The Moth Radio Hour - Fathers: Daddy, Dad, Paw-Paw, Pops
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We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows from New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more. The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth main stage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.

To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns, and on today's show, we'll go on a road trip with dads. ♪

We'll start out in a small town in rural Tennessee, then move on to a Whole Foods market in Milwaukee. We'll visit Ghana by way of India and Atlanta, Georgia, touch base with a Mormon bishop in Idaho, and end up on a basketball court in Philadelphia. Up first, David Kendall. He told his story at an open mic story slam competition we produced in New Orleans with our friends at WWNO. Here's David. The first time I fell in love, it wasn't with a girl.

And it wasn't with a person. I was eight years old and I lived in my hometown of Cottage Grove, Tennessee. It was a tiny little dot up in the northwest corner of the state. There were 110 people that lived in Cottage Grove. There was one store, there was a post office, there was a gas station, there was one school. There were four churches. And that's the kind of place it was. And I realized early on, I don't want to live here the rest of my life.

I don't fit in. And I wondered, are there other people that feel like I do? Well, as it turns out, there were other people. I never asked, but one of those people, I'm pretty sure, was my father, Ralph Kendall. And I realized this when I remembered how he used to sit in front of the stereo at night, go through his record collection and play music while drinking Falstaff beer, smoking cool cigarettes. And he would sing along, and he would laugh.

And sometimes he'd cry if it was Hank Williams. And I realized at that point, I don't think other daddies in Cottage Grove, Tennessee do this. As soon as I got old enough, I started listening to music with him. Because I loved the sounds and also because I desperately wanted some way to connect with this very hard-to-know man.

And through him, I first heard Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bob Wilson, the Texas Playboys, Jim Reeves, all classic country artists that I would learn to appreciate the older I got. But the night I remember the most, and the night that changed my life, was the night that he went into the closet, and he brought out a box of old 78s. And he started rummaging through them. And he pulled one out, and he said, I'd forgotten I had this. I never listened to it very much. He said...

But I got a feeling that you'll like it, Hoss. He called me Hoss after Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. He took the record out of the sleeve, he put it on the turntable, he put the needle on it, and the hiss and the crackle and the pop of the old vinyl gave way to this glorious, raucous, epic, opening salvo, car wreck guitar riff of Chuck Berry's Maybelline. And those killer lyrics...

As I wasn't motivated nowhere to heal, I saw a Maybelline in a coupe de ville. Cadillac rolling on an open roll, nothing out of run my V8 Ford. Wow! I never heard anything like this in my life. And as a kid raised in a Southern Baptist tradition, I was pretty sure I wasn't supposed to like it. But I sure did like it. And when the song ended, he reached to take it off the record player. And I said, Daddy, no, no, no. Play it again, play it again. Please, please, please play it again. He said, I figured you'd like that, Hoss.

Yeah, I'll play it again. He played it again. And he played it again, and again, and again. And I don't know how many times I made him play that. But I know he played it until my mama walked in the room. And she looked at him a certain way. And he stopped playing it then. Y'all know what I'm talking about. Well, it wouldn't be too long after that until I would get my first guitar. And I would try to recreate those sounds I heard on that record. But it was really hard. And I didn't think I was very good.

When it came to musical talent, I did not consider myself gifted. And it would take me 20 long years to escape the clutches of Cottage Grove, Tennessee. But when I finally left, I headed for a music city. I went to Austin, Texas. It was Labor Day of 1989. I had my car packed. I was ready to go. And I was standing on the front porch of my parents' house about to say goodbye. And my daddy said, hang on, Hoss. I got something for you.

He walked back in the house, he came outside, and he said, I know how much you love this, and I thought you might want it. And he handed me that 78 of Chuck Berry's Maybelline, and it was a wonderful present. It was the best present I ever got. But the real gift that I got all those years ago was a love and appreciation for good music. And it's a gift that I could never wear out, and I could never lose, and I could never outgrow.

