433: Coffee with Mom—That Toy Really Sucks

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A cup of coffee with my, with my mom.

Mom was just telling me a story about this hoarder that our family knew very well

who needed help.

But

how do you decide?

Like, when are you helping, mom, and then when are you enabling?

It was really difficult for us because I knew him well.

You know, he was employed.

He had a good job.

but he was just a hopeless hoarder.

His house was filled, his car was filled, his van was filled.

He had bought three storage sheds for his backyard.

They were filled.

He kept saying, well, I'm going to start getting rid of some of this stuff.

He couldn't do it.

He was mentally ill.

And when he called us and said,

I can't get into my kitchen.

I've taken off my pants with the bulging pockets and I've turned sideways.

I can't inch my way through

the clutter in my kitchen.

I can't get to my bathroom and my bedroom.

I can't fit in my car anymore.

Could I just spend

a couple of nights with you and then I'll come back in the daytime and get rid of some of this stuff.

Can I just bring some of my stuff with me when I come over?

Just

which he have done.

I didn't know what to do.

I did write to a friend, and he's a minister, actually, to see if he could help.

But in the meantime, I said, I am so sorry, but we're leaving in the morning.

We're going to Florida.

You know, sorry about that.

Liar.

I didn't know what else to say because I knew if he came, he would not leave.

He was not capable of leaving.

You know, I'm not trained to deal with mental illness.

But you certainly know how to lie when your back's against the wall.

But I did put him on to this mutual friend of ours who was the minister.

Oh, good.

Oh, really?

Wow.

Awesome.

Are you guys still friends?

Well, he passed away tragically because of his hoarding.

He couldn't get to his medication in the refrigerator.

Oh, God.

Look, I don't even know how to do it.

It's a horrible story.

It is horrible, but you know, when it gets to the point where you can't get through your own kitchen without taking your pants off, somebody's trying to send you a message, surely.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around that, that his pockets were so full, like he was hoarding in his pants as well, right?

He had cargo pants, and the sides of his legs bulged out as far as the pants would allow.

And his other, all of his pockets were filled.

They were full of...

Have you idea what in them.

Yeah, oh, yes, balls of string, tape.

Oh, golly, various sundry things.

Um,

I don't remember now, but I remember all of that string that he had.

He couldn't throw anything away.

He was powerless to throw away an envelope that had a canceled stamp on it.

Oh, my goodness.

I have pictures that

it's just such a sad story.

And Mike, your dad.

Oh, hi, hi, Freddie.

I just wanted you to say goodbye to him because I'm going to go ahead and throw him out now with all the other things that are just making me crazy over here.

He's looking at you, you know.

I know.

You haven't seen the boy in a while.

He wants your approval.

Michael, don't let him do that.

I don't care anymore.

I love the dog.

He's 12 years old now.

If he wants to lick me in the mouth, I don't care.

I don't care.

I mean, I do care a little bit, but obviously not enough.

I want to talk about, I mean, since we're on this weird subject, isn't it crazy how, like, when you were 30 or 40 or 50, was hoarding, I mean, I know it was a word, but was it a thing?

Did anybody talk about it?

Like, all of us, I mean, this couldn't have just happened in the last 30 or 40 years, but it got a name.

We gave it a name.

And shortly after it had a name,

it had a TV show.

It had a TV show.

And it damn near had a whole network, Chuck.

Hoarders was a huge show.

And many, many hoarding shows spun off of that.

You know, and I can't prove it, but I think it might have been another one of those that Dirty Jobs helped kickstart.

We did a segment back in season one.

It wasn't about hoarding.

You know, it was about this woman who had a dirty job and I wound up going back to her house for whatever reason in the course of filming.

And her house was just, it just looked like a garage, like that had been completely overfilled with every inch of the house.

And even back then, this was 2004,

like the first thing that popped into my mind wasn't, oh my gosh, we got ourselves a hoarder.

It was just, man, this place is a mess.

But now here we are, hoarding is a thing.

It's a mental condition, obviously.

I'm not making light of it.

I'm just saying that isn't it odd how once you name a thing,

there it is everywhere you look.

Well, I'll tell you one thing I did.

I did call Protective Services and I talked to them about this person.

And they said, Oh, yes, that was something that they could take care of.

So they went and picked him up

and

committed him temporarily to an institution

that could have helped him.

He called me from there and he said, please come and get me out.

He didn't know that I had done this.

And he said, please come and get me out of here.

These people don't know what they're doing.

It took them two hours just to go through my pockets.

And he was blaming them for that.

He just, you know, he was hardly coherent.

and i said that i couldn't do that that perhaps they could help him do what he had committed to do to get rid of a lot of his stuff you know and he hung up

and sadly but let me tell you what happened some well-meaning people that he knew from a church

went and got him out

and they thought they were doing what was right because he called and he begged them.

You know, they shouldn't have done that, but they thought they were doing the right thing.

There it is.

That's the message for the season.

It's your

best intentions, right?

You can't always know.

And it's such a torture.

I know we talk about this a lot because being a best-selling author now,

three plus times over, people ask you for advice and they ask you for encouragement and it's always fun to give

but you don't always know who you're talking to and when encouragement becomes enabling when help becomes hurt how do you know well here is one more layer of this story he had

an offspring who lived out of state.

You mean like a child?

A child.

I don't want this person to hear this and know that I'm talking.

So I'll just.

