The Moth Radio Hour: When We Were Young
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To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon.

From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Meg Bowles. We all have childhood memories, some fond, some painful. Some childhoods are full of dreams and wishes, while others are more focused on survival. In this hour, we bring you three stories. From a small town in Texas to upstate New York to the southeast of England, we'll hear how different and yet how similar the experience of growing up can be.

Our first story comes from Safraz Manzoor. He shared it live on stage at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. Here's Safraz Manzoor live at the Moth. So there were no photographs of my parents' wedding day in the house when I was growing up.

I grew up in a town called Luton just outside of London in the 1980s and my parents were Pakistani Muslims and they'd had an arranged marriage and apparently it had been such an uneventful day that nobody could remember the day, the week, the month or even the year that it happened. Now my parents were many things but the one thing they definitely weren't was in love and

The word love was never used in our house. It was completely taboo. You could almost say that love was a four-letter word. And so I was never told, I love you, before I went to bed. Nobody told me, I love you, before I went to school. And my parents never said, I love you, to each other. And they made out that this was a really good thing, because their argument was that white people fell in love, got married, and then got divorced. Pakistanis...

never loved the people they married, but we stuck with them forever. So my parents thought it was their duty to sort of keep me away from the idea of love and any kind of intimacy. And one way they did this was by making sure that I had a haircut where it was short at the top and long at the back, which was a bit of a girl repellent. It also suggested that Michael Bolton was some kind of style icon rather than a terrifying warning.

They also kept me away from any kind of intimacy on TV. So if two people were kissing or even looked like they were going to kiss on TV, I had to run over and turn the TV off because there was no way I could watch that in front of them. Now, as much as they tried to protect me, the one place they could not police was the radio. And so pop music became the place where I learned about love.

And the people who taught me about love were people like Lionel Richie, Motown, Foreigner. And all these people were saying that love was amazing. They were saying, "You should really go for it." And it was weird because my parents were saying the exact opposite. Now, the most important song during my teenage years was by the Pet Shop Boys. And it was a song called "Love Comes Quickly." And the chorus was, "Love comes quickly. No matter what you do, you can't stop falling."

I don't know about you, but that sounds absolutely terrifying because what that suggests is that love is like an infection. It's like some kind of disease and it doesn't matter what you do, you're not going to be able to stop falling or catching it. Now, my family, I had an older brother and an older sister and a younger sister, and they were a little bit more traditional than me, but I was always a bit of an outsider. I was a bit of a dreamer.

I guess I had three dreams really. I wanted to get out of Luton, I wanted to do an interesting job, and I wanted to marry somebody who wasn't already a relative. And none of those things seemed entirely possible. But as I got into my 20s and 30s, I managed to get out of Luton. I did do an interesting job.

But the wedding and the love and the marriage thing, that still seemed completely elusive. But by now, I had moved on. I'd evolved from Lionel Richie to Bruce Springsteen. And Bruce Springsteen became the person who I went to for all my wisdom. Now, there's a song you'll know, Born to Run. And in Born to Run, he says this line where he says, I want to know if love is wild. I want to know if love is real. And that was a really important question to me. Is love real for somebody like me?

There was also another line in that song, which was, he says to Wendy, we live with the sadness and I love you with all the madness in my soul. I love you with all the madness in my soul. I was like, I want to meet someone that I could feel this way about, who I could say this about. And something made me think that this was not something that I was going to get from an arranged marriage. Now, my mum had started to gently hint that

that it was time for me to have an arranged marriage. When I say gently hint, she went on a hunger strike and I would come home and she'd be on the phone and she'd be talking to the parents of girls that she wanted to marry me off to and she'd be like, "Yeah, he's 5'10", "No, he's not a taxi driver." I'd be like, "Mum, what the hell are you doing?" And she'd be like, "I'm doing my duty." So we got to 2008

and I'm just about turning, almost turning 37, and I'm at the Hay Book Festival, which is this big book festival on the border of England and Wales, and I'm there for a week doing some work, and then it gets to the last day of the festival. It's a Sunday. It's the first Sunday of June, and I'm in a taxi on my way to the train station, and it's a really hot day, and I'm going to miss the train, so I'm getting out of the train, I'm getting out of the taxi, I'm running with a suitcase, I run along the platform, the doors are about to close, and I get in.

