Jessup, a cop 10 years into the police force.

Speaker 2 He came to New York to tell his story outside in Greenwood Cemetery, so you may hear the occasional airplane. We partner with the Greenwood Historic Fund.

Speaker 2 And just a note, this story involves a crime, and there is some intensity. Here's Ross Jessup live at the Moth.

Speaker 6 It's July 7th,

Speaker 6 scorching hot, 95 degrees. I'm in a Dodge Durango driving on a dusty road.

Speaker 7 I'm I'm a cop.

Speaker 6 I responded to a call where there was a man

Speaker 6 acting disorderly

Speaker 6 who was last seen running through a forest.

Speaker 6 This man

Speaker 6 had possibly crashed a blue car

Speaker 6 and he was caring for a baby.

Speaker 6 I'm at the end of the road.

Speaker 6 I'm depressed.

Speaker 6 I'm struggling. My marriage is falling apart.

Speaker 6 And in front of me, there's nothing but large bushes and pine trees that had overgrown the road that I was on. Another dead end.

Speaker 6 I turned my patrol car around to continue the search.

Speaker 6 The area that I'm searching is Lolo National Forest.

Speaker 6 It's 2.1 million square miles.

Speaker 6 That's a little bit larger than Delaware, folks.

Speaker 6 I continue searching for hours.

Speaker 6 At approximately 10.30,

Speaker 6 my patrol radio breaks silence since my partner

Speaker 6 says to me,

Speaker 6 Ross, we know who the suspect is.

Speaker 6 He's a man, felon, wanted out of Oregon. He's a known drug user and he's violent.
He has guns and he's made threats towards law enforcement.

Speaker 6 I'm 20 miles away, so I go.

Speaker 6 I meet other officers,

Speaker 6 knowing that we have about a half a mile walk into the campsite that where he's staying at.

Speaker 6 I put on my night vision.

Speaker 6 I take out my long rifle, strap it over my chest.

Speaker 6 My heart's pounding. I'm nervous.

Speaker 6 I'm focused and I'm full of adrenaline. I'm ready for combat.

Speaker 6 silently walking in to the pitch black forest, it's about 40 degrees now,

Speaker 6 and I see his tent,

Speaker 6 but it's empty.

Speaker 6 My partner finds the stash of guns that had been set out to ambush the cops when we got there.

Speaker 6 There's no people in the campsite.

Speaker 6 I open up the tent and I look around

Speaker 6 and I see diapers

Speaker 6 and dirty clothes and dirty dishes and baby toys.

Speaker 6 My heart sinks

Speaker 6 and I'm crushed.

Speaker 6 It wasn't until that time we were just speculating, but now I knew

Speaker 6 that we're looking for a five-month-old baby boy named

Speaker 6 nobody knows where he's at

Speaker 6 as I'm scrambling my brain I

Speaker 6 to try to figure out what I'm gonna do next

Speaker 6 my portable radio breaks squelch

Speaker 6 and it's my dispatch center and it's a broken transmission

Speaker 6 The suspect has been arrested.

Speaker 6 So I run back to my patrol car

Speaker 6 and I drive as fast as I can to where he's at.

Speaker 6 I see a man that

Speaker 6 is dirty. His hair is a mess.
He doesn't have any pants on. He's screaming wildly at everybody.
and just making no sense.

Speaker 6 He's more concerned about his telephone than anything else.

Speaker 6 All that pent-up adrenaline that I just had kind of went to the wayside, and I just became pissed.

Speaker 6 I tried interrogating him to no avail.

Speaker 6 I wanted to just

Speaker 6 strangle the truth out of this guy,

Speaker 8 but I didn't.

Speaker 6 I yelled at at him, begging and pleading him

Speaker 6 to tell us where we could find.

Speaker 6 And he says to me,

Speaker 6 is dead.

Speaker 6 I buried him alive. I crashed off of a cliff.

Speaker 6 You won't find him. I don't know where he's at.

Speaker 6 Enraged.

Speaker 6 I'm asking him for more information.

Speaker 6 And he tells me about

Speaker 6 me about a bush that he had drove over

Speaker 6 and started to ramble on and on and on and the bush

Speaker 6 in my head just kept echoing and echoing

Speaker 6 I knew where I had to go

Speaker 6 I got the help from the Forest Service with their four-wheeler and I went up with a Forest Service officer back up to the same road that I'd already been up earlier earlier that night.

Speaker 6 And when we get to the bush, we drive around it and we continue driving for less than a quarter mile before

Speaker 6 what was left of that road completely disappears.

Speaker 6 Now we're just on a mountain slope about 30 degree slopes. no trails, overgrown with bushes and trees.

Speaker 6 I'm devastated because

Speaker 6 there was supposed to be a car up here, but there wasn't.

Speaker 6 I want to scream and I'm walking downslope and I see an overturned boulder the size of a basketball.