Yeah, but I mean, we just, for the clarity, we're staying within the same species.

Let's just call his offspring a daughter.

Let's say he has a daughter, had a daughter

who lived out of state,

and

protective services got in touch with her and asked for her help.

She couldn't.

She said, I can't do it.

I have been dealing with this my entire life.

My mother

passed away,

partly because of this problem.

She had lost a sibling, possibly because of this problem.

Their whole family had been really messed up.

And she said, I just can't deal with it.

I'm sorry.

I'm not trained to deal with this.

Just as I had said, this mental illness.

I can't do it.

I'm sorry.

I have children.

Can't expose them.

So she received criticism for this

from people here that I know.

Yeah.

But should she have?

When you think about it, she had been dealing with that issue her entire life.

Well, I mean, certainly her adulthood.

God, it's so complicated.

You know, when a person you love and who loves you

asks for a drink and you know for a fact that they've struggled with alcohol, you don't give them a drink simply because they love you or because you love them.

You can't do that.

But you also have to be in a state of mind at that point when you understand

that you're not dealing with a desire, you're dealing with a compulsion.

Now, are you dealing with a disease?

Well, a lot of people say, yeah, a lot of people say no.

Chuck, I would love for you to find some, like an expert on hoarding.

I had no idea we were going to talk about this, but

I'm fascinated by it because

I don't know if it, if it really comes to you in the form of a disease or if it metastasizes.

Like, like, where does it start?

Should I be worried that my entire desktop is cluttered with icons because I don't like to file things and I really don't know how, and I don't really care to learn, or that my closets are overfilled.

Like, when do you

people have these spring cleaning rituals, for instance, that are so therapeutic, you know, because once you get used to getting rid of stuff, you get rid of more stuff.

That all seems human and normal, but I really have no idea when things

evolve or devolve into some kind of illness.

When you step over that line.

Well, I think.

I was going to say when you open your front door and newspapers are stacked up from the

line to step over.

There's just a narrow pathway through your house and everything is junk around.

Well, Chuck, that is exactly what happened.

I've known this man for years,

probably 28 years.

And through the years, he has invited us to his home for certain things.

I was shocked when I went into his house.

I went in the front door, and there was a narrow pathway, as you describe it,

through

boxes

and a clutter, a narrow pathway into the kitchen or some room where this expert was going to teach us how to do something.

So it was gradual because you used to be able to get in through the front door, and then that pathway gradually closed in.

That's fascinating.

Yeah, it is.

And I know of someone here at the home who was hoarding,

and he had a problem

with something.

Something was wrong with the electric or the water or something.

And he had to call in general services.

And when they came in, they are trained to look for things.

They might come in and you think, oh, they're just here to clean.

They're just here to unclog the drain.

But these people are trained to look around to see if there are problems that need to be dealt with.

So, when this person came into his apartment and saw all of the clutter, he realized this man can't even get to the pool court if he needs help.

And so, they had a meeting and they told him either he cleared out his apartment or he would have to leave.

So, fortunately, he had friends who helped him to clear out his apartment.

I'm just so interested in the day, in the moment where

you go from a messy person with a cluttered house to a hoarder to somebody who is suffering from a disease.

It's an environmental kinetic thing.

You can look at it and you can say, okay, that's a mess, that's messier, that's super messy that

now you've just entered.

Like, is it one, like a box too far, a bit of clutter too much and then all of a sudden it looks like oh well clearly this person's you know lost their mind but they haven't they're a frog in the boiling water and it progresses you know my friend Mariana

Mike's wife

she's had a business for years I don't know if she still has it but this happened about I think maybe 20 years ago.

She just started noticing there were so many people

that she either knew or had access to that were in this space suffering from some level of this problem.

She started a business called Clutterflies, where she would come to your home and spend as much time as it took just to get you decluttered.

And I remember her telling me once, you know, it's like sometimes it really is just a question of people who took their eye off the ball and now they're just kind of disorganized and messy by nature and they just need some help.

They just need a clean slate, and then they can do a better job of keeping their basic area livable.

And then there are people who are beyond help.

And it's just fascinating and difficult to know at a glance which one you're dealing with.

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Yeah, these people have to be willing to declutter.

And if you are truly a hoarder, you are incapable of doing it.

Because dad and a couple of other guys

who knew this person went over to his house one day

and said we're here and they took big trash bags and they said we're here to help you because he said he wanted to declutter

sadly they were unable to talk him into parting with anything

he had canned goods on the kitchen table that were years expired he said no they don't really expire they just put those dates on there but you can still use that stuff

A rubber band.

Well, no, I might need that rubber band.

So he'd stick it in his pocket.

Oh, that was something else in his pocket, Chuck.

Big balls of rubber bands.

Oh, what else?

Old newspapers.

His house was cluttered with old newspapers.

His baby.

That's common for hoarders.

I don't know why, but that's common.

He said, well, because there might be a coupon in there that I could use.

They left that day without being able to get rid of stuff.

This is the area.

Here, let me turn this light over here.

This is my office.

Okay.

Now, when we record, I'm over here.

It's not terrible.

It's not great.

But, you know, I got my lights set up and I can sit here and I can talk.

But right on the other side of this partition, which I have up just to control the sound.

I got stuff that just comes in the mail.

And it's just, it's driving me crazy.

It's just stacks of stuff.

And every time I come over to try and tidy it up,

the same thing happens.