I plonk myself down, I look up and sitting opposite me is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She's got blonde hair, she's got wild green eyes, she's reading a copy of Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gatesgall. And I'm looking at her and I'm thinking, who gets to be your friend? Who gets to know you? Because like, this is not usual luck for me. So...

I'm not the sort of person that talks to strangers, so I didn't do anything. I just let the train carry on. But then something inside me just kept saying, if you don't start a conversation, you're going to regret this. So I was like, what do I do? And then I noticed that she had a cloth bag which said, Hay Festival. That was my opening. I said, have you been to Hay? She said, yes. So then we started talking and

She told me her name was Bridget, she's a speech and language therapist, she works with kids with autism. And as the train rolled on, we talked about life and holidays and family and what was missing from our lives. I was really enjoying the conversation, but I was also getting really, really stressed because this train was rumbling on its way to London and then it was going to end. And I was like, I don't want this to be an anecdote. I don't want it to be just this story that I told people afterwards.

So what do I do? So I thought, well, I don't want to be one of these people that imposes on somebody else. So as the train went towards the end, I said, look, I'd really like to see you again, but I totally understand if you don't want to feel that way about me. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you my phone number, but I'm not going to take yours. And I don't even know your second name. So there's no way we're ever going to hear from each other again unless you contact me. So then I went home and stared at my phone. LAUGHTER

And then the next day I stayed at my friend's. And the next day I stayed at my friend's. And that, she sent me a text saying she'd had a really nice time. She'd like to meet up again. So on the Saturday we went for a date at Tate Modern and that led to a couple more dates. That led to more dates. We ended up in a relationship. And I was like, this is amazing. This is what Lionel Richie was singing about. Finally, I had the answer to Foreigner's question from their 1986 hit, I Wanna Know What Love Is.

So I go back home to my mum and she is not in a good way. She's getting more and more worried about the fact that I'm still not with anyone. And she's like, it's my duty to see you married. There's nobody's going to take care of you. What are you doing? And I'm like, I know something you don't. So I thought, sod it. I'm going to tell her. I just said, look, I have actually met someone.

And when you say that, you can't just leave it like that. So I had to give her some more information. I was like, oh my God, what am I going to do? So she works with children. She's really good with her parents. She knows some Muslims. And then I sort of threw in that she was blonde and Christian, but I hope she didn't notice that. So that evening, I ring home just to see how it had all gone. And it turns out it had gone really badly because my mom is not answering the phone.

And she's like, you have absolutely, totally betrayed everything that I believed about you. And if you're going to have this relationship with this girl, you're not going to have a relationship with us. You've got to choose. And this is difficult. I'm meeting somebody who I absolutely love, who makes me happier than I've ever been. But my family are saying, you've got to choose. So what do I do? So I do what I always do in situations like this. I turn to Bruce Springsteen. And...

In "Prove It All Night" from the album "Darkness on the Edge of Town" he has a line where he says, "If dreams came true, well, wouldn't that be nice? But this ain't no dream we're living through tonight. If you want it, you take it and you pay the price." It's profound, isn't it? "If you want it, you take it, you pay the price." And I thought, maybe that's what life's about. Maybe in the end you take the things you want and you pay the price and maybe that's what maturity is.

So we went on holiday to Rome and that's not me and my mum, it's me and Bridget. And we have dinner and then it's a really full moon and the stars are shining and it's Rome. And I just out of nowhere say to Bridget, do you think we should get married? She said, let's do it. So we returned to Britain engaged and I ring my family and I tell them the good news.

And they say, "Well, that's great, but don't expect us at the wedding. We're not going to come. If you're going to choose her, go alone." So we set the wedding date for the 21st of August. And it's a weird thing because we were trying to do the seating plan and all of Bridget's family are on the top table, but there's nobody from my side. But you make your choices.

