The Moth Radio Hour: Where We Belong
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From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hickson. In this hour, we'll hear stories of looking for home. The setting for these homes? A repossessed house, a middle school science class, a concert, a silent retreat. Our first story takes place in Portland, where we partner with Oregon Public Broadcasting. For people of a certain age who grew up in Portland going to public schools, 6th grade outdoor camp will be familiar. The storyteller is Vin Chambry. Here he is, live at the Moth.

When I was a kid, I never cried. I never had time to. I was always put in adult situations, like the time when I was 12. My mother abruptly woke us up in the middle of the night, tears streaming down her face, her mouth filled with blood from being punched repeatedly. We knew that it was time to flee from him. And from that day on, we were homeless and on the streets. But I was the man in charge.

My four-year-old sister and I would wait down the street in a park while my mother would scope out the shelters. But those places always had social workers and police at those places, which meant we might get taken away from her. So most of the time, we'd sleep under a tree in a park.

Living under trees was only hard for the first couple of weeks. I mean, it was early fall, so it wasn't too cold yet. And at that time of year, all we really needed was a layer of cardboard underneath us, a blanket we all shared, and plastic on top of it. And we had a routine all worked out. Showers at the local swimming pool,

free breakfast at school. Then we'd walk around with the shopping cart until dark. And we knew exactly when the police would patrol the parks and when they were done with their rounds, we could safely crawl into the tree without being seen. It was all right until we found the tree.

this beautiful 50-foot pine tree. Once you settle yourself in near the trunk, you are immediately hidden by its branches. The tree itself becomes a wonderland of a home. The dirt is smoothed over by all the Portland rain. It felt good, good enough to relax a little and sometimes sleep. I lay back and look up through the branches of this tree that I call home.

I look at my mom and sister, amazed at how peaceful they can sleep here. Not a care in the world when their eyes are closed. I admired it, imagining how wonderful their dreams must be. But me? I had to protect them no matter what. As the only man of the tree, it's my duty. So I never dreamed. But tonight, when I watch over them,

I think about with mixed emotions what I'm about to embark on next week with all of the six, the Portland Public School sixth graders. Outdoor school. A five-day environmental school at a sleepaway camp in the forest. We've been hearing about it since kindergarten. No classrooms, just outdoor learning around fires and s'mores for a whole week. But best of all,

I get to have my own bed with clean sheets and a pillow. The day I leave for outdoor school is hard on me. I tell my mom, "Now look, if you're gonna walk me to the bus, you have got to leave our shopping cart with all of our stuff behind the market so nobody sees us." She agreed. And my little sisters hold my backpack, which is as big as she is. She's always trying to help. I give my mom and sister a big hug and I hop on the bus.

The conversation on the bus with the other sixth graders is around who will be the first to cry of homesickness. And they say that at the end everybody cries because you're so sad that it's over. Cry? What for? This is an opportunity of a lifetime, a bed for a week, clean sheets, hot food at every meal, nothing to cry about here.

We get there and we are bombarded by cool 16-year-old counselors who actually wanted to hang out with us. They had been waiting here. They gave us a necklace made out of a slice of a tree trunk with our names on it. And we all had the opportunity to run and jump in the river if we wanted to. What? I mean, I really wanted to. All the kids just ran and did it without even worrying about their clothes.

I only had two pairs of pants and two pairs of underwear and no quarters for the laundry mat. Matter of fact, I don't even know if they had a laundry mat. So I went to the counselor and I asked him. He told me that they would wash and dry my clothes for me and I didn't have to worry about it and it was okay to run and jump in the river. I felt taken care of. At outdoor school, I didn't have a care in the world. As the week goes on, I forgot about my family and the struggles we face.

I forgot about the struggles they're probably facing right now. I like not thinking about how hard everything is. For the first moment in my life, I felt like a kid. The high point of outdoor school was the competitive game of tug-of-war.

Now, 10 of us would represent our school to push as hard as we can against the other rival middle schools. I knew that this was my opportunity. The teacher came up to us and said, "All right, kids, raise your hand if you want to go on the front line and push as hard as you can." Nobody raised their hand. So I did. She came up to me and she said, "Go ahead. You can push as hard as you can." I approached the tape.

to get ready to walk in and take my position. I look down at my shoes. These are my only pair of shoes, and they're actually Nikes, which gives me just enough credibility at school so the kids don't know I'm homeless. And now they're going to get really dirty, and I'm going to have to wear them home like that. No, no, no, you don't get it. They're patent leather, white and red, Deon Sander Nikes that I got as a gift from a girl at school whose dad worked for Nike.