I look at a thing and I'm like, well, you know,

somebody sent me that book.

You know, they sent it to me.

And in my case, half the time, they wrote it.

So he wrote a book and they sent it to me.

And now I've got a stack of like 30 of these books.

I'm never going to read them.

There's just no way I can.

And then between the books are letters and explanations and pictures.

And

I can't tell you how many times I've gone over there to say, okay, this is the day.

I'm just going to get a bag.

Because, like, said, I know what's going to happen.

I'll snap and I'm going to throw it all away.

And I'm going to have a fire.

I'm going to have a fire.

And then I'm going to feel okay about it.

But that's not normal either.

It's like, why can't you just, you know,

manage your stuff?

You know, look, you've got three sons, and all of us are somewhat afflicted to varying degrees with whatever that is.

And maybe it's just as simple as procrastination meets a bit of laziness, meets a bit of distraction.

Or maybe we're nuts.

Or maybe you know

that somebody...

cared enough about whatever they sent that they wanted to share it with somebody who is very approachable.

And you are, Mike.

People trust you.

You're a very trustworthy person.

So why not send you something that means a lot to me?

People send me stuff too.

Not on the same scale that they send you because I don't have as many followers, but they do.

I have a big box of books.

Was that like a passive-aggressive cry for help or something?

What just happened there?

I don't know.

Tell me.

Can you work up a tear?

Because I don't have as many followers

no and I'm happy for that because I'd have a bigger box full of stuff

oh you know but I've been a writer forever and I had so much rejection and these people who send me their books have had a lot of rejection and they feel that Maybe I can help them or maybe if they just get an encouraging word from me and believe me, I've been there.

I know that.

I can't throw any books away.

And I do read an occasional chapter here and there.

Yeah.

It's heavy.

Do you remember a book by a guy called O'Brien?

I think it was Tim O'Brien.

It was a big deal back in

the 80s, I think.

It was called The Things

They Carried.

Oh, dad just read that book not too long ago.

You're kidding.

Yeah, it was a wartime book about the things that soldiers carry.

And I know this because dad loves to read aloud.

And

Alexie.

And I'm here.

Is that a proclivity, a condition, a compunction, an ailment?

A disease?

Some writing is meant to be read aloud.

I have to say that.

People tell me that my books are so good when shared with some.

People just tell me that.

Are so good when reading someone.

I turned out I was one of those people.

Yeah.

And I think Chuck may have told you that too.

Hey, Mike.

I recently wrote something

that I think you might like.

It's a story that happened years ago when you were growing up.

And you had two younger brothers, which you still have, but they were

younger.

Younger.

still brothers if you're keeping score

and still younger still younger

yeah not young anymore but no longer growing up but anyway it's about a purchase that we made for our family do you remember kirby oh my god

please tell me you've written this down I have written the story and I love it.

It's filled with humor.

This is the story of a vacuum cleaner, at least on the surface, named Kirby.

Well, Kirby was like the state-of-the-art manufacturer of vacuums once upon a time.

Okay.

And we had, prior to that, a Hoover,

which mom used to joke, you know, we got from the Hoover administration because it was ancient.

It was originally owned by Herbert.

It was the opposite of a vacuum, this thing.

You'd push it around and it made sounds and air rushed around, but I think it was pushing the air out because crap and dust just flew everywhere.

It just didn't pick up any dirt at all.

Anyway, sorry, mom, go on.

But

I love this story.

So one day,

John was on the phone, and he was moving his feet around the floor, scraping his feet.

And he scraped up a pile of dog hair because we had two dogs who shed like nobody's business.

And we lived like animals.

And we lived like animals.

And when we borders, but we just got a giant hair ball.

Yeah.

And when you

were making, you were collecting the hair balls of the animals, right?

Yes, and we put them in our pockets.

In your pockets, yeah.

Yes.

No, we filled pillows with them, really, and slept on them.

All our clothes were made of dog hair.

Well, that seems economical to me.

Yes.

That's not a bad idea.

And we wove them into blankets.

But anyway.

And ate the dogs and supplied the army with blankets.

John was like,

not angry, but

who lives like this?

Look at this hair.

And so, of course, I was a little on the defensive side.

And I said, you know where we keep the vacuum cleaner.

Feel free to use it.

And that's what he did right then.

He went to the closet,

got out the Hoover.

Now, in defense of Hoover, I don't mean to, you know, to criticize Hoover, but this had been around for like decades.

This vacuum cleaner sucked.

Not at all.

Not at all.

So he vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed.

Very little happened.

And I said, wait a minute, here's how you have to do it.

So I laid it over on its side.

And as he, you know, held it on, turned on the button, I fed the hair into the moving

rollers on the bottom.

I'd pick up a handful of hair, put it in the roller, and it would disappear.

She's not making this up.

I stood there.

This is the house I grew up in.

It's not like we didn't have appliances.

It's just that they weren't in a state where they could be operated, you know, in the intended way.

So you literally, to use our vacuum, you had to lay it on its side, pull the crap out of the rug, and jam it into the roller.

And you should see how the blender worked.

There was no power.

You had to just drop the eggs in or whatever, put the lid on, and then just pick it up and shake it like you were making a martini.

The toaster?

Well,

it was great as far as toasters go, but it didn't generate any heat.

So what you used do is two thick lighters, you know, on either side of the bread.