And I regret that I didn't tell him this when he was alive, so I'm going to say it now. Thank you, Ralph Kendall. Thank you. Thank you.

That was David Kendall with his tribute to his late father and the late Chuck Berry. David is now a singer, songwriter, and musician in Austin, Texas, where he's lived for most of the last 30 years with stints in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and New Orleans thrown in. He wrote, My early years spent on a farm in rural northwest Tennessee have been a great source of inspiration for stories and songs. I told another story featuring my father at a local storytelling event here in Austin, and that went over well.

So my father's definitely been a good source for material. He'd probably be happy about that. Next up, we have a story from Chris Myers. He told it at the Story Slam in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where we partner with Wisconsin Public Radio and 88.9 Radio Milwaukee. Here's Chris Myers.

In the run-up to my first daughter's birth, I discovered that the gulf between how I thought I should feel and how I did feel was getting wider and wider. It wasn't so much that I felt blue or sad or anything, it was just that it was a little bit beyond my reach. So this came to a quick head as two weeks before she was born, my wife and I, late one evening, were hanging out. She sits down and says, "Ooh!"

And it is the most significant, ooh, I'm ever going to hear in my life. Because we spend three and a half hours trying to figure out if we're in labor. Now, I'm just going to tell you, if you're planning on having a kid or if you're on your way to having a kid, if you spend three hours, if you spend two hours trying to figure out if you're in labor, you're in labor. So we rushed to the hospital, and about 45 minutes after that, I'm holding my daughter, Eleanor, and I'm relieved. I'm happy in a sense, but...

I'm not really feeling the joy. It's still kind of beyond me. Well, luckily my wife steps in and she sends me to go get her some non-hospital food. And so I go across the street to Whole Foods, which is a bastion of drama. And there, in aisle, I think it was seven, I'm reaching for an Italian soda. And as I reach for it, I hear a drumbeat on the radio. Dum, dum, dum.

And a keyboard and a baby's cry and it's this throwaway song that I've never paid attention to for the most part But I fall to my knees sobbing because it's Stevie freakin wonders isn't she lovely and I am suddenly clobbered by the reality of what is hit and Frankly, I'm floored and as I'm having my epiphany

I'm sitting there and I can hear in the back of my head this voice saying something to the effect of there's an incident in aisle seven. And I'm looking around thinking I'm the only guy in aisle seven. There's nothing going on. Oh. Good parenthood moment. I'm going to mention it. I didn't drop the bottle. Cradled.

sobbing over my lemon-lime Italian soda. I get this 19-year-old kid, he's kind of geeky looking, and comes up, very Whole Foods-y, and he's like, are you okay, sir? And...

I'm cradling a bottle of Italian soda and trying to explain to him the beauty, the depth, the grapes of what, 10 fingers and 10 toes is suddenly meaning to me. And I'm not doing a good job of it. And finally, I just settle for, I'm fine. I spent a lot of time at the floor of Whole Foods, aisle seven, cradling bottles of Italian soda. He goes away. He's glad that I tell him I'm fine. But the problem is still in aisle seven. So

I rate a little bit higher and I get the manager who looks like Rush Limbaugh's angrier brother. And so I decide honesty is the best policy this time around. And as soon as he gets up there, I try and stand up. Standing up looks like you're in control. And so I turn to him and I'm like, look, man, I just had my first daughter born not an hour ago across the street from here. And this song is playing and he hasn't heard it. It's background noise to him.

but suddenly he does and his face is blank for a second and then i am buried in man and my shoulders getting wet and all he can sob out to me is mine was born three months ago too that was chris myers chris is a high school teacher and since that day in the supermarket he says he's been madly in love with both eleanor the baby in the story and his second daughter abigail who was born two years later

Coming up, a Guatemalan immigrant sees his new baby and faints. And a young man from Ghana gets to know his elusive father through the stories told after his dad's death. When the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.