And I know that next week the kids are going to see my dirty shoes and know that my family has no money. But this opportunity is too great for me to worry about adult things like trying to find a place to wash and dry my shoes. I don't hesitate for long. I grab that rope in my hands. My feet begin to sink in the mud, giving me the proper leverage I need to pull for my team. Before the whistle blows, I look in the eyes of the rival school and they're taunting me.

saying that I'm not strong enough and blowing kisses at me. I tilt my head up to the sky and I think, "Who ever gave me this gift to just be a kid?" The whistle blows, I pull with all my might from my team. I hear grunting and screaming and suddenly it's over and we won. All the kids are running towards me, picking me up in the air, telling me that I was strong, that I belonged, that I was strong. The last night of outdoor school,

We sat around listening to counselors tell stories like they do. And one story I will never forget is a story long ago about how all the animals seek shelter from the worst of the storm. Some of them went into the cliffs and some of them went into the caves, but in the end, the mice were left with nowhere to go. So what they did is they seeked shelter in the mighty pine trees.

And till this day, if you look at a pine cone, you can still see what looks like their tails sticking out from the bottom. Hearing that story, I started to cry. At this point, I can tell that all the kids have noticed that I'm crying and they're all whispering. But in that moment, I do not care. I am too overwhelmed with emotion to be embarrassed. I look around at this wonderful place and my new friends

But I can't help think that I've deserted my family in Archery. I deserted them this whole time and I just realized it. My tears were coming from a place of gratitude from this awesome week, but from the realization that my family needs me and I'm the man in charge. I'm supposed to push the shopping cart with all our stuff. I'm supposed to find the cardboard for us to sleep on. I'm supposed to protect my mom and sister. There's a storm coming and I wasn't there to stay awake.

But for five whole days, I got to be a kid. They said at the end of outdoor school, everybody cries. And in the end, I did too. Thank you. That was Vin Chambly. The giant pine tree, Vin's family tree, still stands in Grant Park in downtown Portland. To see a picture of Vin posing with the tree and his two daughters, visit themoth.org.

Vin, his mom and sister, eventually found a home with a roof and four walls, and Vin went on to get a degree in musical theater. He's appeared on Broadway and in several national tours. And when he's not on stage himself, he writes and directs plays and choreographs. He's also the director for a nonprofit called Brother to Brother, which helps men of color stay in college no matter what. To this day, Vin still loves the smell of pinecones.

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 Jennifer Hickson. We're sharing stories of home and family. Our next story is by Lauren Weedman. For many years, Lauren was one of the hosts of the Los Angeles Moth Story Slam. Here's Lauren live in Anaheim, California. The theme was Between Worlds.

So I'm adopted and I met my birth mother when I was 19 years old and my adopted mother was the one who did the search. And she did the search purely based on the fact that I just, I was, it wasn't a big drama around it. I just was always curious, like, I just want to know maybe what my birth mother looked like and maybe can I get a picture? And then my adopted mother was, I didn't call her adopted, I was like, adopted mama, do you think, no. But my...

Adopted mother was really into murder. She wrote and I'm obsessed with this It's a detective show and so she went undercover or pretended to anyway so she found and she found my birth mother and Diane was her name and so where so it was happening we're gonna have a reunion and there was the two of us my my my mother and I were on this plane flying to go visit Diane for the first time and on the plane there I was

I was, I mean, I was, you know, I was nervous and I was excited and the stakes are high. I mean, I got that. But my main concern was that there was going to be some big dramatic scene at the airport. Like, there was going to be some, like, ugh, I just, my whole life of being adopted, all I did was just do a bunch of shtick around being adopted. It was always like my, when I was in third grade, when we'd come back from summer break and the teacher would be like, what'd you do over the summer break? I'd be like, I'm adopted! Ha ha! Ha ha!

It was for no reason. And then the idea that there was going to be something super dramatic or some kind of Oprah moment. And I'm like, if she ends up being, if Diane, if there's any sobbing or sort of, you know, like, I made a stuffed animal look like

You held it. Like, I don't want any of that weird. Or calling me baby or something. Oh, just none of that. And too over the top. And also, I didn't have any... I had a good family. I liked my adopted family just fine. I wasn't looking to trade them in so much. So I get off the plane and I see her. And my God, it couldn't be any better. She was exactly...

She was better than I could have hoped for. First, her and my mom, they do have a little moment. My mother's like, thank you for our baby. I'm like, she's never been that grateful, I swear. They have a little moment with each other, and they're crying and hugging each other. Then Diane looks at me, and I can tell that she just sensed that I couldn't, I don't roll like that. I don't roll with all that hug, hug. I didn't want that. She saw me, and then she just goes, she's like, that's okay. She goes, we've got a lot of time to catch up.

And she's like, and I knew we'd find each other. Let's go get a burrito. And that was it. She gave me the squeeze, and I was like, ah, my people. That's perfect. I don't have to deal with everything. And I couldn't have, I'm telling you, I didn't really, I didn't think I wanted or needed anything from what I would meet in a birth mother. But Diane was fantastic. Like, she was this, she was everything.