We just put the whole thing in the oven, turn it to bake 450,

then put the bread in the toaster.

Boom.

Bob's your uncle.

Michael, you do exaggerate.

But

the Kirby...

So the Hoover part of the story, that is true.

The hairy part.

It is a hairy story for sure.

So this is a Mother's Day story.

For Mother's Day, John

happened to see an advertisement on the bulletin board where he taught for

a Kirby vacuum cleaner.

Yeah.

And so

it was expensive.

Like it costs real money.

It costs $100.

And on a school, I didn't work.

I stayed home with the children.

What year was this?

What year?

Well, I think Phil was about five.

And he was born in 67.

Yeah, so this was early 70s,

73, maybe.

Gotcha.

$100, a lot of money.

A lot of money.

Oh, my God.

A lot of money.

It's like a mortgage payment.

Right.

John was more proud of that Kirby when he brought it home.

You would have thought

it was gold.

And we all stood around and

our mouths gaped open.

We oohed and awed.

The kids had never seen anything like it.

I mean, it was like Christmas morning.

Well, anyway, so I've written all this into a story, and I call it a Mother's Day story.

I was going to put it in my book, but.

You know what?

Send it to me.

Send it to me today.

I will record it, right?

I'll read it like the old big blue purse thing that

got this whole thing started.

And we'll just put it up either with the podcast or right after it, or we'll figure out something to do with it.

it gets very dark though remember mike you think

oh my gosh audience up to that this story

well without giving too much away what i can tell you chuck is

i mean we've never seen the old man spend money on really anything ever uh-huh and so including toys like we We didn't have toys at that point, like not traditional toys, right?

But was it a ball of hair or whatever with a leash on it?

Right?

We'd get like maybe 16 pieces of Lego and do your best.

You know, we had one Lincoln log, which is difficult to build much with, but you connect to the Lincoln log and the Lego.

You use the hair and the Lego.

Yeah, you tie it together.

You use the Lincoln log together.

Yeah.

So like we did the best we could.

We didn't know any better.

We thought, okay, you know, this is all part of, you know, expanding your imagination.

But this vacuum cleaner was better than a toy it was a beast it was a machine a true machine a true engineering marvel it could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch man

it was amazing and like once we saw it in action like we couldn't wait to like My brothers and I were fighting over who gets to vacuum.

Wow.

And then it was like, oh my God, it'll lift up a pillow.

It'll lift up a ball.

It's the attachments.

When they discovered the attachments, it was Christmas morning.

I'm telling you, it was a weapon.

It was a tool.

It was pure fun.

I'm guessing some of your brothers got some hickeys somewhere on their body.

And they might have been pulled upwards somewhere.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

There were hickeys all over the place.

I mean, it was just crazy.

Like everything in the house needed to be tested against Kirby and the attachments.

It had a hose, right?

The hose had these different attachments.

I know it's all very common today, but in 1973, it was

literally like the.

This was NASA stuff.

Yeah, it was a prime directive on Star Trek.

An alien came and left a device from the future.

on our porch.

And now

we were just trying to figure out all the different things that could happen.

Well, look, I I don't want to screw up the story because I'll be curious, mom, if our uh

if you heard it the way I heard it, if we remember it the same way.

That will, yeah, that's yeah, that's good.

Okay.

Probably, I mean,

the facts are there, but interpretation will probably vary because you saw it from a

what, 11-year-old boy's eyes through your eyes.

Oh, Chuck, it was honestly, I didn't know what to expect next.

They wanted to vacuum the curtains.

They pulled the curtains right off the wall, and the curtain rod came right off the wall.

They just about destroyed the house.

I mean, and the poor dogs,

the poor dogs.

Well, the one dog was 15 pounds.

It lifted her hind end right off the floor.

Right off the ground.

But the other dog had a real thick coat.

She was part shepherd.

She loved it.

Oh my God, she thought she died and went to heaven when they put that on her back.

She loved it.

It scrubbed the hair, pulled the hair right off her, not all of it, of course, just the loose hair.

We would vacuum the dog.

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It was amazing.

The hair never stopped coming off the dog, but the dog never went totally bald.

Bald.

Right.

But we sucked a lot of hair off that dog.

We really did.

But look, I'm so curious as to how it went dark.

Oh, God.

Well,

I don't want to wreck it, but I'll just tell you that in our particular home, which was

a haven for all creatures, great and small,

cats,

all sorts of creatures, and not all of them

take to being vacuumed equally.

Okay.

Is PETA going to get involved in this story once it's over?

Yes.

I hope not.

I hope not.

Yeah.

It won't be the first angry letter I've gotten from that particular angry acronym.

But this is a screwed-up Mother's Day story.

But since you've written it, since Mother's Day is around the corner, send it.

I'll read it.

Done.

It was such fun to write.

I couldn't stop laughing when I wrote it.

And I called your brothers to see if they remembered it.

And of course, they remembered it.

Remembered it.

We're all still in some form of therapy for that whole decade.

I can't wait.

I cannot wait for this story.

We had horses.

We were boarding horses back then.

We had dogs.

We had cats.

Phil was like a...

Even at that age, he was only like five or six years old, but he was like Steve Irwin.

He'd come home, but he'd bring home fish out of the creek.

He'd bring home lizards, frogs,

all sorts of things.

We had two turtles that walked our kitchen floor.

I mean, they must have taken a while because they're pretty slow.