Speaker 6 And I look where that boulder was and there was tread marks in the dirt.

Speaker 6 I continue to look and soon find a dome light,

Speaker 6 very dim dome light of a car that had been crashed into a grove of pine trees.

Speaker 6 I rush to the car and I find

Speaker 6 debris scattered all around it,

Speaker 6 a chainsaw that had been stuck in the middle of the tree because our suspect had tried to cut himself out of

Speaker 6 being stuck.

Speaker 6 And I frantically get into the car,

Speaker 6 but there's no baby.

Speaker 6 I start to look around the crash site, and I start following a trail of debris, playing cards,

Speaker 6 some diapers here and there. And slowly and slowly, we walk down

Speaker 6 slope of the crash, and about a hundred yards here and a hundred yards there.

Speaker 6 I'm still picking up traces of

Speaker 6 human.

Speaker 6 until I come to the bottom of the ravine where it's just completely muddy.

Speaker 6 All signs stop.

Speaker 6 My partner had to go back to the crash site to meet the search and rescue people that were on their way up.

Speaker 6 And here I was alone in the forest and somewhere in Montana.

Speaker 6 Not knowing

Speaker 6 what differences I make.

Speaker 6 Not knowing why.

Speaker 6 But I do know one thing:

Speaker 10 I'm looking for the body of a baby,

Speaker 6 and it's it breaks my heart. I'm a father of three, I have three beautiful little girls.

Speaker 6 I kneel down

Speaker 6 and I just pray to God,

Speaker 6 God,

Speaker 6 please

Speaker 6 help me find this baby tonight,

Speaker 6 help me find this baby so that nobody else has to.

Speaker 6 So that nobody else has to deal with the things that I'm about to see.

Speaker 6 I continue my search.

Speaker 6 A short time later, I find the suspect's pants

Speaker 6 in an easterly downslope direction from the crash.

Speaker 6 And then I find a car seat, and the car seat's empty.

Speaker 6 My portable radio had died. I didn't have any way to communicate with my dispatch center.
I'm now in charge of all of the volunteers who are looking for this baby and everything's pointing.

Speaker 6 Keep searching downslope. That makes the most sense.

Speaker 6 I tell my partner,

Speaker 6 can I borrow your radio? I'm going to take a walk straight up this mountain.

Speaker 6 He says, no, but I'll go with you.

Speaker 6 So together,

Speaker 6 we start walking straight up this mountain, 30-degree slopes.

Speaker 6 We're hot, we're sweaty, we're tired, and we're upset. I'm upset.
Maybe more upset than I've ever been in my life.

Speaker 6 And I'm exhausted.

Speaker 6 And I'm breathing hard.

Speaker 6 About 20 minutes straight uphill, I'm panting, trying to catch my breath.

Speaker 6 And in between pants,

Speaker 6 there's a moment of silence

Speaker 6 in a black forest.

Speaker 6 And in that moment, I hear this small,

Speaker 6 precious little baby whimper.

Speaker 6 At first I couldn't believe it

Speaker 6 and I heard it again

Speaker 6 and if I was to describe this sound

Speaker 6 it would be the sound of a baby that has cried and cried and cried and cried and cried until he couldn't cry anymore.

Speaker 6 I've never heard anything like it, and I hope I never have to hear anything again like it.

Speaker 6 I rush towards the sound

Speaker 6 and it's pitch black and my headlights on and my flashlights are on and I can barely see anything.

Speaker 6 I'm about to step over this pile of debris

Speaker 6 and uh

Speaker 6 there's

Speaker 6 buried underneath sticks and twigs face down.

Speaker 6 He's wearing a onesie. He's soiled and he's wet.

Speaker 6 I remove all the sticks

Speaker 6 and I wrap Grin up in a down coat

Speaker 6 and I kiss his forehead and I cry

Speaker 7 and I hold Grin

Speaker 6 and I walk him down the mountain and the whole time he's

Speaker 6 coughing up sticks and twigs out of his mouth.

Speaker 6 I get to the ambulance

Speaker 6 and turn Grayson over to their care.

Speaker 6 In less than a minute and a half, Grayson drinks two bottles of infamil. He was that dehydrated.

Speaker 6 However, Grayson's a strong kid and he's alive today

Speaker 6 and healthy.

Speaker 6 I go back to my patrol car.

Speaker 6 I think I'd forgot to mention this at the beginning of the story.

Speaker 6 But July 7th is my anniversary.

Speaker 6 And when I left that house that night, I left my wife angry because I chose not to take the time off,

Speaker 6 even though I could have.

Speaker 6 So when I got home at 7.30 in the morning, way into overtime,

Speaker 6 I walk into my kitchen where my beautiful wife was drinking coffee. And she asked me, How was your night?

Speaker 6 I smiled at her.

Speaker 6 I said, I made a difference last night.