Everybody liked her. Like, over the years, and I went to go see her a lot. I tried to spend as much time with her as I could after I met her. And at one point, I even tried to live in the same city as her. And she's a probation officer. You know, everybody loves her, you know? And she loves her murderers, and they love her. You know, there's...

And she told great stories. She always had wonderful-- I loved hearing her stories. And I loved how she just treated humanity. Diane could talk to anybody. And it was never awkward or overly sort of-- I was from the Midwest, and I was used to people just sort of, hello, like not really actually connecting so much. You could roll up like a headless torso on a gurney, and Diane could have like a heart to heart and really get to know them. Like she just-- the messiness of humanity didn't scare her, which I love that.

The two of us were constantly wanting to tell the story of our reunion to, you know, we were always like, "You told the guy at the gas station. I get to do the guy at the Rite Aid, okay? I get to do it this time." And when she would tell the story to people, she was never overly precious about it, and she would tell them about how she's like, "Well, listen, so I put the baby in the garbage can, and god dang it, she got that lid off, and then she found me." And I was like, "Ah, that's fantastic." And people were mortified. That was even better. I loved all of that.

So I, 20 years later, or, you know, this is fast forward 20 years, and I have a baby of my own. Anyway, so I have a baby, and I wanted one of my moms to come help me afterwards at home for the first week, and I asked him,

adopted mama, but she couldn't do it. She hurt her knee. And so then I asked Diane to do it. And Diane said she could. She's gonna be the perfect person for me, you know, when I'm trying to handle like a newborn. And she doesn't have all that stuff around the birth, which was amazing as well. Because she had told me this story many times about how when I was born, that it actually was...

it was fairly positive the whole thing as those things go because her family was really supportive and she was at this unwed mother's home and she liked the unwed mother's home and all the other birth mothers are really cool and they crochet things and and they uh she she liked she had a teacher at her high school because she was 15 she had a teacher who would bring her homework so she could keep up with the rest of her class and she got to graduate on time and then when Diane would talk about the actual birth of when I was born she was like you know what I I

I don't really remember it. I was really drugged up and I just remember that I was pretty much out dancing a week later. I mean, she's like, I'm telling you, I had haircuts that are more stressful. It's really not that big of a thing. And which, so it was, I was, I'm not really concerned about her, you know, having some like, you know, Bellatown, you know, when she sees Leo, Leo's the baby.

So, I get home from the hospital and Diane arrives. My husband picks her up from the airport. And she walks in and the first thing she says is, first of all, she walks right over to Leo and feels like screams in his face, like full, like, from the diaphragm, screams in his face. She's like, "I'm Bobbs, I'm Bobbs, I'm your Bobbs, okay? Nice to meet you, I'm Bobbs." And I was like, "Jesus, when did she get so loud?"

And she decided on the airplane that her grandma name was going to be Bubz off The Wire because it's her favorite character from The Wire. And that she wanted to call that. And...

For some reason, it made me, I got teary, which surprised me. Well, I was upset because I'd wanted her to have just like a tiny moment, I guess, of just sort of like, oh, wow, a baby. Or, you know, like, oh, there he is. Or just do something. And then I was embarrassed that I wanted that. And I thought, well, it's hormonal. I'm sure it's hormonal. Because that's, you know, everyone's sort of like, oh, get ready. You're going to sob when you open a can of Coke. You know, whatever. So...

Then right after that, she puts her stuff down and she immediately takes off because she wants to know where the nearest coffee shop is because she wants a baked good and she'll be back in like a half hour. But she comes back a couple hours later and it's like 6.30 p.m. and she goes to bed because the time changed and the next couple days were like that. She wasn't around that much and I was like, where are you going? Her big thing she would do is just give a thumbs up, you're doing great, you got this thing down. And then she's off to get a baked good, then she's a nap and then she's to bed.

And, which was bothering me a bit. And then I thought, well, I know what she's doing. She's trying to like, she's building my confidence, I guess, that she's just telling me I'm doing good. That's all I need. Anyway, the third night that she was there, I'm up in the middle of the night and I'm feeding Leo or trying to feed him. And out of nowhere, pretty much, I have this awful feeling. I guess it's an anxiety attack or something where I suddenly I was like, oh, my God, I

What have I done? Like, I've brought this baby into the cycle of suffering. I remember thinking that sentence, which is not something I normally, that's not a, okay, I'm like, where did that come from? And I was like, I've done it, though. I brought him to the cycle of suffering, and he's going to have to face my death and his death. And, oh, my God, JFK Jr. died. Everybody, plane crashes. Oh, not allowed.