Well, we had a big kitchen too.

Oh my golly, crayfish.

We had a pan of crayfish under our bed.

One night, John and I woke up in the middle of the night and we heard scratching, scratching.

I said, what the heck?

And John looked under the bed and there was a big pan of crayfish.

And little Philip had put them there because he said,

I was afraid they might wake up in the middle of the night and miss their mommies and daddies.

So I wanted them to be close to you.

So I put them under our bed.

Oh, a snake.

Phil brought a big black snake into the basement wrapped around his arm.

And you know what?

He still has.

He's still an animal person.

He hasn't changed that much.

Yeah.

Yeah, still loves animals.

Anyway, Mike, Mike, I'm so glad to see that you're up and about.

And because you were a little bit under the weather.

You know, there's so much crud going around.

And yeah, I got back from Clint Hill's funeral

and didn't feel bad, but just didn't feel great.

And then every day it's just a little worse, a little worse.

And then it's like, oh, you know what?

You're sick.

And then you take your temperature and it's like, what?

103?

So yeah, that's high.

It was high and I spent the weekend in bed and now I feel exponentially better I'm so glad well are you coughing because when I had that

it left me with a residual cough that just lasted for a long time I know I was so worried about you was it COVID or do we even care anymore is that even a polite question we both tested positive for COVID in the first week of April April 1st for me and I think maybe April 3rd or 4th for your father.

So we did have COVID, but very different forms of COVID.

We had different symptoms.

That's the kind that you can only get after you've been vaccinated and boosted three times.

That most rare form of COVID reserved for people who did everything they were told to do, but nevertheless have it visited upon them.

For reasons no one is...

It's just unknowable.

It's just a fluke, I suppose.

I don't know, but I do know that I missed the latest booster because I had COVID.

And they said

don't think about it.

Maybe in a few months you might decide to go there.

But Mike, it's funny, I wrote about it because I write and I talk about our lives.

Well, I got the greatest comments from readers

who wanted to tell me what to do to stay healthy and

how to avoid coughing?

It was so funny.

One lady said, Oh, sip pineapple juice.

That'll do it.

That does it for me.

Every time my coughing stops the minute I sip pineapple juice.

Another woman said, Sprinkle salt into the palm of your hand and lick it.

And she said, By the time you lick up all that salt, you won't even want to cough.

The cough will be gone.

I didn't do that

because I try not to, you know, ingest too much salt.

Oh my golly.

And for the coughing.

Wasn't there something about wrapping your...

Oh my gosh.

Somebody told me to slice

more than somebody.

I mean, a lot of people said, oh yeah, yeah, that works.

Slice a raw onion very thin.

And wrap it on the bottom of your feet.

Put it on the bottom of your feet and wrap saran wrap around it oh my i'm doing it as i'm talking and that will help

well

don't try to go to the bathroom and walk on on on onions because

you'll get bruised feet um and then somebody told me oh this is easy you just get vicks vapor rub and you rub it all over the soles of your feet just before you go to sleep and then put your sock put socks on and you won't cough all night long.

I did that.

I did do a little coughing too.

I mean, I might have done more if I hadn't tried that.

Yeah, but that's like saying, ah, you know, my head still hurts after I took the aspirin, but it would have hurt so much more if I didn't.

You know?

COVID would have been so much worse if you hadn't gotten the booster.

That's right.

We got a much easier ride.

You know what?

I know this tweaks a lot of people, but I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

If we're living in an age where the most enlightened minds in the world keep telling us to take more and more boosters and everybody keeps getting the same disease over and over and over again, then I'm not sure how bananas it really is to wrap your feet in bananas or to sip pineapple or eat onion or rub salt on your hand.

I don't know how to think about people who have to take their pants off in order to walk through their kitchen on account of all the clutter.

I don't know if I should just set them off in crazy town while the rest of the population is lining up to get booster number 12 while they're infected with the very thing it's supposed to prevent.

I just don't know how to think about it all, Mother.

Please say something wise for those dozen or so people still listening.

I do have one reader who raises goats, and she wrote to me me and suggested that I put Vicks in one nostril and some garlic, a garlic clove in the other nostril.

And she said, really, that helps so much.

You'll get well faster and the coughing will be at a minimum.

Also, she feeds her goats honey and cinnamon and dark red wine.

And I said, you know,

you know, if I do succumb to this illness, I want to come back as one of your goats.

Honey and wine.

Nice.

Yeah.

Honey and wine.

Sure.

But the garlic clove and the,

I don't know about that.

Well, you've got just like jamming a clove up your nose?

Is she saying?

Like clogging your nose?

Well, she wasn't real specific.

And I don't know how big goats' nostrils are.

Well, wait, she did that to her goats or she was saying for you to do that?

Oh, no.

When her goat gets sick, she puts a thing of garlic in her stars.

Mom, that's not what you said.

Oh, what did I say?

You said that a woman who owns goats wrote to you and suggested that you stick garlic cloves up one nostril.

Oh, well, she was just telling me what she does with her goats, and then she thought

important detail of the story, the really critical detail.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Because I was picturing you with the clove of garlic.

But even that, I mean, the PETA people should talk to her with a jamming garlic up.

I'm talking about a woman who vacuums by turning on the vacuum, lying it on its side, and then pulling the dirt out of the rug and jamming it into the roller.