This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns, and our next storyteller is Nestor Gomez. He was born in Guatemala, but has lived in Chicago since the mid-'80s. Here's Nestor live at the Moth. I woke up in the waiting room in the hospital a little bit confused, and immediately I ran to the room where the nurses kept the babies looking for my newborn baby boy. The first baby that I saw when I entered the room was an ugly-looking baby.

This baby had facial hair. His skin was all wrinkled up. His ears were wrinkled up like discarded pieces of paper. And every time that he breathed, he made this ugly noise. I felt sorry for whoever were the parents of that baby, and I continued looking for my baby. I made it all the way to the middle of the room when I heard my mother's voice in the entrance of the room. "Mi nieto! My grandson!" She was looking at the ugly baby.

I turn around and I ask my mother, "Why do you think that's my son?" Menzo, dumbass, he looked just like you when you were born. I ignore my mother's comments and instead started to think why had I woken up in the little waiting room. So I started to trace back my steps. I had just gotten home the night before from work, from working a long shift. I was tired, I was sleepy, I was hungry.

I got into bed and my head just hit the pillow when my wife say, "My water just broke." So I got up and I got our 11-month-old daughter ready and my wife ready and I drove them to my in-laws house so they could babysit my daughter while I took my wife to the hospital. Now I wasn't too worried about this whole delivery thing because I had been there before already, just 11 months before. It wasn't really my idea to be there.

when my daughter was born. It was the doctor's idea to have young parents present at the delivery of the babies so they could think twice before they get another baby. Of course, I'm a hard Latino young man and that didn't work for me. So 11 months later, I was there again with another baby. And like I said, I wasn't too worried about the whole thing because I had been there before. The only thing that I was worried about

was that I had so much love for my daughter and so much love for my wife that I kept thinking to myself, "How am I going to get love for this other baby in my heart? There's no way that I can make room for him in this heart. This is too much love already. Maybe I'm going to have to grow another heart." But I wasn't too worried about the delivery until the pain started and my wife started complaining a lot.

Several times she told me that she was going to die and she told me to take care of our daughter and our other baby. But thanks to God, nothing happened to her. Our baby was born. And I started to walk to where the baby was. But instead of saying something good, the only thing that I managed to say was, the room is spinning. Next thing I know, I woke up in the little waiting room because I passed out.

So that's how I happened to wake up on a little waiting room. I asked the nurse if that was really my baby, and the nurse kept telling me that that was my baby. After 24 hours, my wife, me, and my baby were given the okay to go home. My mother put some socks on my baby's ears because this was an old wife remedy to fix the ears.

So when I got out of the hospital with my baby, he looked even uglier than when he was born. But a couple of weeks later, the thing with the socks in the ears actually worked and his ears started to look normal. The facial hair fell off, the skin was nice and smooth. He was a really good-looking baby. He kind of looked like me. I was like, "Hey, this is a cute baby. Probably my son." However, the breathing never got better. In fact, it got worse.

My wife took our baby to the hospital where he was born. And the doctors in the hospital said, don't worry, just a little cold, don't worry about it. So she came back with the baby. But that night, the baby started to turn blue. So we took the baby to another hospital. In that hospital, they told us that the baby had asthma. And they put him on the intensive care unit. For two weeks, my baby almost died. He was given medicine. He was put in a crib with a big cover. I couldn't touch him. I couldn't hold him.

Little by little, he got better. Until one night, I was finally able to hold him in my arms. And I prayed to God, I don't care if this baby is ugly. I don't care if he's beautiful. He's mine. I just want him to be healthy. As in clue, the doctor walked into the room and said, I think your baby is going to be okay. And you're going to be able to take him tomorrow home. I started to cry out of happiness. The doctor looked at me and asked me if I was okay. And I answered more to myself than to the doctor.