And it felt awful. And I couldn't shake the feeling. Normally, I can have dark thoughts, but then I can be like, oh, let's get a donut. And I'm fine, but I couldn't shake it. And the next morning, I was still kind of shook up, and I didn't want anybody to be worried about me and worried that I wouldn't be a good mother or something if I was just like, I'm seeing planes crashing and blood coming out of the walls. Is that okay? Okay.

I wanted to tell Diane about it because I knew that I could tell Diane anything. I mean, we are definitely super close. We had been. So I tell her about what happened the night before, and I ask her if she's ever had anything. Does she remember after the birth of her children? She had three other kids. I'm like, do you remember having that feeling ever? And she was like, I don't.

"No, I don't think so. I don't remember anything like that. But, you know, I'm not as deep as you. But I think your sister had it. You guys are kind of deep. I don't think like that." And I thought that was so not at all how I had ever seen her. I mean, she's, I mean, not deep is not how I would describe her at all. Then I felt, "Oh my God, she's gonna leave me alone in this feeling? She's not gonna help like, you know, I'm like, 'Throw me a line!'" Like, nothing. I just have to stay here.

And on the way to the airport, I see her in the backseat, she's in the back with the baby, and she's eating Pringles and drinking a wine cooler, like a wine cooler that she had left over she bought the night before. And then she starts complaining she feels car sick on the way to the airport. And I'm like, my God, what is wrong with this woman? I'm like, dear God, she's a mess. And how did I, it was the first time ever, put it this way, it was the first time ever that I was happy to say goodbye to her.

And that had never happened. I could never get enough of Diane. I mean, oh my God, she was my favorite person in the world to be around. So she leaves, and a year later, I had plans to go back to Indiana, where she was, where all my families were for Christmas. And I hadn't had that much contact with Diane, and I felt like that maybe I had just so...

wanted her to be this person in my mind and in my desire for her to be somebody, I was blind to who she really was, I guess, is what I summed it up as.

I go back for Christmas and I'm supposed to go visit Diane and all of her other kids and stuff. And we go to see a Paul Simon concert that was already on the roster before I got there. And there is, I'm sitting next to Diane at the concert and the kids at all, all of her other kids had bought tickets. They bought tickets in different places but Diane's ticket, she had two tickets and they were at the very, very, very back row of the theater. And so I sit next to her.

And I'm not really wanting to sit next to her and I am after a year of being a mother I've just as I said I've gotten to a point where I'm like wow It's a little bit more you have to actually be there for me I was feeling so I'm sitting next to her and the concert is she's going crazy and it's and she's Every single song is up like dancing and like and nobody else and for some reason it's a very somber audience Nobody's dancing. It was even moving and she's losing her mind and I'm embarrassed and I'm like sit down like sit down sit down She's like I don't think

wall mines, ask him, he's fine. She's loving it. And then when Kodachrome comes on, she's still, I actually got up and I danced for that one because I was, that one, I dare you to sit down. So I'm dancing with her. In the middle of Kodachrome, she leans over to me and she's like, man, I wish I wore a bra today. Ha, I wish I would have done it. And I'm like, oh, gross. And she's like, oh. So then Paul plays, Paul, I call him, Paul plays Mother and Child Reunion.

which is a song I have heard so many times, but I've never heard it sitting next to my birth mother. And the lyrics were brutal. And I, on this, "Mother and Child is only emotion away," on this very sad and lonely day, like all these, it was, oh, the awful, the heart, and Diane grabs my hand.

And I do it for a second, just, you know, I'm not a dick. I was like, you know, like that. But I took it away, and we're both, like, getting emotional listening to the lyrics, and it's very intense. And then she grabs my hand again, and I'm like, oh, God, I don't want to pull it away. But she's gripping onto it. I'm like, finally, I calmed down. And it's so nice.

It feels so nice. So after the concert, we don't talk on the way home. We're very quiet. And I couldn't think of anything to-- I couldn't think of a joke to say. And I know Diane felt the same way. I had this fear of thinking like, oh, no, are we going to end up being like--

It was nice, that moment of like, "Oh," and hearing that, but now are we like the hand holding, you know, whatever. All right, sorry. So the next day, we're going to a coffee, we're going to get coffee. In the car, Diane says to me, "I want to tell you something, Lauren, that I think maybe you needed to hear. And I think maybe you needed to know that you were a hard baby to give up."