It's not beyond the pale that she might strap some onions to her feet and shove some garlic up or down.

This woman loves her goats, she wouldn't do anything to harm her goats, so she feels that this is really a good remedy.

Garlic in the nostril.

We had a goat, didn't we?

For a while?

Oh, we didn't, but our neighbor did.

And our neighbor kept, in fact, the goat's name was Mary.

And he used to

put Mary in our back pasture.

That's why, that's, you can see my confusion.

When you live in a petting zoo and you look out the window and there's a goat in your back pasture, it's not a stretch to think it might just belong to you, be part of the menagerie also their chickens used to come into our garden and eat our tomatoes yeah yeah yep

chickens you should get some chickens Mike yeah you should get chickens

they're very popular yeah

I mean backyard chickens are really the rage now a lot of people have chickens in their backyard they make eggs You can eat them.

I know.

I love that.

And they're not going to be diseased eggs if you, you know, control your chickens, where they go and so forth.

I learned more than I wanted to

know about all that season, I think it was season one of Dirty Jobs up at Murray McMurray.

You remember that hatchery segment where we did

chick sexing?

Oh, I remember that.

Yeah, I remember.

That was funny.

Well, I mean, first of all, it's like 350 breeds of chickens that are out there.

There are so many.

And secondly, the vast majority of chicks that are purchased by people all over the country are sent to them through the U.S.

Mail.

They're literally put in a box and just

shipped.

They can survive.

for a while because the

white part of the the egg, what you call the albumin,

is absorbed by the yolk, and that's filled with the, I guess, the fluids, the nutrition, whatever hydration is necessary to keep the chicks alive for a couple of days.

I don't know if you saw the episode, but

chick sexing, right?

You just.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

You take these chickens one at a time.

They're little chicks.

They're like little Easter

tweeters.

They're little balls of yellow feathers.

Little

down.

With a tiny beak.

Yes.

And to separate the pullets from the cockerels, you need to have a really experienced eye.

And for whatever crazy reason, at least 20 years ago, I'm not sure it's still the same, but the go-to chick sexing teams were flown all around the country to different farms.

to perform this service.

And incredibly and inexplicably, these teams often consisted of very old Japanese men who, for whatever reason,

had some facility for the work.

And the work involved picking up each of these little chicks and peering into their buttholes to identify the tiniest little bump.

The bump was associated with the cocrel, of course, and the pullets were bump-free.

And so the two sexes were separated, but in between the peering into the butthole was the evacuation of the intestines, which presumably were filled with some ingested albumin.

So the first thing you do is you pick them up and you hold them over a coffee can.

In this case, I think it was a Folger's, if I remember right.

Not that it matters, but you'd literally squeeze the chick and the poop would fly out.

And then you'd look into the butthole.

Pullets to the right, cockerels to the left.

And it was really only the pullets that people wanted.

Those were the ones that typically got shipped by the thousands

every day.

Incredible.

And what happens to the mail chicks?

Oh, jeez.

The cockerels.

Really?

All right.

Well, I mean, since we're having that kind of conversation.

Yeah, this wasn't dealt with in the episode because it was deemed too upsetting.

by my executive producer at the time, but they're not needed, and so they are disposed of.

And by disposed of, I mean they are by the thousands poured into a hopper of sorts that leads straight into a grinder.

It's like a whisper chopper.

And what comes out the other end is just

cockerel goo,

which if memory serves, is ultimately repurposed and turned into chicken feed.

So there you go.

Hakuna Matada, mom.

Circle of light.

Well, that's a happy story.

That's a happy story, Mike.

Well, when your nephew, you weren't born yet, of course.

I was just a teenager, but my sister was married and had a little boy who was three.

And we lived in the country on a farm.

Well, I bought Stephen, who was three.

I bought him six little baby chicks for Easter.

Well,

they were little babies.

And when I bought them at the feed store, I said, I would like like females, please.

Five of them were males, and one was a female.

Well, those males.

The same thing happened with your kids, as I recall.

Yes, yes.

I ordered girls three times.

But anyway,

they were horrible.

They all ran loose, of course.

We didn't have a chicken house.

They just ran free.

Well, you couldn't go out the back door.

They would attack you.

They would put their wings up in the air and and scratch the ground and put their heads down and run right for you.

They were horrible.

You would try to cut the grass and they would attack the lawnmowers.

So your Uncle Charles came up from Virginia and took them home with him and they had chicken for dinner.

Yeah.

Where they spent the rest of their lives in rich fulfillment up on the farm.

Do you remember the first time you saw your grandmother wring the neck of a chicken?

Oh my golly, it was traumatic.

My sweet little grandma daisy just with the apron on and a

her braids wrapped around her crown like a cherub

just the sweetest little thing in a little pair of glasses picked up that hatchet grabbed that chicken by the head and laid him over the tree stump and whack

And the blood, I mean, the blood splattered on her face and

what was left of that chicken just danced around the yard.

Oh, I remember it like it was yesterday.

That's another kind of dark story, isn't it?

I don't know.

I mean, you came out with mental illness.

Yeah.

It involves dancing, you know.

We paint with a broad brush over here with coffee with mom.

I know.

Can't we think of something happy?

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I got one.

Since you mentioned Daisy, here's another episode that never really aired, which is a shame.

But I did a story on these people who were living off the grid outside of Georgia who raised rabbits as their primary source of protein.