Speaker 2 That was Ross Jessup. Ross is still a cop in Missoula, Montana, and a canine handler from Missoula County.

Speaker 2 And he's recently received the Department of Justice Attorney General's Award and the Charles Budd Meeks Award for Deputy Sheriff of the Year.

Speaker 2 Ross and the baby were both lost and found. And I asked Ross if all these years later he's still questioning everything or if this memory pulls him through the tough days.

Speaker 2 He said, some days are hard and I still have PTSD. This particular experience has changed me.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it haunts me, revealing the evil we face from time to time, and other times it shows me that we can all make a difference by acting together.

Speaker 2 To see a photo of Ross with his family and his medals, visit our website, themoth.org.

Speaker 2 After our break, a woman comes out of hiding and a Beatles fan falls in love. When the Moth Radio Hour continues.

Speaker 12 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Speaker 1 The moth is supported by AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca is committed to spreading awareness of a condition called hereditary transtyroidin-mediated amyloidosis, or HATTR.

Speaker 1 This condition can cause polyneuropathy like nerve pain or numbness, heart failure or irregular rhythm and gastrointestinal issues. HATTR is often underdiagnosed and can be passed down to loved ones.

Speaker 1 Many of us have stories about family legacies passed down through generations. When I was five, my mother sewed me a classic clown costume, red and yellow with a pointy hat.

Speaker 1 It's since been worn by my sister, three cousins, and four of our children. I'm so happy this piece of my childhood lives on with no end in sight.

Speaker 1 Genetic conditions like HATTR shouldn't dominate our stories. Thanks to the efforts of AstraZeneca, there are treatment options so more patients can choose the legacies they share.

Speaker 1 This year, the Moth will partner with AstraZeneca to shine a light on the stories of those living with HATTR. Learn more at www.myattrroadmap.com.

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Speaker 2 This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin-Janess.

Speaker 2 This is an hour all about what you may find after loss. Our next story is from Christine Gentry.

Speaker 2 She told us at a moth grand slam in Boston, where we partner with WBUR and PRX.

Speaker 2 Here's Christine live at the moth.

Speaker 13 So it's one of those first days where you catch yourself getting way too excited because things are going way too well.

Speaker 13 Supposed to be just drinks that turn into dinner, more drinks. And then we were back at his place in Inwood in New York City, and we were just talking, talking, talking.

Speaker 13 And as it often does on first dates, the conversation sneaked around to our previous experiences on the app that we had met on.

Speaker 13 And he starts laughing and says, oh man, the last girl that I met on there, she seemed great. But then we went back to her house, and get this, she was bald.

Speaker 13 Like something about her immune system. I don't know, she had a wig and she took it off in front of me.
Like how crazy is that? I was so weirded out.

Speaker 13 And what this man did not know is that he was sitting across from someone who had the exact same condition.

Speaker 13 The odds of which I cannot even begin to imagine.

Speaker 13 My immune system attacked every hair follicle on my body when I was three years old, and then again when I was eight, and then again when I was 14.

Speaker 13 And I'd been wearing wearing wigs since high school, but it was something very few people knew because I kept it locked, quarantined, you know, behind this thick door inside of me.

Speaker 13 And at that moment, it felt like I was floating above us, looking down at this conversation, and I thought about telling him, I thought about the bravery of the woman before me, and I thought about how fucking stupid he was going to feel if I did it.

Speaker 13 But I'm embarrassed to tell you, I chickened out. I said, you know what, it's it's late.
I have to work tomorrow, grab my stuff, and left.

Speaker 13 And I just sobbed that whole subway ride home.

Speaker 13 Because not six months before, I had finally escaped this horribly abusive relationship, and I had gone into therapy to figure out, how did I get into this relationship?

Speaker 13 How is it that I stayed for so long?

Speaker 13 And we'd figured out that it was because I had let that man in that space, right?

Speaker 13 And I had let him see me at my most exposed, my most vulnerable, and what I thought was my most ugly. And he had loved me anyway.

Speaker 13 And he had turned that love against me. He would do things like snatch my hair off during fights, because he knew that it would just break me.

Speaker 13 And I left that relationship with these two very deep fears, right? The first was that if anyone ever got into that space again, they would hurt me.

Speaker 13 And the second was that no one would ever love me for who I really am anyway.

Speaker 13 And that night on the train, I was like, this is proof. What just happened to me is proof that I'm right.

Speaker 13 And I resolved to make this my deepest, darkest secret. And when he emailed me the next day and asked to see me again, I said no.

Speaker 13 And I went on to date several people. I would date people for months and they would never know.

Speaker 13 Because I got really good at redirecting hands.

Speaker 13 And I got really good at sneaking out of beds to fix my eyebrows or my eyelashes while they were asleep.

Speaker 13 And I would ruin $3,000 wigs by sleeping in them night after night after night because I felt so ugly without them.