And I never wanted to tell you that because I didn't want you to worry about me. I didn't want you to think it was something awful. I wanted you to know that your birth was this good thing. But I'm wondering if maybe I didn't do any favors by not letting you know that it was the most heartbreaking thing that's ever happened to me, was losing you. And she goes, maybe you needed to know that. And I could have never told, never, ever, ever...

said that that was something I needed to hear, if I would have asked for it, I'd have been like, no, ew, God, too much. It was, it was so profound, and I, well, it did change my life after that. I was so moved by that, but then I also got worried, like, oh, no, are we to become these, like, oh, like, earnest, sort of like, here you are again, Diane, let me tell you my feelings, and, uh,

But thankfully, the last time I saw her, I was picking her up at the baggage claim, and she comes out to the car and she goes, she's like, "Okay, I gotta go get more baggage. "I'll be right back. "Oh, and this time, I mean it." And I'm like, "Oh, thank God." Thank you. That was Lauren Weidman. She's a writer and actor who lives in Los Angeles. Every time Lauren heads back to Indiana for a visit, she sees both of her families, sometimes all together, like at her mother's upcoming 80th birthday. Diane will be there too.

Now, Lauren sent a copy of the story you just heard to Diane to make sure she was okay with it being aired. I want to read a bit of Diane's response. Sweetie, I think it's beautiful. I'm thrilled that somebody has that much to say about me. I must admit that I didn't know at the time how useless I was when Leo was born. I don't think I knew how much to interject myself into your new life. I don't think I knew how much to interject myself into your new life.

I thought I should stay back and wash clothes and keep in the background. Oh, well, we're good now, huh? I think it's great. Thank you so much for being so considerate of my feelings. Love you so much. Lauren is the author of two books, A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body and Miss Fortune, fresh perspectives on having it all from someone who is not okay. To see a picture of Lauren with her son and grandma bubs, visit themoth.org. The mother is only a motion wave.

This next story is by Michelle Oberholzer. She told it in 2015 at our Detroit Story Slum, where we partner with public radio station WDET. Here's Michelle. When I moved to Detroit, I decided to turn myself into a writer. And the beautiful thing about being a writer is that all you have to do is to write, and then you are it.

which is great for me because I studied engineering and that's like the best way to get through college without writing a word. So I was trying to turn myself into a writer and it wasn't going so well in financial sense. So this past fall I took a job working for a company that was going to have me doing property surveys of properties in Detroit that were going into tax foreclosure. And for me it was like a great way to see the city,

to see the front lines of this interesting issue, and I knew I'm going to make some money, and I'm going to have something to write about. And the deal with tax foreclosure in Detroit is if you get behind in your taxes, the city will foreclose, and then you can buy it back for $500. That's what I knew. And we had a little tablet, like an iPad, and they would send us out, and on the thing is a map, and it's filled with records,

red squares and all the red ones are the ones that I need to survey. And there are a lot of them because there's a lot of foreclosures in Detroit. So there I am on my bike up and down the streets taking a picture and marking down the information about the building or not a building. Actually, a lot of them had nothing on them. They're vacant land grown over, hardly a whisper of the house that had been there before, except for maybe some concrete that's grown over. And then, you know, oh, there maybe was a sidewalk or a driveway here.

And those were kind of strange, but nothing too heavy. And then there were the abandoned houses, quite a few of those actually that had broken windows and signs of lives that had been lived there once, maybe not so long ago. Often they had signs of fire damage and there would be tires dumped there and those were pretty sad.

So it was really nice to see all the beautiful homes and I was proud as a Detroiter that we have still so many beautiful neighborhoods. You hear so much bad stuff about Detroit in the news and no, there's so much going on here and I just love to see the gardens and the way they painted their houses and the little kids toys out in the front yard.

and I would take my pictures of those and answer the questions. And the thing about those houses though is that people live in them and when they see a white girl with a piece of technology like entering information they're like, "What's going on?" So they would talk to me and I was glad that they did because I started to learn what they knew and they knew what I knew. They would ask me, "Are you buying my house?" "No, no, no, I'm just doing this because your property is in foreclosure."

And time after time, I mean, they would disregard me with shock. I'm literally delivering this news to many people for the first time, and I'm a girl on a bike. I don't have the tools to help you through this. And I would answer the questions as best I could, which was not very well.

And it was really weighing down on me. So I would go home at night and look it up online and try to find the inevitable questions that I'd have to answer the next day. And I would learn a little bit more. And it got to the point, now I'm giving them my phone number and email address and the website. I'm trying to do something about it. But...

It got to a point where I just, I knew it wasn't enough. And of course, I couldn't make a difference for most of these people. But I thought, maybe I can make a difference for some. And there was one day, I was biking away from this last home that something about it just was the straw that broke my back. And there was a word echoing in my head. And it was radicalized.

And I didn't choose the word, but that's the one that was echoing in my head. And it doesn't mean like I'm going to join Che Guevara in the trenches or anything, but what it meant was I can no longer just talk about this. I can no longer just write about this. I'm going to have to do something. And I didn't know what I was going to do, but I started a fundraiser and was able to raise enough money to give $500 to 11 different families, the starting bid on their houses. Yeah, it was pretty great.

