I went for a walk to get away from Thanksgiving. Or from my family. Or from myself. I don’t remember if it was Friday or Saturday morning. But I remember going for a long walk and listening to a particular episode of a particular podcast.
This was 2008, so podcasts were relatively new. Unless you owned the year-old iPhone, you had to listen on your iPod. That’s what I did, plugging into my computer at least once a day to suck down new content. I’d become aware of podcasts partly through my job in public radio. But I didn’t start really listening until I lost the ability to sleep.
That fall the housing crisis had metastasized into the financial crisis. There was talk of layoffs at the public radio station where I worked. There was talk among the economic reporters of a possible second great depression. The show I worked on was covering the presidential election, and it was my job to keep track of any breaking news and to ensure we made no mistakes. That must have been how the anxiety got under my skin. I’d placed Google alerts on numerous keywords and names, and it felt as if I’d planted a dozen or more landmines inside my own head.
And then I stopped sleeping. Or at least I stopped staying asleep. I didn’t know this was a distinct form of insomnia: not a struggle to fall asleep but the tide of sleep going out earlier and earlier each morning—4:00am, then 3:00am, then 2:00am—revealing all the rocks, splintered pilings, and debris on the shore of my brain. As the days grew shorter and shorter that fall, there seemed to be less and less oxygen in the air. All my jobs at home and work felt increasingly insurmountable: helping my kids get dressed for daycare, brushing my daughter’s tangled hair, proofreading a script for my host by printing it out and touching each word with the tip of my pen to make sure it was really there.
So I would go for pre-dawn walks. No one needed me at 4:00am, and I didn’t have much time or energy after work. And on these walks, I listened to podcasts. At a time when my brain manufactured an endless torrent of worry about the world, podcasts gave me a break, filling my head with voices other than my own.
On election day, I cast my vote and then saw a doctor. She prescribed me a pill for my sleep and a pill for how I was feeling. I took the pill for sleep but delayed the other one, not sure I was ready for that. My wife suggested perhaps we should not attempt the 500 mile drive from Saint Paul, Minnesota to Lafayette, Indiana for Thanksgiving, considering how things were going. But I couldn’t imagine disappointing my family, especially my mom and my grandmother. So we made the day-long drive to the town where my mother grew up, inching through the stop and go traffic near Chicago, surrounded by smokestacks and the industrial wasteland, our children whining in the back seat for bathroom stops we might not reach for hours.
We did reach our destination, but my son was terrified by the dinosaur movie we put on for him that night. And he had an allergic reaction to the rug. We visited my grandmother’s nursing home the following morning, and both kids got fussy with too little to do. Our Thanksgiving meal was at the nursing home’s banquet hall, which everyone swore had wonderful food. But they’d overbooked, and we had to wait in line for more than an hour to get our table. I took my squirrelly son for a walk around the block, trying and failing to hide my irritation at everything. Merely existing felt like walking barefoot on a bed of needle-sharp nails.
At some point that weekend, my grandmother pulled me aside to tell me she’d heard I’d been having a hard time. I was shocked that she knew, that she’d been let in on this thing I wasn’t even sure I’d mentioned to my parents. But her son, my mother’s twin brother, had died by suicide almost thirty years earlier, so she may have understood what I was going through. It also could have been the last real conversation I had with her.
All of this was what I walked away from when I went on my walk and pressed play on a podcast. I wanted the same escape I got from those pre-dawn walks, someone else’s thoughts to give my own needle-sharp thoughts a rest.
Instead, I got a story. The premise of this podcast, which I’d recently discovered, was simple. A venerable magazine, known for publishing great fiction, invited a writer of fiction to choose a story from the magazine to read aloud and discuss. The genius in the premise is that it’s not just any story being read aloud. It’s a story being chosen by a specific person and read aloud by that specific person for some specific reason.
The story I heard that day, on that walk, was the story of a woman visiting an old friend and his family. The woman in the story is a dancer, but she’s making a living giving workshops in elementary schools. Her friend has an elementary-school-aged son named Eugene in who suffers from cystic fibrosis. It’s the early 1990s, so a shadow of death haunts the boy’s every scene. And yet, he couldn’t be more vivid and delightful. He talks about the older kids at his school like they’re royalty. He disapproves when his parents make a joke about suicide. When he mentions he’s learning about the planets in school, the narrator asks him which one he finds the most interesting. “Mars with its canals? Saturn with its rings?”
“Earth, of course,” he says.
I wouldn’t have had the strength that day to sit down and read such a story. But I could manage having it read to me. In school I always loved when a teacher would read a story to the class. We’d put our heads down on the cool surfaces of our desks and listen. I didn’t become an avid reader until sixth grade, but I was an avid listener to stories as soon as adults started reading them to me. Especially when they could do voices. Or even just modulate their tone to match what was happening. Often, I would go to the library and look at the books, wondering why I couldn’t find any as good as the ones my teachers had read to me. I didn’t understand that the way they read the stories was so much of what I loved.
The guest on this podcast, the reader of the story about the dancer, was like that. A celebrated author from my own Twin Cities, she had a wily, sandpapery voice. She did a madcap accent for Eugene’s French mother, who tells a story about raccoons trapped in a chimney to illustrate her theory of love affairs. “We hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead….Love affairs are like that…They all are like that."
And the podcast guest did a great Eugene, who embodies the idea that we have what we have, and we can try to do our best to enjoy it. Earth being the most interesting planet after all.
Near the end of the story, Eugene and the narrator dance around the living room to an old song by Kenny Loggins called “This Is It.” The author repeats that phrase multiple times, describing the dance.
“‘This is it!’ sings Kenny Loggins. ‘This is it!’ We make a phalanx and march, strut, slide to the music.”
But it’s the reader of the story, on this podcast, who modulates her tone when she reads that phrase the final time. Not, “This is it!” as she has been saying with a triumphant exclamation point. But, “This is it.” Her voice gives voice to something that was inanimate on the page. And the meaning becomes clear. This is it.
That story on that walk offered me some kind of sustenance I didn’t know I could access. The world came briefly back into some kind of color. I could smell the sun-baked piles of late autumn leaves. The next day I would go with my own family, my parents, and my grandmother to see the work of art my grandparents had dedicated to the public library in memory of their son. I would worry, briefly, about whether my kids would enjoy this trip. But the work of art was a surprisingly beautiful motorized sculpture attached to the ceiling of the children’s reading room. A librarian turned it on for us: something like a pod of benevolent sea creatures, moving in the current of an invisible body of water. My kids laid down on the floor to watch it. And for the first time in months, I felt like I could breathe.
Podcast: The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Episode: Louise Erdrich reads Lorrie Moore
You can hear an audio version of this story, interweaving both my version (told on the podcast Arrvls) and my wife’s version (told on our couch late at night ten years ago), on the bonus feed of the Phonograph podcast.