So we're trying to, we're setting it all up and I'm sort of steeling myself for the happy day. And on the 20th of August, the day before I'm supposed to get married, I get a phone call and it's my younger sister.

I haven't spoken to my younger sister since all this argument stuff had been happening. So I was a bit surprised to hear from her. And she said, "How are you doing?" I said, "I'm not great. How are you?" And she said, "I'm actually not that great either." I said, "What's been happening?" And she said, "Well, I go to work from Luton to London every morning, and by the time I get to the work, I've got tears streaking down my face, and my boss is wondering why I've got mascara running and whether I'm on the tip of having an emotional breakdown." And I said, "What's going on?" And she said, "Well, I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen."

Because it's one of the things I did well by having a younger sister. I got her into Springsteen. And so she'd been listening to the album Tunnel of Love. And there's a song on Tunnel of Love called Walk Like a Man, which is about getting married. And there's a line in it where he says, Would they ever look so happy again, the handsome groom and his bride, as they step into that long black limousine for their mystery ride? It's about somebody getting married. And she said, The reason I'm crying is that every morning I listen to that song and I think...

I want to see my brother as that handsome groom. And I said, well, what does that mean? And she said, well, you know, the family have decided that we're not going to turn up to the wedding, but I'm going to go. You're going to see me. Don't have anybody else, but I'm going to be at your wedding. So the next day, it's the 21st of August. I wake up, I put my suit on, I put a flower in, I get to the Islington Town Hall where we're supposed to be getting married. And I see a car pull up. And out of the car is my sister. But she's also brought my mum.

My older brother and older sister still didn't turn up. But I was really moved by the fact that my mum was able to transcend and overcome some of her concerns to be there for my big day. So the following year, my wife gives birth to our daughter, Leila. And a couple of years later, we have a little boy, Ezra. And the great thing about having kids is you get to tell a new story. So in our house, there are photographs of our wedding day.

and I do tell my kids I love them. And kids being what they are, they love me reading books to them. But even more than reading books, my daughter Layla loves me telling her stories. And her favourite story is a story of how Mummy and Daddy met. And the fact that if I had not met Bridget on that train, those two children would not exist. And as a parent, you have lots of dreams for your children.

if I have one dream for my kids, it's for them to grow up believing that love is not a four-letter word, that love is wild, and yes, love is real. Thank you. Safraz Manzoor is a journalist, author, and broadcaster. His memoir, Greetings from Burry Park, was recently adapted into a movie entitled Blinded by the Light, about a boy growing up in a working-class British-Pakistani Muslim family whose life is transformed by the music of Bruce Springsteen. ♪ So much that you want ♪

Coming up, a neighbor, a sandwich, and a discovery in Costco 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 Meg Bowles. Our next story about growing up comes from Hoan Noh Usadi. Hoan was born in Saigon in southern Vietnam, but grew up in an orchard in the Mekong Delta, where her family was exiled after the war. When she was 11, the family escaped Vietnam as part of the mass exodus of boat refugees and settled in Port Arthur, Texas in 1984. She shared her story at the Paramount Theater in Austin. Thank you.

Here's Juan Noyusade, live at the Mott. We had just arrived in America, this small town in southeast Texas, just one hour drive from here, called Port Arthur. It was 1984 and I was 12 years old. My family and I were immigrants from Vietnam. We were boat refugees. We moved into this rental house that belonged to our landlord, who lived just next door across the yard.

Right after we moved in, before we even finished unpacking, my father said our whole family, the seven of us, me, my parents, my two older sisters, my two older teenage brothers, should go over and introduce ourselves. We walked across the yard and saw a landlord out on his back porch. He was this heavyset, rough-looking older man.

He was sitting in a wheelchair, puffing on a cigarette while watching us. He did not look happy. My father had warned us our landlord might be upset. My parents had been trying for weeks to find a place for our family to live with a very limited budget. And in the end, they had fudged the number of people in our family. Our landlord had expected only five, not seven of us.