I think I just grew another heart. Thank you. Nestor Gomez holds the record for the most Chicago Moth Story Slam wins and is also a two-time Chicago Moth Grand Slam winner. But if you ask Nestor, he will tell you that his biggest accomplishments are his kids, making his mother proud, and winning the heart of his fiancée. And the little baby in the story? He recently graduated from Grinnell College. ♪

Our next storyteller is Karan Chopra. We met Karan when he was a 2015 Aspen New Voices Fellow. Here's Karan live at the MOF in Washington, D.C. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech getting ready to take a final exam when I got a call from Ghana. I was told that my dad had had a heart attack and had passed away in a matter of hours. Just like that, he was no longer there. I was in shock.

But arrangements had been made. My dad's boss had booked me on the next flight out to Accra to be with my mom. My dad had moved to Ghana in the early 1980s to be a maintenance engineer on a manufacturing plant. The money was much better than what he was earning in India, so he moved halfway across the world. A year after I was born, my mom and I joined him in Accra, and that's where I grew up.

So our lives in Ghana centered around my father, but growing up, we didn't spend much time together. He would leave for work early in the morning, return late at night, often before I was awake and after I was asleep. Six days a week, and Sunday was a half day. But I remember Sunday evenings when he would take me to a restaurant called Sunrise so I could have my favorite meal, chichinga.

which are these skewers of meat like kebabs marinated in local spices. These would all be memories now. On the flight over to Ghana, I couldn't help but think that we didn't have enough of these memories in our years together. See, my dad was not a very emotional person. He was not the one to say, "I love you," talk about his day, tuck me into bed, take me to a soccer game. He was consumed by his work.

But that's what he needed to do to put food on the table. I wanted to spend more time together. I wanted to get to know him more. I had questions. What was it like to rebuild your life in a place that was so different from what he was used to? Did he like sports? Was he troublesome in school? When he was a young man, how did he decide what he wanted to do with his life? Question that I would now have to wrestle with in college. These are all unanswered questions.

Over the next few days, something incredible was happening. Something I can only appreciate looking back. Every day someone different would bring home-cooked food to our house, not just for us, but for the many others who came to pay their respects. There were people who helped my mom and I with things that I didn't even know needed to be done. Getting a death certificate, washing the body, organizing a cremation.

We decided to hold these Hindu prayer sessions for 10 days in a row. And on the floor of our living room house, there were tens of people crammed, Indians and Ghanaians alike, on mats in a small room. Some of these people I was seeing for the first time. Who are they? And what brought them here? After one of these sessions, a lady came up to me and said she was a sales agent in the place where my dad used to work.

And she told me that my dad was the reason she was able to send her kids to school. She said she was out of work and no one would give her a chance. And it was my dad who gave her a job that paid school fees. A skinny, tall man was a driver on the factory floor. And he said that he could build his house because of my father. My father had given him a personal loan so he could build his home. And in Ghana, having a house is a sign that you have arrived in this world.

I knew that he cared for the people he worked with, that he was respected, he was the guy who could get things done. But I didn't know he was in the business of giving out loans. Mr. Singh is a manager that was hired to run the factory working for my dad. And for the first three months that Mr. Singh was in Ghana, my dad made sure that he got a home-cooked meal every evening for three months. Because he knew what it was like to move halfway across the world and he wanted...

him to know that he had a home away from home. The day of the cremation, I was standing on the porch of our house and I was looking outside and there must have been at least 100 people in our front yard, through the gate and onto the dirt road outside. Indians wearing their all white kurtas, Ghanaians in the traditional red and black funeral attire. And they wanted to carry his body from our home to the cremation ground, which was about 10 kilometers away.

See, my dad was not a politician. He was not a village chief. He was not an NGO leader. But he had built a community. He had touched the lives of these people in profound ways. And it is in these stories that they were telling me that I was finding my purpose. A deep understanding of service, of what it means to help others who may not have the same opportunity. What is left of us is

when we leave are the memories that we have with the people we work with. And it's this purpose and meaning that inspires my work. It inspires the work I do now here with underserved communities to get them jobs. It's what inspired me to go back to Ghana to build a business there so that farming communities could earn more money and have a better life. And the general manager of that business is none other than Mr. Singh. And Mr. Singh reminds me

that my father guides our work in the community. My dad also guides our community at home. My father's name is Surendra and we named our daughter Surena and his spirit is in her every day. Thank you. That was Karan Chopra. Karan's company, GADCO, which he co-founded, is now helping Ghana's poorest farmers make more money off their crops by providing them with seeds and fertilizer than buying their crops and selling them around the world.