Speaker 13 And if anyone ever found out, I would just bounce before they got a chance to leave me.

Speaker 13 And then last month, you guys,

Speaker 13 last month Ayana Presley.

Speaker 13 The congresswoman whose district we're in right now, she did something so incredible.

Speaker 13 She posted a video where she revealed that she'd been wearing wigs because of the same condition.

Speaker 13 And it was so brave,

Speaker 13 and it was so beautiful.

Speaker 13 And the next night, I sat across from this man I had been dating less than a month,

Speaker 13 and the street lamp was coming through the blinds, and the room glowed this beautiful bluish-purple.

Speaker 13 And I took everything off

Speaker 13 and I asked him to see me,

Speaker 13 like all of me, the real me.

Speaker 13 And I knew that it was for me.

Speaker 13 And that it was something I needed to do no matter how he responded.

Speaker 13 And he kissed my head. And he told me I was beautiful.

Speaker 13 And this time, I believed it.

Speaker 7 Thank you.

Speaker 2 That was Christine Gentry. Christine taught English, creative writing, and storytelling in the public schools of Boston and New York City for 13 years.

Speaker 2 And she's now a professor at New York University, preparing secondary public school teachers.

Speaker 2 Christine and Henry, the man at the end of her story, decided to split when she moved back to New York from California a few years ago.

Speaker 2 She says, we knew better than to try a long-distance relationship, so we made the heartbreaking but right decision to break up when I left.

Speaker 2 But we stayed in touch, and he's happy that this story is airing.

Speaker 2 Sometimes you have to clear out or lose your old way of life in order to find the next chapter.

Speaker 2 We met Gregory Pereira, our next storyteller, in a moth workshop with the College and Community Fellowship here in New York.

Speaker 2 He told this story with us in a moth showcase that explored the justice system.

Speaker 2 Here's Gregory Pereira live at the moth.

Speaker 8 My mother was a big Beatles fan. She loved the Beatles.

Speaker 8 And I ended up loving the Beatles because my mother loved the Beatles.

Speaker 8 And she would buy all these different beautiful records, and we would have posters on the wall, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, All You Need Is Love and I felt that kind of sensation of happiness and I remember my mother and I just dancing and dancing to these Beatles songs and I felt filled with love and for me that was a great sense of family.

Speaker 8 Within a few years shortly thereafter, it seemed like my community in the South Bronx was hit with a tidal wave of heroin.

Speaker 8 And in that devastation, people were caught up. And my mother was one of the ones caught up in this typhoon, tidal wave of heroin.
And she lost her ability to parent.

Speaker 8 My father there had moved to the West Coast.

Speaker 8 And in my search for family, because I was kind of left to my own devices, 10 years old, 11 years old.

Speaker 8 Kind of pain attracts pain.

Speaker 8 And I gravitated to that street life. And at that time, they were indoctrinating young kids into the gangs.
And I remember my father talking about being in a gang when he was younger.

Speaker 8 My mother started dating somebody who was in the Hell's Angels.

Speaker 8 So that life was kind of there for me to embrace.

Speaker 8 And I remember wearing cut-off sleeves, jeans. MC boots, chains, patches, colors, and people would die for these colors.
I found a brotherhood.

Speaker 8 I looked for older men to kind of mentor me, to be my brothers, and I found guys like Apache, Wild Child, Crazy Mike, Crazy Phil.

Speaker 8 These guys became my protectors and my brothers, and they showed me the ropes. I remember us just hanging out,

Speaker 8 wearing bandanas,

Speaker 8 putting them on,

Speaker 8 standing in the park.

Speaker 8 And you had to look like a warrior. You had to look like the Terminator.

Speaker 8 No feeling

Speaker 8 until we got drunk.

Speaker 8 And that lasted for quite a number of years.

Speaker 8 Well, my mother and my grandfather, they didn't want me in this lifestyle any longer, and they sent me to live in the West Coast with my father.

Speaker 8 In California, I went to East Los Angeles. It was like the frying pans of the fire.

Speaker 8 Because gangs were generational over there.

Speaker 8 It was great-grandfathers, grandfathers, fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, cousins.

Speaker 8 And I had to be accepted and I had to do what they did.

Speaker 8 They used to wear these shiny shoes called Imperials. Iron your khakis, khakis, iron your t-shirt, or put your t-shirt over your arm and another bandana.

Speaker 8 And you always kept it low and you kept your eyes sharp. You were both predator and prey.

Speaker 7 And you looked fierce.

Speaker 8 You had to. Otherwise, you were a victim.

Speaker 8 My father said, no,

Speaker 8 back to New York you go.

Speaker 8 So back to New York I went. My mother and my stepfather, both intoxicated, forgot which airport I was going to land at.

Speaker 8 And I had to find my way back into the city and back

Speaker 8 into pain, because pain attracts pain. The gang life one more time.
Back with the cutoff sleeves, the long t-shirt, and the headband.