And the way that I chose the families that would receive the money was based on one criteria, which is that they had a tricycle in the front yard. Because those were the homes that to me I thought, if we can save these homes that are not just houses but homes, and not just homes, but the homes of young children, then maybe this community will have a chance. And the auction came. It happens all online. A lot of the people I was working with don't have internet access and

So I was often the one delivering the news and it was horribly nerve-wracking and exciting.

And I was calling people up and telling grown men, "You own that house that you paid a 20-year mortgage on. It's yours again." And they cried. And I told someone else, "You got this house. You know, they had been renting it now. They're first-time homeowners." And they cried, and they called me an angel. And I felt like I have done something bigger than anything I've ever done in my life, and it wasn't the hardest thing. But it didn't work every time.

Two, three of the houses actually got outbid. And that's something that we always knew was a threat. Like maybe there's someone sitting on a pile of money in New York or China and they're like, "Hey, I hear Detroit's coming back. Click, click, click." And not knowing that they're changing the future forever for the people who live in those houses. And one of the women who lost her house was Miss Ruth. And I had to wait till I stopped crying to call Ruth. I was so afraid to tell her.

And she picked up the phone, she said, "Tell me some good news." And I said, "I can't. We lost your house." And she paused and she said, "Well, I guess that means I won't be needing that money. Is there another family that could use that $500?" And I said, "Yes, of course. Of course, there's so many more people." And basically, in the moment that she found out that she was losing her home, she also became one of the biggest donors. And it was so moving.

her grace in handling that situation. And it is proof to me that just like those blighted buildings can bring down the whole block, so too can one strong person bring up the whole community. And it's why I want to be working on this issue, and I want to be more like Ms. Ruth. And it's why, in addition to being a writer, I'm also now an activist. Because all you have to do to be an activist is to take action. Show yourself.

That was Michelle Oberholzer in Detroit, Michigan. Michelle is a housing advocate for United Community Housing Coalition, where she leads the tax foreclosure prevention project. The nonprofit, the Tricycle Collective, is still going strong. After three years of operation, it's raised and donated over $50,000. The money helps Detroit families with young children save or buy the houses they already live in.

Michelle is also a writer and singer. To see some photos from the Tricycle Collective, visit themoth.org. When we return, we'll visit one of the timeless dilemmas of domestic life, kids who desperately, desperately want pets. Also, a story of letting go and bonding during a 30-day silent retreat when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org. You're listening to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jennifer Hickson. We're hearing stories about homes, fitting in, belonging, and this next story about a different sort of family. This is from a slam in New York City. Here is Flora Diaz.

When I was growing up, all I wanted was to discover that I was one of those kids who had some special, magical, amazing connection with an animal. Maybe I would be buried in an avalanche in the Himalayas and a dog would rescue me and it would be traumatic but bonding and we would be inseparable after that or maybe there would be an orca who found my voice really trustworthy. Yeah.

It would get in some trouble and I'd be called upon by the scientists to come help coax it out of trouble with my voice or, you know, a bunch of birds that lost their sense of direction and needed me to guide them south or something like that. And I just knew that I was special and that I would have that connection. I just didn't know which was my soulmate animal until I was in sixth grade when I finally discovered that it was Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly.

I discovered this in science class. We were doing a unit on Mendelian genetics, and we each got a jar of fruit flies that we got to breed for several weeks. And we had to come into class and count how many of them had red eyes and white eyes or no eyes or crooked wings or straight wings and keep it all in this little chart.

And I was so excited about this. I felt like I got, you know, my very own set of pets at school. And I got so into it. And I took it so seriously. And at the end of the unit, our teacher, Mr. Benson, told us all to take our jars outside. And that it was so cold that the fruit flies would die instantly. And then we could move on to astronomy next week. And I was like, what? I couldn't believe. I just felt like this was my... I knew...

Them, I knew their parents, I knew their grandparents, I knew their dominant traits, their recessive. I just felt like we were really intimate at that point. I could not imagine killing them. And nobody else in the class seemed to have any problem with this. They were just getting their jars and heading out to lunch. And I just felt like there was no time to think. I had to stop this atrocity. And I ran around.

telling the other kids that I would take their jars for them, not to worry. And, you know, save themselves the trip, I'll do it for you. So I ended up with six jars of fruit flies. And I didn't know what the hell to do with them, but I knew I had to save them, and this was my calling. And I asked Mr. Benson for some plastic bags, and I lied and told him I was going to take them outside. He gave me plastic bags, and I went down the stairs, like the central stairwell of the high school, or the middle school, sorry.

And I didn't know what to do, but I saw that underneath the stairs there was this little sort of triangle of space. It was dark and there was like a thick layer of dust on the floor and like an old detergent bottle left there by a janitor or something. So I ducked in there with all the jars and I set them up in this sort of half circle in front of me and I opened all the lids and I told them that they were free. And...