When we got closer, he abruptly turned away from us and shouted something through the screen door into his house. I had no idea what he said. His thick Texas straw and this heavy, smokeless voice was nothing like the English I had been learning in a refugee camp just a few weeks earlier. The screen door opened and this really friendly woman stepped out. She didn't seem upset at all and was really talkative.

She introduced herself as Loretta and her husband as Walter. Walter with an L. I had been learning English for only a few months. I could barely make out that tiny L sound wedged in the middle of the name Walter. I was pretty sure my parents didn't even hear it. So the rest of us copied my father and called our landlord Mr. Water. Mr. because it was unthinkable for any of us to refer to an adult without a title.

And as for Loretta, her name was just too hard. So we called her Mrs. Water. Neither of them corrected us. After we moved in, I was somehow the go-between our two families. My job was to deliver rent and home repair questions. I didn't mind the rent deliveries because I didn't have to say very much. But I dreaded the home repair questions. I had to use my limited English to talk to Mr. Water.

I couldn't understand a lot of what he said. And to be honest, Mr. Water terrified me. Everything about him scared me. And the more scared I got, the more my English sounded like Vietnamese with a lot of hand-waving mixed in. I kept thinking he was going to lose it. He was going to explode like that time he was in a backyard screaming at my brothers and me.

My older brother had dumped leftover hot charcoal from a barbecue in different parts of our yard to kill fire ants. Mr. Water yelled that in America, you don't burn grass, you cut it. I thought, why so much yelling? It's just grass. It will grow back. Growing up in Vietnam, I didn't even know what a lawn was. I thought of grass only as weeds. In Vietnamese, grass and weeds are called the same thing.

I used to wonder why people in America, this land of riches and wealth, would choose to live in homes surrounded by weeds. But I got why Mr. Water was upset. I mean, our yard looked like some kind of lunar landscape, all these black patches. But his anger just seemed so out of proportion. I just thought he hated us. I didn't know if his feelings would ever change or if we could ever feel at home in our new home.

And in our new home, my parents decided to open a family business, a Vietnamese Banh Mi Sandwich Shop. A Banh Mi Sandwich is a French baguette with a thin crispy crust. Inside is spread with pate, homemade mayonnaise, filled with roasted meat, and topped with all kinds of vegetables.

pickled carrots, daikons, slices of cucumber, cilantro, fresh chili peppers, and a few dashes of soy sauce. It's really delicious. But back then in our small town, few people had ever heard of, much less tasted, a banh mi. But somehow, my father was convinced that he was going to give McDonald's a run for his money. He named the sandwich shop "Budget Sandwiches."

He had seen there were budgets on the side of some trucks and thought it would make a great name for a food place. We all thought it was a great idea too. After the shop opened, my parents worked 12 hours a day, six and a half days a week. My siblings and I all helped out. After school, I often came to the shop to stay with my father, taking over my mother's shift so she could go home and rest a little.

because at night there was still a lot more work to do at home. But despite these long hours, we barely scraped by. As it turned out, the McDonald's down the street had nothing to fear. But it came this beautiful spring afternoon. I was at the shop doing homework when the phone rang. My father picked it up. Right away I could tell he was really excited. I heard my father repeat, asking in English if the customer wanted 50 banh mi.

50! This was the biggest order we had ever had. But the fact that the order came from a customer who spoke English was even more amazing. Until then, most of our customers had come from the Vietnamese community. It looks like the American public has started to discover banh mi. This was something my father has always hoped for. It felt like times were changing. Right away, we went to work. My father joked that McDonald's had no idea what was about to come.

Finally, the sandwiches were done. We couldn't wait to see who this customer was. But then half an hour passed, and then an hour, and then more time, and no one showed up. I opened my notebook and started doing homework again when I saw the date in the margin. April 1st. April Fool's. My heart sank.