Speaker 8 And I did that for some time.

Speaker 8 I felt the brotherhood,

Speaker 8 but then I felt a betrayal like I've never known before. They left left me for dead.

Speaker 8 You know, there was a Beatles song when I was growing up that reminded me of family. It was a line inside that Beatles song, that magic feeling.

Speaker 8 And I had that with my mother, and I had that with the gang life, the culture. I had that for a little while.
But that magic feeling was no longer there, nowhere to go.

Speaker 8 Alcohol and drugs became my new friends.

Speaker 8 And that lasted for quite some time. But what happened was

Speaker 8 I ended up finally,

Speaker 8 I guess through the big guy upstairs, changed my life.

Speaker 8 I hit bottom and it turned some stuff around for me. And I ended up,

Speaker 8 I ended up even going back to school. I ended up with two different degrees.

Speaker 8 And with that,

Speaker 8 I taught

Speaker 8 gang awareness and prevention, substance abuse prevention, HIV prevention.

Speaker 8 And I was transformed, but didn't have that sense of family.

Speaker 8 I had some stuff, but not family. But in my office one day, there was this girl who came in

Speaker 8 and she was smiling, she was beaming, she lit up a room.

Speaker 8 When she came, that smile was there. When she was leaving, my head bobbed left and right with her.

Speaker 8 She used to come into my office to borrow a stapler and tape and folders and I would see her walk out and I could look at her desk and she had a stapler, tape and folders.

Speaker 8 So from our talking we got to walk and she was very athletic and she used to love to walk. So I used to walk her home or close to home.
So we started walking for her.

Speaker 8 About two, three weeks we were walking and she would always tell me after about two miles,

Speaker 8 okay

Speaker 8 i'm gonna leave you here and i was like maybe she's doing me the favor you know she has a lot more to go but after two more times like this

Speaker 8 i got very curious you know like why isn't she allowing me to walk her home well when the following day we must have had this psychic connection

Speaker 8 It was the heart of February. It was freezing out and there was sun glaring on the snow that was still on the floor floor.
And I was breathing smoke out of my nose, and I had these sunglasses on.

Speaker 8 And she stops and she says, Listen, I got to tell you something, I got to show you something.

Speaker 8 And she whips out these two pictures.

Speaker 8 And these two pictures, and I'm cold, I'm trembling,

Speaker 8 and I'm counting heads: two,

Speaker 7 four,

Speaker 7 five,

Speaker 8 seven, seven heads. And she says, These are my children.
I said, Man, she couldn't put them on one picture.

Speaker 8 And she said, are you okay with that?

Speaker 8 Now, I had a son of my own, and like, I wasn't a good parent.

Speaker 7 I don't know. I could do this.

Speaker 8 You know,

Speaker 8 I'm still finding my way.

Speaker 8 Anyway,

Speaker 8 we left, and I figured out why she didn't allow me to walk home. She was really trying to protect her children from whom they meet.

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 8 we talked the next day at work and I was contemplating and I asked my friend Ronald, what do you think? And he says, well, she's very pretty. And

Speaker 8 do you think you could handle it? Check yourself. And I said, okay.
And I get this phone call from her and I'm home ironing clothes. You know, I got used to ironing my stuff.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 I'm thinking about, I can't do this.

Speaker 8 You know, it was nice knowing her.

Speaker 8 But when we talked,

Speaker 8 in the background there was such laughter laughter I've never heard before

Speaker 8 I remember dancing with my mother and that was the last time we ever danced in 1967 we never danced again and that magic feeling was dead

Speaker 8 I heard all that beautiful laughter in the background I said wow maybe there's something there

Speaker 8 for me too

Speaker 8 And she says, you know, are we still going out on a date? And I was very,

Speaker 8 I was very thrilled because of the laughter in the background

Speaker 8 anyway she says it's on the date we go on the date and she says I'm gonna set up a time for you to meet my children

Speaker 8 okay well we'll work that out okay

Speaker 8 so the kids had another way of meeting me

Speaker 8 because at my job

Speaker 8 one of my co-workers came ghost-faced and scared and said, listen, there's some thugs outside waiting for you.

Speaker 8 And I I said, who? And I confront stuff. So I went outside and there was these two young men across the street in the park.

Speaker 8 One with his hat cocked to the side. He was about 18 years old.

Speaker 8 The other one had a headband down low with a pit bull stare.

Speaker 7 And the older one called me over.

Speaker 8 And when he called me over, so I said, you know, like, what's up?

Speaker 8 And he says, what's your intention for our mother?

Speaker 3 I said, your mother?

Speaker 7 Who's your mother?

Speaker 8 I didn't recognize him from the picture.