And we're getting a lot of hate mail from people that go online and they would, you know, their kids are participating and they're, you know, they're walking them through all the steps of raising and slaughtering and preparing and they're making rabbit stew and Haas and Pfeffer.

I just thought, well, it's a great chance for people to understand where their food comes from.

And I wanted to do that story.

So we went there and we filmed it.

And sure enough, man, it's very instructive.

You know, a rabbit, mom, is so much more efficient than a cow to an almost extraordinary magnitude.

Like the meat from a rabbit that you'll eat when it's properly slaughtered and prepared is well over 90%.

But a cow is probably less than 50.

When you, you know, you count for all the organs and all the fat and all the stuff that you don't want.

Anyway, it's super efficient, but I'll never forget this father taking one of the rabbits, big plump Easter bunny.

I mean, he just looked like the star of a Cadbury commercial and just gave it a slow pet and said some soothing words to it.

And the kids came over and they petted the rabbit.

And the father,

the father laid it on the ground and took an axe handle and gently put it behind the head and on the neck.

And the little boy and the little girl each petted the rabbit again.

And the father put a foot on either side of the handle and then grabbed the hind legs.

And then they said a little prayer.

And then...

The little girl reached out and rubbed the ears one more time and said, bye, Daisy.

And then the father pulled the hind legs of the rabbit and the neck snapped.

And within four minutes, that thing was completely dressed.

And five minutes after that, it was in a pot.

And two hours later, we were having rabbit stew.

And

the network just said,

we just don't know how to think about it.

I literally called the episode by Daisy.

And you know what?

I mean, you brought her up, but it was beautiful.

I mean, it was rough because you don't want the Easter bunny.

You don't see the Easter bunny as your meal.

Yeah, we don't want to see things die.

I mean, we know we like a hamburger, but

we went up to your Uncle Nelson's one year.

Golly, I can't remember.

I think it was over the Christmas holiday.

And we had dinner and we were eating,

they had hamburgers, but they called them Max burgers.

And I was curious as to how they got that term.

Max burgers, you know, are they like maximum ketchup and mustard

relish?

No, this was Max.

Remember Max out in the field eating grass?

This was Max.

These are Max burgers.

You guys couldn't eat very much.

Oh, but I do remember it.

And honestly, that was somewhere in the back of my mind when we did Earl the Butcher.

That mobile butcher segment, that one did air, and that one upset a lot of people.

Remember, I shot the cow.

I shot a cow in an episode of Dirty Jobs.

Yeah.

It was probably a steer.

No, it was a cow.

Oh, a cow.

It was horrible.

But,

you know.

I rode with the butcher.

This was a family who raised the cow for this specific purpose, and it would provide them with six, seven hundred pounds of meat, feed them for the whole year.

And when the day came to take it, they didn't want to do it.

You know, they had kids and it wasn't a pet, but they had become attached to it.

I forget the name of this thing.

What I'll never forget, though, is opening the segment, standing there by the gate.

It's a shot of me.

and the cow and the farmer and his wife and his family are out of the shot and the mobile butcher Earl, is standing on the other side of the camera with a rifle.

And I just introduced the segment by saying we're here, and we were in Western Michigan, I remember.

And I quickly introduced Earl and the camera caught him, and then I quickly introduced the family, and the camera panned over, and then it came back to me.

And I'm standing next to the cow, and I explained to the viewer that this cow is going to feed that family for the next year.

And that man, Earl, is going to show you exactly how every cut is prepared, dry-aged, and then returned to this place.

But he's also here because the family doesn't want to do what has to be done.

But make no mistake, what has to be done is going to happen.

As I'm talking, the cow is licking my neck.

Nuzzled up and licking my neck.

Oh, no.

Yeah, and that's what I.

She had a name, and she'd been giving them milk.

Yes.

Is she a milk cow?

Well, I mean, it is traditional.

I mean, if she wasn't giving them milk, I don't know what she was giving them.

I mean,

it's life, isn't it?

And we don't want to see that side of it, but

we're very anxious to eat a hamburger or a steak or, you know.

Mom, it's one of the few things that I'm positive about.

today.

Not everybody agrees, but I

say it all the time, and Chuck's heard me talk to lots of different guests about this, but you just have to get your head out of the sand.

I don't care what the issue is.

You know, if you want to trade with China, you have to look at what's going on with the Uyghurs.

You have to look at what's going on with organ harvesting.

You don't have to like it, but you have to at least be mindful of it.

And if you're going to eat a steak or a hamburger, yeah, you damn well better meet Max.

You better understand where it's coming from.

The animal deserves that much, at least.

And I guess if you're going to make lighthearted jokes about a condition like hoarding, then you need to hear a real-life story about somebody who had to take their pants off to walk through their own kitchen.

It's real and it's a heck of a thing, but in the end,

it's better to know, right?

Yeah, we should be informed.

Well, I tell you what, in the interest of information, As we land the plane here, I'll remind the two or three viewers we we still have left that I'm going to read your story.

It better be as good as I remember it.

And we're going to have it up either for Mother's Day or just before it.

And by the way, folks, if you haven't bought her latest book, do I have you a copy of it sitting around?

Oh, no, here it is.

It's probably on your bedside table.

Well, of course it is.

Dog-eared, but here's my copy.

Right here.

Oh, no, not the home.

It's her fourth book.

It's as good as the rest, maybe even better.

How did that last event go?