Karan was named a 30 under 30 social entrepreneur by Forbes magazine. He's currently the co-founder and executive VP of the new company, Opportunity at Work. What I love most about Karan's story is how it highlights how we can get to know someone who has died by hearing stories about them. As a Moth Story director, I've heard many stories about people who've died years before, sometimes even before I was born. And even though I never met them, they live on in my mind through the stories their loved ones tell about them.

Coming up, a young woman must make an embarrassing confession to her father, and an uncle in Philadelphia becomes a father figure. That's next on the Moth Radio Hour. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.

This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns, and our next story is from Amanda Hamilton-Ruse. A warning to parents who may have little ones in the car, this story has a moment where teenagers explore their sexuality. It's mild, but we wanted you to know. Here's Amanda, live in Pittsburgh, where we partner with WESA.

I come from a long line of cougars. BYU cougars, that is. You know, BYU, that Mormon college that's out in Utah? No? No drinking, no drugs, no sex, but lots of wacky board games. Yes.

And it's also the alma mater of my mom, my dad, my grandparents, my aunt, my cousins, everyone. So when I was thinking about going to college, that's where I pictured myself going. I grew up in Idaho, but we would go down to Utah for BYU football games, and I went to a couple girls' camps there and volleyball camps. And so when it came time for me to apply to college, that was the plan.

But then, when I was 17, my dad was called to be a bishop of our Mormon congregation in Jerome, Idaho. See, Mormon bishops are called because it's not a full-time or a paid position, but they're in charge. It's like being a priest, which meant that when I was 17 and I needed to go to confession, I had to confess to my dad. Now, luckily, I was a very good girl. I didn't drink or smoke crack.

I got straight A's. But I did have two tiny faults. One was that I drove obscenely fast. And two was that I really liked this boy Steve a lot. But still, I avoided confession because, well, it's my dad, right? But there was one confession that I couldn't avoid. So in order to go to BYU, you need a bishop's recommendation.

So because they have this set of standards that they require everyone to follow, I had to have my bishop vouch for me, right, to say that I could follow these standards. So my dad took me into his office, which was really just this double-wide trailer we had in the backyard. See, I didn't grow up in the kind of house that has an office or a study. I grew up on a farm.

In fact, we have this great picture that the local newspaper took of him once. And so you can kind of picture this. He's this big guy, 6'4", and he's sitting on a wooden fence in his bib overalls and tucked under his bushy beard. He's playing a violin.

to a giant bull that's in the background. That's my dad. He would have never chosen to be bishop. He's this gentle and unassuming guy. He writes his own music. He plays the violin. He laughs really easily, and he loves puns. He abhors telling people what to do, but he loves telling them something very interesting that he's read lately. Um...

But he's also a guy who does what he thinks is right without any drama. So when the time came, you know, when they called him to be bishop, he accepted the call and he shaved off his beard and he started wearing proper pants. So that was good. And okay, so there we are. We go into his office for this interview for me to get into BYU, the alma mater of everyone.

And he starts going through all the normal questions. You know, do you believe in God? Are you morally clean? Do you abstain from alcohol? And it would have been so easy. You know? This is my dad. You know? Don't we lie to our parents all the time? It was her fault. Of course his parents are going to be there. I'm late because I was stuck behind a tractor on the way home. Right? Like, don't we say those lies all the time? But, um...

So he gets down to the very last question, and he says, well, man to girl, is there any reason I shouldn't sign your recommendation to go to BYU? And I should have just said, nope, we're good to go, Dad. But this is my dad, you know, and I'm looking him in the eye, and I just crack. And I inhale, and I exhale a sob. Steve touched my boobies. I...