Speaker 8 And they said that

Speaker 8 they, you know, wanted to check me out. After a small conversation,

Speaker 8 the older one, he was a seasoned veteran for being 17. He was a seasoned veteran, and I knew that life.

Speaker 8 And he called the younger one over

Speaker 8 and the younger one did that bob towards him, but eyeballing me.

Speaker 8 And the older one told the younger one something.

Speaker 8 And the younger one, as they were walking away, the younger one glared back at me and he smiled.

Speaker 8 He winked his eye like everything's all right. And that magic feeling started to emerge because

Speaker 8 they became my angels with dirty faces. That's how I felt growing up.
And that was my modern family.

Speaker 8 So we've been together now 19 years.

Speaker 2 Gregory Pereira is now an entrepreneur and community educator. He says this once lonely man found a new start and now has 18 grandchildren.

Speaker 2 He says he wants his life's journey to help listeners understand that hope is possible for all.

Speaker 2 To see photos of Greg and his large modern family, go to themoth.org.

Speaker 2 After our break, a man gives his favorite book away and then tries desperately to find it again. And a lifelong New Yorker has to pick up and move.
When the moth radio hour continues,

Speaker 12 The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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Speaker 7 Truth or dare, how about both?

Speaker 10 This fall, The Moth is challenging what it means to be daring. We're not just talking about jumping out of airplanes or quitting your job.
We're talking about the quiet courage to be vulnerable.

Speaker 10 The bold decisions to reveal the secret that changed everything.

Speaker 10 This fall, the Moth Main Stage season brings our most powerful stories to live audiences in 16 cities across the globe.

Speaker 10 Every one of those evenings will explore the singular theme of daring, but the stories and their tellers will never be the same. So here's our Dare to You.
Experience the Moth Main Stage Live.

Speaker 10 Find a city near you at themoth.org slash daring. Come on, we dare you.

Speaker 2 You're listening to the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin-Janes.

Speaker 2 In this hour, all stories of the lost and found.

Speaker 2 I've always wanted to start a website where people can post single lost gloves they've found, like a national lost and found, but just to reunite gloves. A glove give back.

Speaker 2 I just have to get around to it.

Speaker 2 Joseph Gallo told this next story at Housing Works Bookstore in New York, where WNYC is a media partner of them all. Here's Joseph.

Speaker 11 When I was in college, I had a friend his name was AJ, and the first time that we ever hung out, we went to see the movie Field of Dreams.

Speaker 11 And at the conclusion of the movie we ended up on the roof deck of this parking garage in a mall in South Jersey and the two of us are crying our eyes out.

Speaker 11 We barely knew each other and we were doing circles around my car refusing to look at each other. We're going are you okay? Yeah I'm okay.
Can you drive? Yeah I can drive.

Speaker 11 And that's how the two of us became friends.

Speaker 11 We bonded over baseball and after we graduated from college we moved to Hoboken and we became neighbors and I had a TV and AJ didn't have a TV and he used to like to come over to my house and watch games.

Speaker 11 He liked the Yankees, I liked the Mets. but the one thing, the one thing that we both loved together was the Yankee announcer Phil Rizzuto.

Speaker 11 Now Phil Rizzuto had a Hall of Fame career as a shortstop and when he retired he became the voice of the Yankees, the Yankee broadcaster for 40 years.

Speaker 11 And he was known for his catchphrases, holy cow, did you see that?

Speaker 7 Unbelievable.

Speaker 11 And he became immortalized in the meatloaf song, Paradise by the Dashboard Lights. He calls the game that takes place in the backseat of the car.

Speaker 11 And the thing, though, that AG and I loved the most about Phil Rosuto was his stream of consciousness storytelling. Stories used to spring from him out of seemingly nowhere.

Speaker 11 You never knew where they were going to go. You never knew where they were going to end.

Speaker 11 In fact, they were so epic that Rosuto himself, in his own scorecard over a particular inning, would write the initials WW, which stood for wasn't watching.

Speaker 11 Anyway, one day, AJ invites me over to his house and he presents me with a gift. It's a book.

Speaker 7 And the book is called Oh Holy Cow.

Speaker 11 And what these two writers have done, they've taken Rosuto's broadcast and they've transcribed them and they culled and edited them down to the stories that we both loved.

Speaker 11 And he said, he got the book because he saw it, he thought of me, he wanted me to have it. And he knew I collected books and love books and I'd appreciate it.
And then he sat me down.

Speaker 11 And he said, I have something to tell you. I've been to the doctors and I have been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.

Speaker 11 And a month later, AJ dies.

Speaker 11 So now, fast forward 25 years, and my mother, who is a widow who lives alone in a house that I grew up in, she suffers a massive stroke. And she survives, but she ends up in a nursing home.

Speaker 11 And I am taxed with the job of breaking down my childhood home. Now, anyone who's ever had to do this, it's a sad, emotionally exhausting, horrible experience.