I took a piece of a pear out of my paper bag lunch, and I sliced a piece and left it there for them. And I told them I'd come back for them tomorrow. And the next day, I just could barely even sit through my classes. I was so excited for the lunch bell to ring, and I'd come down and check on my little buddies downstairs. And I did, and sure enough, there they were, still kind of hovering around their jars, and nobody had seen them, nobody had noticed. And I gave them a piece of banana, and the next day, a piece of kiwi.

And then it was the weekend, and I went home, and the whole weekend I just was fantasizing about my future with these guys. Like, I was thinking, next week I'm going to step it up. I'm going to teach them some tricks. I'm going to give them some names. And soon enough, people are going to know that I'm, like, the cool fruit fly whisperer of Chicago. And then we were going to be on, like, talk shows. And by that point, they'd be really well trained, and they'd be, like, sitting neatly in a row on my shoulder.

And, like, Letterman would ask us a question, and I would, like, say it to them in the language that only we understood, and then we'd have a little laugh just between us, and then I would, you know, translate for Letterman just so that he wouldn't feel left out, and then... And then everybody would know, and I would just be amazing. So I went to school on Monday, like, just so excited to see them and see how, you know, what had become of them. And I had actually packed an extra clementine in my lunch because I thought they should have their own and not have to share the fruit with me at that point. And, um...

I got to school and there was a tall man wearing an orange hazmat suit greeting me at the door who ushered me into the school with all the other students and there was like a whole team of men in orange hazmat suits with like gas tanks strapped to their back and they told us that there had been a mass infestation of fruit flies in the school cafeteria and the cafeteria was shut down for several days.

I thought I was going to jail. I was so terrified. I had never done anything bad in my life. I had never even had a detention before, and here I was causing havoc. They sent a letter home to all the parents telling us we had to bring packed lunches because there was no cafeteria for several days. I was like, oh my God, I am going to jail. And I thought all the teachers knew. I thought they were all looking at me with these knowing looks and the other students. Ooh, okay. And, um...

So after a few days, nobody said anything to me. And I realized nobody knows it was me. Nobody suspects me. And as the fear subsided, it was replaced with this deep sense of betrayal that these little fuckers

did this to me. I couldn't believe it. All they had to do was stay put. I was giving them a life of luxury. We had big plans and they had to go and get themselves fumigated and get me in, you know, potentially really big trouble. In fact, I didn't get in trouble at all. Mr. Benson got in trouble and they shut down the Fruit Fly program after that at my school. They never did it again.

I went home, and the one thing I would love to say that I learned some big moral about, you know, owning up to my mistakes, and I didn't. I never told a soul. I went home, and I wrote in my diary, honest to God, this is my diary entry from that week, February 18th, 1991, remember, underline, underline, fruit flies, colon, not to be trusted. LAUGHTER

That was Flora Diaz. The great fruit fly debacle took place in Chicago. And in case her science teacher, Mr. Benson, is listening, Flora would like to issue an official apology. Until maybe right now, nobody ever knew that Flora's big heart was the culprit. As for finding the perfect pet, a few years ago, Flora got a bearded dragon lizard. She named him Mr. Circles. She found pet love at last.

Our final story is from John J. Reed. He told many, many stories at our New York City Story Slams and was always a crowd favorite. Here's John at a New York City Grand Slam at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Holy cow, holy cow.

I am sitting cross-legged on a royal blue cushion with my gaze lowered slightly, so I'm looking at a spot on the hardwood floor about three feet ahead of me. I'm surrounded by 40 other people all doing the same because we are five days into a 30-day silent meditation retreat. That means 30 days no talking, computer, cell phone, television, nothing, just us and our minds. And we're in a retreat center in very northern Vermont, 150 miles south of Montreal.

We are practicing the Shambhala tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Now what I love about Shambhala is that their primary tenet holds that at the foundation of all humanity is this: basic goodness. And I just think it's beautiful, you know. And it's really very simple, although it doesn't quite make sense to me because so much of life really does suck. But it's beautiful.

From 7 in the morning until 9 at night, I am sitting meditating on basic goodness. And I got to tell you, sitting with my mind for that period of time, and I need a break. So I'll raise my gaze, look around at my fellow retreatants about whom I know nothing because we can't talk.

But I do know that one guy came down from Montreal because we had a sign-in sheet. And he must be Quebecois because he has an impossibly French name. Something like Jean-Michel Saint-Loup something creme brulee. It's like really crazy.

So I can't take my mind for one more second. I play "Let's Find Frenchie", which is when I look around for the person who has like the slightly French Canadian fashion. I'm doing this on the fifth day when somebody walks up to me, leans over and hands me a note that says "Call Jim" with a number on it. I don't recognize.