I didn't know where to begin explaining to my father this holiday that I didn't understand myself. More than that, I didn't know if this heartless prank might just finally crush his spirit. The spirit that had been tested time and time again in a life filled with turbulence. In Vietnam, my father had been imprisoned by French forces occupying Vietnam for taking part in the resistance.

Then later under communism, he had survived multiple attempts on his life before he finally organized our family's dangerous escape inside a small fishing boat across the South China Sea. In all these desperate situations, somehow he stayed optimistic. It was this same optimism that made him open the sandwich shop. My siblings and I understood that the sandwich shop was my parents' last big gamble.

It was a chance for him and my mother to experience a little bit of the American dream instead of just living in the service of that dream for their children. When I explained April Fool's to my father, he didn't say anything. He just stayed quiet for a long time. But I could tell he was disappointed. I could see disappointment in his eyes. We never found out who placed the order, but from the incident, we learned to take down contact information any time an order came over the phone.

And with each setback, our footing in America did become a little more steady. We learned to decorate to match the festivities of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We learned to close our shop a little earlier, on a certain Sunday in the dead of winter, because everyone was at home watching some football game on TV. Even though our shop never did much better, it did provide us with a living, putting me and my siblings through school.

And then one by one, my siblings started leaving home for college or for their jobs. Seven years after we moved into Mr. Walter's house, I was the only one left at home with my parents. By then, my English had improved a lot to where I could easily pronounce the L in Walter. But we never stopped calling our landlord Mr. and Mrs. Walter because it was familiar and because it was who they were to us. And one day, I was again delivering rent.

I was a senior in high school and would soon also leave home for college. Mr. Waters said he had something to tell my parents, but he wouldn't tell just me. Later when I came back with my parents, I saw that Mrs. Waters had set up this nice pitcher of pink lemonade with five glasses on a small table on the back porch. This was the first time our families had sat down for something to drink. After we had taken a sip of the lemonade, Mr. Waters started to speak.

speaking really slowly, something I had never witnessed. He told us that he had recently found out that he was very sick. His doctor wouldn't say how much time he had left, but he suspected it wasn't very long. He said he wanted his wife to be near good folks after he passed. So he offered to sell my parents the house we had been living in, his rental house,

for what he had paid for it, minus all the rent my parents had paid him over the years. My parents were stunned and saddened. But they were especially sad because they couldn't grant Mr. Walter his wish. It had always been their plan to retire to Houston to be near my oldest sister and her family when I finished high school. In fact, they had already been trying to find a buyer for the shop.

Mr. Water died a few months later, and sometime after the funeral, my mom asked me to go check on Mrs. Water. I remember waiting by the screen door. Only at that time, I had no rent payment or home repair questions to ask. When Mrs. Water saw me, she hugged me for a long time, then invited me to come inside. I saw Mr. Water's wheelchair folded and leaned against the wall. Mrs. Water talked about her life without her husband and how lonely she felt.

She asked about me and my siblings. She said Mr. Water might have yelled at us sometimes, but he always thought we were good kids. He missed my brothers when they moved away to college. I never would have guessed that. As I left, I couldn't help thinking that after all these years, the only thing that had really changed was our understanding of each other. It's been almost 30 years since I left our small Texas town.

Recently, I found myself thinking back to this time when I was in a Costco. I was in line to buy a hot dog when I looked up at the big menu board overhead and noticed a new item: a salad topped with black beans and banh mi ingredients. A really strange combination for a salad. But wow, banh mi had made it into Costco.

I thought of my parents and of Mr. and Mrs. Water. It occurred to me that appreciation of anything unfamiliar, of a neighbor, of a sandwich, requires time and an open mind. Juan Noy Usati is a writer and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, to name a few.

Juan told me that it took a while for her parents to find a buyer for the sandwich shop, but in the end, they did end up moving the summer after she started college.

We sat down with Juan after she shared her story and asked if she'd ever been back to Port Arthur, Texas. We had been back to Port Arthur, and we did come by and say hello to Mrs. Water. And she's doing very well. She recognized us. She is as friendly and as brightly as ever. And yeah, my brothers and I, every time we're nearby Port Arthur, we always try to make a point to go and knock on her door. And it's...