Speaker 11 And one of the jobs that I have to do is I have to do something with boxes and boxes of books that I have accumulated over 25 years.

Speaker 11 I live in an apartment, I have no room for books, and I stored them in my mother's basement. And now I have to do something with them.

Speaker 11 And so one day I'm driving out to my mother's nursing home and I pass this used bookstore. And I think, I'm going to donate them there.

Speaker 11 And so I drive back to my mother's house, I pack up the car, and I take the books to the store, and the woman who owns the store looks exactly like Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

Speaker 11 And she is completely 100% delighted, and she's going through the boxes, she's opening them all up, and I look down and I see the copy of Oh Holy Cow.

Speaker 11 And I am so emotionally exhausted that I do nothing. And I let the book go.
And the book, I watch the boxes go to the back of the store and they disappear. And a ritual begins.

Speaker 11 I go to visit my mother in the nursing home. I pass the bookstore and I think AJ's book's in there.
I go to the nursing home. I pass the bookstore.
I think AJ's book's in there.

Speaker 11 And I realize that the book is starting to take on this amazing power, certainly far more than it ever had when it was in a box in my mother's basement and I thought of it only once in a great while.

Speaker 11 And I realize that the power stems from the fact that my mother is still alive.

Speaker 11 And as long as my mother's is alive,

Speaker 11 the book is alive. And if the book is alive, then in some abstract way, AJ is alive.

Speaker 7 And I want them to be alive.

Speaker 7 I want them alive.

Speaker 11 And so one day I'm driving to the bookstore, excuse me, to the nursing home. I see the bookstore.
And I can't take it anymore. I pull into the bookstore.
Angela Merkel recognizes me right away.

Speaker 11 And I say, listen, you know, I gave you a book and I need it back and she says well if we still have it and so we search the bookstore and we can't find it and so she brings me into the basement and the basement looks like a mini version of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark it's just aisles and aisles and aisles of books stacked from floor to ceiling and Angela Merkel is checking the shelves for the book and I tell her everything that I've just told you here tonight.

Speaker 11 And finally, she finds the book and she takes it off the shelf and she looks down at the cover, oh, holy cow, and she smiles. And she opens it up and she reads the inscription inside aloud.

Speaker 11 To Joseph, Instant Stories from the Field of Dreams. I thought you would enjoy this.
Love AJ.

Speaker 11 And she closes the book and she hands it to me and she says, You should tell that story.

Speaker 11 And so I just did.

Speaker 11 Thank you for listening.

Speaker 2 Joseph Gallo has written and performed several solo plays, including My Italy Story and Long Gone Daddy, which was nominated by Broadway World as Best New Play.

Speaker 2 Our final story in this hour is also from our Boston Story Slim series. Here's Aaron Wolf live at the moth.

Speaker 4 So my wife, Naomi, calls and she says, Aaron, I got the job. Can you believe it? I got the job.
My dream job. I got it.
They offered it to me right in the middle of the interview. I got it.

Speaker 4 And we just have to move to Boston. Isn't that amazing?

Speaker 4 And on the inside, I'm like, no.

Speaker 4 But on the outside, I'm like, no.

Speaker 4 Because this isn't a job offer. This is an existential crisis.
I have been a New Yorker for 38 years.

Speaker 4 Like even when I lived in New Jersey, I totally told people I was a New Yorker. My parents are New Yorkers.
My grandparents are New Yorkers.

Speaker 4 My great-grandparents, Max and Minnie Goldfinger, they were New Yorkers, and my kids are going to be New Yorkers, too.

Speaker 4 Also, we had a great apartment. You just don't give up a great apartment in New York at all.

Speaker 4 And then Naomi says, we have to let them know tomorrow afternoon I love you.

Speaker 7 Bye, and she hangs up.

Speaker 4 In the next 24 hours, we go through the first four stages of grief in like every conversation. She's like, I'm not going.
I'm not going. I'm absolutely not going.
How could you make me move?

Speaker 4 Maybe we should like try long distance. What am I going to do in Boston? Like over and over again.

Speaker 4 And then finally at like 7.30 the next morning I reach acceptance. I call her up at work and I say look we've been treading water for so long in this city.
My job's not going anywhere.

Speaker 4 I'm not happy at work. You've worked so hard at your PhD.
This is finally, this finally could be the moment where we become adults. Let's do this.
And it's not just acceptance. It's relief.

Speaker 4 It feels good. It feels good to say it.

Speaker 4 And then two days before we're leaving, I'm sitting packing up our kitchen. I'm holding in the silverware and I'm sobbing

Speaker 4 because it's my Grandpa Bernie's silverware.

Speaker 4 And I look around the kitchen and everything in my apartment is my Grandpa Bernie's.

Speaker 4 The art on the walls from his house in Bayside, the furniture, his record collection, my dishes, my love of food, my love of music, my first cup of coffee, my first hot dog, my anger,

Speaker 4 my affection,

Speaker 4 my New York sensibility, it's his.