Oh, it went very well.

Yeah,

lots of compliments.

Yeah.

Did you tell them about killing chickens and hoarders and all that?

Or did you just tell them?

No, no, no.

Oh, no.

I just stuck with the usual.

Lots of humor.

Well, they were just curious to know what it is like for a resident in a facility such as this,

you know, long-term care facility.

Because

they knew it from an employee side, but they hadn't really heard it from somebody who was willing to tell it like it is.

You know, Chuck, it's really rich.

It's filled with humor.

I mean, if you think about it, there are people

who run this Erickson operation are bringing my mom in to talk to large groups.

They buy her book and she tells them the realities, warts and all.

I mean, it's it's almost always funny, but

I think it's terrific, Mom.

I think what you're doing, yeah, well, as you know, I'm a fan.

I love you.

Everybody else does too.

So I got to jump, but go wrap some onions on your feet and get that garlic up your nose and get out there and live your best life.

Okay, Mike.

I'll do that.

This has been fun.

It's always nice to see you guys.

All right.

Well, I have to go narrate another riveting episode of

Deadliest Catch.

Oh, okay.

I look forward to hearing it.

Well, spoiler alert: pot goes over, pot comes up.

What's in the pot?

Crab, no crab, crab, no crab.

It's crab.

Oh my gosh, let's smoke a cigarette.

Pot goes over.

What's it going to be?

Crab, no crab.

Look at the size of that wave.

Oh, my God.

I'll smoke another cigarette.

Crab, no crab.

It's crab.

Oh, no crab.

It's very sad.

Give me another cigarette.

That wave's enormous.

Yeah, you know the show.

I know.

You really sell it.

Well, you know what?

Any season could be our last now.

This is season 21.

I can't believe that show is still going on.

As long as people are eating crab, I think you're safe.

Yeah, and crab is very popular.

It's very popular here at the home and in Baltimore and in Maryland.

It's all about the crab.

Well, in Maryland, it's Calinectus sabatus.

Really?

Okay.

Beautiful swimmer, the blue crab.

These are just the big Alaskan red crabs and opilio crabs and tanner crabs and all that type of thing.

But they are good meat.

I mean, they must taste good or they wouldn't

have all that effort.

I've had, I mean, everything from stone crab to dungeness, all the ones I've mentioned, I still say a big jumbo Chesapeake Bay Maryland blue crab, properly prepared.

There's just no better meat.

It would be a part of my last meal if such a thing were ever offered to me.

And it's so difficult.

It's such a great

example of adversity.

You got to work for it.

You know, you're going to get cut.

You're going to get some of the old bay.

You're going to get some of the JOC.

It's going to hurt.

It's going to hurt.

It's going to hurt.

It's not going to be pleasant.

You're going to wind up rubbing your eye at some point.

The old bay is going to get in there.

You're going to be going to be blinded.

You're going to be crying.

You're going to be bleeding.

It is a social occasion for sure, sitting around eating crabs.

Marylanders love it.

I mean, Baltimoreans, especially.

It's a great thing to do.

But I can't do it anymore because my arthritic hands will not let me get into the crab.

Well, that's why dad's there.

I know.

Even before you were all crippled up with the arthritis, he was making little piles of claw meat for you and back fin.

Yeah.

That's true love right there.

That is true.

It is.

It really is.

And you know what?

One day we

accompanied Mike on a job over on the Eastern Shore.

He was

preparing crab.

And when we left, they gave us a whole pound container of nothing but little back fin balls.

Oh my golly, was that good?

That was a real treat.

You remember what your husband did?

We took him into the to the cleaning and picking area.

I remember him sitting next to that woman who really taught him how to pick crabs and told him her life story.

Well, there were two women, each of whom had been picking crabs for a long time.

It was Sissy and Nicey.

That's right.

And like Sissy had been cleaning crabs for like 60 years, and her daughter had been at it for like 25.

And my dad sits right between the two of them, these two unbelievably experienced black women telling my dad, once you put my dad on a task, he can't leave till it's done.

He perseverates.

He must finish a job.

He cannot,

he can't turn around without going where he meant to go.

You know, he can't stop any task until it's complete.

Yes, right.

I mean,

it's a kind of OCD, I think.

But he's always used it to his advantage.

It's never devolved into a hoarding thing, but it is remarkable to watch.

And we're filming the show.

We've got beats.

We've got a day to do.

And he's just, look, there's a pile of crabs at the end of the table.

And he's sitting there between Sissy and Nicy, and there's work to be done.

He's like, look, son, you can film.

You can not film.

I really don't care.

He wasn't about to leave.

He's not leaving.

He's not leaving until all the meat is out of the crab.

And so we had no choice but to move on.

It was really funny.

Those women, their hands were fairly flying.

Oh, they were so fast.

You couldn't even

follow what they were doing.

And then there's dad laboriously pulling this off and reaching in for this.

They were very patient.

Mom, I love you.

We got to go.

Okay.

Love you guys too.

Happy Mother's Day, whatever.

Happy Mother's Day.

Yeah, whatever.

All right.

I'm looking forward to that story.

Make it a great one.

Okay.

We'll do.

All right.

All right.

See ya.

When you leave a review, only five stars will do.

Not just one or just two or just three.

We were hoping

four

more.

As in a one more

than a four,

holy is one more than four.

Just a quick review with five stars too

from the you five stars will do

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