I think we heavy petted. Heavy petting. That was my big confusing crime. I've had three children and I still am not sure what heavy petting is. It seems like such a silly thing to confess, right? But...

It was bigger than that, and I knew it. I knew that if this was my passage into adulthood, that I wanted to do it right, and I wanted to be the kind of adult, you know, who doesn't get by and half-truths or try to weasel her way out of things. I wanted to be real. I wanted to look my dad in the eye. So my dad kind of paused and said, well, you know...

In this double-wide trailer, I am your bishop, you know, but when we walk out that door, I'm going to be your dad again. And your dad doesn't need to know about what you just told me, and your mother certainly will not know. This is between you and your bishop, and I'm glad you told me. You did the right thing. Everything's going to be okay. And we hugged, and he told me he loved me, and he did not sign my recommendation to go to BYU. Oh, no.

So that changed everything. I didn't go to BYU. I didn't marry my high school boyfriend, who, incidentally, his bishop did recommend for him to go to BYU. It takes two to have a pet. I think. I'm still not entirely sure. But more importantly, it started me on my journey to becoming the kind of adult that I hope I am today. Okay.

And, you know, my dad upheld his end of the bargain. He never grounded me. He still shook Steve's hand when he came over. And I don't know if he ever talked to my mom about why he didn't sign my recommendation. But I believe he did not. Because my dad is honest, just like his daughter. Thank you. That was Amanda Hamilton-Ruse. Amanda is a freelance education consultant, writer, and blogger.

She's still very close to her father, but has not needed to confess anything in a long time. She and her husband and kids now live in Mexico. Our final story was told as part of a Moth Community Showcase. We met our storyteller, Jack Marmerstein, at a workshop we did in Philadelphia with Funders Network and the William Penn Foundation. The story speaks to the many different circumstances that can lead a man to act as a father to a child. Here's Jack, live at the Moth.

It's the summer after I graduated high school and I'm shooting hoops in my driveway with a buddy. I ask him, "When are you leaving for school?" He says, "I don't know, a month maybe." I'm shocked, not because this is actually happening, but because he doesn't know when. I know exactly when. I've been counting the hours for months. It's my release date from a family, from a mother,

who's had a hard time letting go. If leaving for school is going to be the best day of my life, it's really going to be the worst day of hers. She's sort of half Jewish mother, half tiger mother, half like helicopter mother. She's been kind of looking over my shoulder and done an okay job. She's, my grades have been good. I got good SATs. I got into a good college. It's not really that. It's the little things that have driven me crazy.

I'll be on my way to the refrigerator, get myself a snack. And she'll get there before me, open the door, "Are you hungry? Are you hungry? Can I get you something?" And I can sense this desperation to feel needed. And I just feel desperate to do something by myself. A month later, I leave for college, and I never really look back. I spend a lot of time by myself and get a job that takes me all over the world: England, France, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, China.

I end up living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. My bedroom overlooks the Blue Ridge Mountains where I run, ride my bike, camp with my dogs. It's beautiful and I love it. I'm looking out my window when my sister calls one morning. My mother's health has taken a turn for the worse and she's dying. Over our doctor's objections, my sister has figured out a way to fulfill my mom's wishes. She wants to be cared for at home by family.

And my sister has it all figured out. She has the hospital bed, the IV pole, feeding tubes, wound care supplies, ventilators. And my sister is the head of her academic department. And she's a single mother of a two-year-old. She's going to need my help. And I'm not going to say no, but I'm not happy. We're going to run a hospice for a vent-dependent quadriplegic in a tiny row house in Philadelphia. My mom is unconscious most of the time, and when she's not,

She's paranoid that we're not taking every measure humanly possible to prolong her life. It's gonna be rough, but I pack my roller bag, arrive at my sister's on a sweltering August day, blow up an air mattress on her tiny guest room floor, look at the child's desk where I'm gonna telecommute, and I begin counting the hours because the doctors haven't given my mom long. They're amazed she's made it this far. Days, maybe a couple weeks.