And I sit on my cushion for two minutes, I mean seriously, maybe three, trying to think of one person really close to me named Jim. And there just isn't one. There isn't. There isn't. So I get up, I walk out of the Shrine Room, I'm heading to the office thinking, "How do I pantomime?" You know, I don't know, wrong retreating, somebody else. When it occurs to me, my brother Jimmy. You know, you know. So, so...

I make the call and the first words I say in five days, first words I said to any of my three older brothers in over 15 years are these, did mom die? And she had. So I meditate on the plane from Vermont back home to California where Eddie, my tent revival preaching evangelical brother, leads the service which he begins like this verbatim.

Jean Reed was two things. She was a Christian and she was a Republican in that order. And it's like, ugh. And then he goes on to admonish and chastise us for ten minutes and that's the sum total of my mom's funeral. Although he makes a moment to look directly at me and he goes, where do you think mom is? Nirvana? And it's like, jeez, you know.

But before I head to the airport, and I've been on the ground a total of 13 hours, my three brothers form this semicircle around me, and I feel myself regressing to my baby brother toe-headed state. You know, it's like this dense wall of meat is looming over me.

Or a wall of dense meat would be more accurate. And Richie says, Johnny, if you don't change your ways, you're never going to see mom again. And that's when I know they planned this. They want me to be absolutely certain that I understand that our mother has gone to heaven, and if I don't stop being a fag, I won't.

Now, I'm so startled and taken aback that I can't think of anything to say. But when I get on the plane, I'm just overcome with rage. I'm so angry that they think it's okay to say this to me at my mother's funeral. And I'm angry at myself for thinking that just because it's my mother's funeral, they might treat me like a normal human being, like they would treat any other human being on the planet. But then I think, she was my last tie to them. I can leave that garbage 3,000 miles away in California. Nobody ever gets to talk to me like that again.

So I get back to Vermont, sit on my cushion and lower my gaze and for 23 more days I sit in absolute silence. And although nobody knows what's going on, because we can't talk, I feel this great comfort in being surrounded by these people. Now on the 30th day we're allowed to start talking again.

And so we make these ad hoc circles in the shrine room and I'm sitting with six other people and this woman across from me says, "Hey, what happened to you? You like disappeared." And I said, "Yeah, my mom passed away and I flew to California for her funeral." Silence. Until the guy on my immediate left leans in, makes eye contact with me and he says, "Congratulations."

Now the temperature in the room drops and I am making eye contact with him so I can see that he's starting to panic. You know, he knows something, something just went wrong, but he doesn't know what. And that's when I get it. I found Frenchie, you know. And I know like that he meant to say condolences, you know.

But I have got to tell you that this guy, who absolutely has no command of the English language, risked saying something at that intense moment. It just went right to my heart. I mean, it was so touching. But when I turned from him to the other people in the circle,

They are horrified. They're horrified, and they're horrified for me. They're concerned for me. They're wondering, how am I going to take this absurd thing this man just said to me? And their reaction is in such stark contrast to my brother's that I just can't help it, and I burst out laughing, you know? Inappropriate. Inappropriate.

wrong for the shrine room. You don't do that in the shrine room. But I can't help it. I can't get it under control. It keeps coming and coming and coming. And then tears start flowing. And then they're not so much horrified. It's just like really, really confused. Because they have no idea why this is so funny to me. But one by one, they start laughing. And then we're all laughing. And then everybody but Frenchie, who has no idea what the hell is going on. You know?

And then I look in his eyes and I see he's frightened. And then I realize he thinks we're laughing at him. And I don't want him to feel that. I don't want him to feel that. But I can't talk because I'm laughing too loud and I don't fucking speak French and his English sucks so I can't do anything so I push him off his cushion. And I don't know why. I don't know why. But he's lying there. He's lying there on the floor and he starts laughing.

And so I hoist him back up onto his cushion, and then there are seven of us all laughing. We're all in on the joke. Seven complete strangers who are just like ridiculously intimate after these 30 days. And we're laughing and laughing and laughing, and I think, oh my God, I get it. I totally get it. I understand on a level I never thought I would that at the foundation of all humanity is basic goodness. Thank you. Thank you.

That was John J. Reid. He was indeed a great believer in common goodness. The storytelling community in New York City was heartbroken when we learned that he passed away from heart failure at just 53 years of age. For 20 years, John was the director of client services at Friends Indeed, the crisis center for life-threatening illness, a job that suited his incredibly generous and open-hearted way of being and of listening. He often told heartbreaking stories, and his emotions were always close to the surface.

On the other side, he had a gorgeous baritone laugh, and he was not afraid to use it. He was greatly loved in this world by me and so many others and will be missed. That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from the moth. ♪

Your host this hour was Jennifer Hickson. Jennifer also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moss directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Janess, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Lou Lee. Moss Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Ben Harper, Paul Simon, RJD2, Pokey Lafarge, and Tom McDermott.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced 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 your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.