Speaker 4 And now I have to leave it. And I don't know how to say goodbye to it or to him.

Speaker 4 And then I see this clock on the wall in my living room. It's his clock from his store in the Lower East Side.
It says, Forsyth Monuments, established 1911.

Speaker 4 And now I know what I want to do for my last day in New York.

Speaker 4 The next day, Naomi and I pack our two-year-old son in the stroller, and we head out for a really long walk. And it's August in New York.

Speaker 4 Like everyone in their right mind is inside in air conditioning.

Speaker 4 But we're walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, through Chinatown, up East Broadway, then Delancey Orchard, and then we stop at Stanton Street

Speaker 4 in front of Silver Monuments, the last Jewish monument store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, my cousin Murray's shop.

Speaker 4 And when my Grandpa Bernie retired, he sold the business to Murray. So there in the window of Silver Monuments is this little sign.
It says Forsyth Monuments established 1911.

Speaker 4 It's the last shred of my Grandpa Bernie on the Lower East Side.

Speaker 4 And I don't want to go in, but I have to go in. Because Naomi's like, you have to go in.
We walked all the the way here you're going in

Speaker 4 this is ridiculous and I'm like you know I also have to go in I have to and Murray's not there but his assistant is there and I can't remember his name but he knows me because the last time he saw me he was selling me and my mom a gravestone for my grandpa Bernie and he kind of squinches up his face and he's like yeah yeah Beth David Cemetery right yeah yeah buried near the the arbeiter ring yeah yeah how is your mother anyway

Speaker 4 and I look at this guy, he could be 50 or like 250. Like,

Speaker 4 he's never touched an iPad, you know, like.

Speaker 4 And he looks like he's from, he's of this place, like he's stepped out of the fabric of this store, which is dusty and claustrophobic, and there's yellowing paper everywhere.

Speaker 4 And I reach out, I touch, I like sort of stabilize myself on a gravestone,

Speaker 4 and the granite is cold and smooth, and it feels exactly like it felt when I was eight years old in my Grandpa Bernie's shop.

Speaker 4 And I think I can't, I can't do it. I can't leave this place.
Who am I going to be if I leave this place? This is my New York. This guy is my New York.

Speaker 4 And then he says, yeah, it's funny you should come in today of all days. It's really funny because Murray just sold the building.
We're moving to Long Island tomorrow.

Speaker 4 It's funny of all days you're coming in today.

Speaker 4 And I sort of like rock back on my heels in stunned silence.

Speaker 4 And all I could see is him and the gravestones and a clock that looks just like the one that's in a box in my house waiting to come up to Boston.

Speaker 4 And I look at him and I just say, well, I guess this is goodbye.

Speaker 7 And he says, yeah, I guess.

Speaker 4 And I leave.

Speaker 4 That clock, my grandpa Bernie's clock, it never worked.

Speaker 4 One night after like hours of Googling, I found these like rare clock fuses and I replaced the fuses in the clock and I plugged it in and the fluorescent light turned on and then it ran backwards

Speaker 4 like a frickin' time machine.

Speaker 4 But also like a time machine.

Speaker 4 My New York, my grandpa Bernie's New York, it's gone. It doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 4 But I still see it here of all places. I see it in the Lebanese market in Watertown.
I see it in me when I'm walking across Cambridge Common and I'm amazed by the history.

Speaker 4 I see it in my son's love of Chinese food and smoked fish, and in my daughter's laugh and her scream.

Speaker 4 But most of all, I see it in the stories we tell each other around the dinner table at home, my home, underneath the clock that says Forsyth Monuments established 1911.

Speaker 9 Thanks.

Speaker 2 That was Aaron Wolf.

Speaker 2 Erin is a screenwriter and the chief creative director at a storytelling agency called Faculty New York.

Speaker 2 To see a photo of Cousin Murray's monument store and Grandpa Bernie's clock, which is now proudly displayed in Erin's Boston home, go to themoth.org.

Speaker 2 If you've lost something, take a breath. It may come back or the loss may just make space for a new chapter and you can tell a story about it.
That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Radio Hour.

Speaker 2 We hope you'll join us next time.

Speaker 12 This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, Katherine Burns, and Sarah Austin Janesse, who also hosted and directed the stories in the hour along with Janelle Pfeiffer.

Speaker 12 Co-producer is Vicki Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. Additional Grand Slam Slam coaching by Chloe Salmon.

Speaker 12 The rest of the Moth leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Cluche, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Gladowski, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Aldi Caza.

Speaker 12 Moth Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift.
Other music in this hour from Stellwagon Sinfonet, The Beatles, Julian Lodge, and Anat Cohen.

Speaker 12 We receive funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Speaker 12 Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Rhys-Dennis.

Speaker 12 For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us, your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.

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