So my sister, though, she runs a tight ship. She has rules. She has it all figured out. And I'm horrible at it all. I can't keep the sterile from the not sterile. Household waste from medical waste. Let alone get near my mother's airway. I'm like demoted to like the laundry and the dishes. And Jonah. And that's my nephew. He's two years old. He's wonderful. We were scared to...

bring this into his life. We were scared we would bring death and dying, fear, anger, tears. But he's the one who lifts us up. He's the one who keeps us going. His spirit, he just, he's unstoppable. And it's good because weeks become months. Summer becomes fall, becomes winter. And on Jonah's birthday, he gets the best birthday present. He gets this basketball hoop for our living room. Little basketball.

And we spend the rest of that winter playing basketball. He calls it "dasketball" with Uncle Dak. All he wants to do is play "dasketball, basketball" with Uncle Dak. And we work on his passing and his shooting and his ball handling. And it just keeps us going. He's so obsessed with basketball, the whole world becomes kind of a "Where's Waldo?" of basketball. We'll be driving through the city, he'll see people playing basketball hundreds of feet away. He'll look through my New Yorkers just on the off chance there's a cartoon about basketball.

He spots it no matter where it is. One morning, my mom's vent alarm goes off. It's like a siren in the house. And that happens a lot, but this time I can tell the nurse is scared, my sister's scared. And I scoop up Jonah and I carry him upstairs, but even he can tell something's going on. He's looking around the corner, "Mommy, mommy." And I think I've got to distract him.

Now my sister, I told you, she runs a tight ship. Lots of rules. No screen time for Jonah. No TV, no computer, no iPad. He's never seen it. But desperate times, I pull my phone out of my pocket. I remember a video I've seen that morning. I press play. It's Stephon Curry, the NBA star, dribbling two balls, one in each hand, behind his back, through his legs. Jonah is transported into another world. It's a window into like a universe he didn't know existed. He forgets all about what's going on downstairs, but I don't.

And I'm listening and I hear the alarm stop. Things calm down. My sister has saved my mom's life again. It takes a lot to pry Jonah away from that video, but we get him downstairs, finish getting him dressed, take him to daycare. But that afternoon, Jonah's obsessed with basketball. He wants to go to the big boy court. He wants to take his big boy ball to the big boy court. There's a basketball court around the corner.

And the days are a little longer. It's springtime and the sun's still shining. We hustled to get there before dinnertime.

And now normally the ball is so big, Jonah has to hug it to even carry it. He can barely lift it over his head, those 10-foot baskets. He's not really shooting much. But we dribble a little bit, we pass a little bit. Then he often will get a little distracted by a mud puddle or a stick or something. But on this day, there are 10 guys on the court. They're playing ball. They're playing a pickup game five on five. And Jonah's transfixed. And I don't know if I mentioned,

Jonah's adopted. He's a little African-American boy. And these are 10 African-American men playing basketball. And Jonah's looking at them like they're gods. And I'm thinking this is great. Jonah will be able to impress them with his moves. He's going to dribble. He can dribble with both hands. He keeps his eyes up when he's dribbling. He's going to knock their socks off. But the ball's like dribbling away, like rolling away from him.

He's just obsessed with them. And more than that, they're playing shirts versus skins. Half of them are shirtless. And I look down at him, and all he's trying to do is take off his shirt. And now, my sister has rules, right? She runs a tight ship. You have to be dressed to be outside. Not just pants, shoes, shirt. I look down at him. I look at those guys. I reach down, help him pull off that shirt.

He looks down his little belly. He looks out those men. He looks down his little belly. He is blissing out. If there's a happier boy on the planet, I look around. I see those men. I see Jonah. I see the chain link fences, the Philly row houses. And I think I'm a long way from Virginia. But I'm doing something right. My mom doesn't last much longer. She passes away a few weeks later. And we've done it.

We took care of her at home. She was taken care of by family. And it's my release date. I'm done. I can go back to Virginia, start up right where I left off. But I call a realtor, put an offer on a house, and I live a half block from Jonah and a half block from the basketball court. And I've never been closer to my family, and I've never felt more free. Thank you. That was Jack Marmerstein.

I wrote and asked Jack how he and his family are doing. He has two daughters of his own, Pippa and Sadie, who wonder why they're not in the story. He says, Jonah is great. He's now four years old and loves books and construction vehicles almost as much as he loves basketball. We still get out to the court whenever we can and sometimes take him to 76er or UPenn basketball games. He has a new little sister who is beautiful and mighty in her own right.

And my remarkable and heroic sister is still single parenting, chairing an academic department, and doesn't allow any screen time or exposed skin in warm weather without sunscreen. To see a picture of Jack and Jonah, go to themoth.org.

I really related to Jack's story. My own dad, Frank Burns, is amazing, but I also am lucky enough to have a second dad, my stepdaddy Wayne. He started dating my mom when I was nine, and even though he actually grew up on a small farm in rural Alabama that didn't even have running water until he was 12, he's a pretty sophisticated guy. I remember he'd go on business trips to New York City when he was dating my mom, and he would bring me back trinkets from the big city, which always blew my mind.

When I went to college, he was the one who drove me to Boston and insisted we stop in New York City for the night to check it out. People sometimes ask me how a small-town Alabama girl like me ended up in the big city, and I always attribute it to my stepdad. He's turning 70 in a few weeks, so happy birthday, Wayne. I love you.

Do you have a story about your dad or stepdad or anything else? A lot of our stories come to us through our pitch line. We get them from all over the world and we love hearing them. We listen to every single one and many of the people who call have been invited to tell their stories on our main stage. Just call and leave a two-minute voicemail with a summary of your story. The number to call is 877-799-MOTH or you can pitch us the story right at our website, themoth.org.

My best friend as a child was my grandpa. My mother and I lived with my grandparents for a few years after I was born. He taught me how to hammer a nail in his workshop. I learned trust games like how to jump off the top of the refrigerator to him. My grandmother hated that game. In fact, there wasn't anything I couldn't jump to him from. The top of his truck, the refrigerator, and even once the roof of the garage. It was a low roof.

Whenever we would have a meal, I would sit next to him because he would eat the gross food that I had when no one was looking. It got me out of eating Brussels sprouts on a number of occasions. If he got caught eating off my plate, he would just say, I was testing it to see if it was fit for human consumption or I was checking it for poison. One day we were in his workshop and he had a beer and I walked over and said, hey, grandpa, I better check that for poison. He looked around cautiously and he let me have a sip. I immediately decided that this was another gross food and it was not for me.

I loved everything about my grandpa. He talked to me like I was a person, not just some kid. When the time came, he gave me away at my wedding. In late 2003, my grandpa was diagnosed with mesothelioma. That's a lung cancer that is caused by asbestos. In 2004, he was very sick and I was pregnant. We lived about three hours away from each other and he couldn't travel. After I had my son, I took him to meet my grandpa in mid-December.

My grandpa got to hold his great-grandson once before he died in January. I'm grateful that they got to meet each other. And aside from me, they had something else in common. You see, my son was born on my grandpa's birthday. Again, you can pitch us your own story by calling 877-799-MOTH or by going to themoth.org. ♪♪♪

That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. Music

Your host this hour was the Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns. The stories in the show were directed by Larry Rosen. The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Jeunesse, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Liu Lee. The Moth would like to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their support of the Moth Community Program, as well as Andrew Quinn and Rachel Stretcher from the Aspen Institute.

Moth Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. The story from our pitch line came from Tina Ben-Susan. Other music in this hour from Pokey Lafarge, Chuck Berry, Stevie Wonder, Ry Cooter, V.M. Bott, Duke Levine, and Tin Hat. You can find links to all our music at our website. The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.