Everything's the same, but in a way everything is very different. So it's always touching. She was a first introduction to the U.S., and now that we've grown more adjusted, and when we see her, all the feelings of this home that was new to us, but now it is really a home. All of that comes back.

You can find out more about Juan Noyusade and find a link to her memoir entitled Of Monkey Bridges and Banh Me Sandwiches by visiting our website, themoth.org. And while you're there, why not pitch us your story? You can find all the information for how to leave your two-minute pitch right on our site. We listen to all the pitches that come in. ♪

When I was in kindergarten, my school decided to have an early Father's Day field day. They had us make little invitations out of folders, and I gave mine a tie. I was so proud of it. I rushed home to show my dad, and I remember he looked at it and said, I'm a busy commander of a hospital. I don't have time to come play with you and your friends at school. I was crushed, but I didn't let him know it because I knew that he was really busy.

On the day of the event, there was actually quite a few kids whose fathers weren't able to come. It wouldn't have been a big deal, but the teachers had set up all the activities to be one adult and one child. They had a couple volunteers, but not enough for everyone. So when they weren't able to play with us, they had us sit in the hangout corner and eat ice cream until someone was free.

I remember watching this kid eat his ice cream with his fingers and being super grossed out when he gasped suddenly. A big van came pulling up across the field. Twelve soldiers in uniform jumped out, and my dad stepped out as the last one with these really awesome aviators. One of the soldiers went over and explained to the teachers who they were and that they were there to help the soldiers out.

were actually able to play and take the place of the volunteers that couldn't help. My father came over to me and picked me up and apologized for being late. I remember I yelled, you said you couldn't come. And he looked at me and smiled and said, of course I was going to come. I never said that. I've

I found out a couple of things later. My dad knew at this point that he had leukemia, and by that time next year, he actually had passed on. I also found out that most of those soldiers were parents of kids that were there, and there was a few soldiers who were parents but were stationed far away from their family. This left a very big impact on me. As a teacher, I tried my best to create big moments for my students to remember, and it's one of my only memories of my dad, and I'm so grateful that he did it in such a big and grand way. Thank you.

Remember, you can pitch us at themoth.org, where you'll also find advice for how to craft your pitch. For instance, a pitch is generally more successful if you just tell it rather than read something that's been perfectly crafted and written. Also, don't tell us what your story is about. Just jump in and tell it to us. Often people will say things like...

This is the story of how I learned this or that life lesson. I always say start in the action of the story you want to tell. Really grab our attention out of the gate. Stories don't always have to have a moral or a life lesson. Sometimes stories are just like a roller coaster taking you on an adventure to nowhere in particular.

And lastly, my personal pet peeve, no cliffhangers. Basically, we just want you to tell us the story. If it's compelling or hilarious or amazing, you don't need any fancy tricks to get our attention. A good story will always stand out. Coming up, religion, heartache, and AOL Instant Messenger 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. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles, and our last story comes from Max Garcia-Conover. He shared it at an evening we produced at the Wilbur Theater in Boston in partnership with WGBH. Here's Max Garcia-Conover, live at the Moth.

So when I was six years old, my family moved to a small town in western New York. And we moved there because my parents found this little house that they could afford that was next to these beautiful woods. And just down the street from that house was the local church, which was very popular. Every Sunday we'd watch as what looked like the entire town would show up there. And then eventually, even though my family wasn't

really a family that went to church, eventually we started going too, which I mostly liked. The chapel was cozy and warm and the pastor seemed nice and I always sat next to my dad and we'd just spend the whole sermon kind of drawing these little cartoons. The only thing I didn't like about church was that halfway through each service all the little kids had to go downstairs for Sunday school and I didn't know any of the other kids and I didn't

make friends easily, and so I spent most of that time alone just sort of pretending I was too interested in coloring pictures of Jesus to talk to anybody. So when the Sunday school teacher quit and my mom volunteered to replace her, I was thrilled and also surprised.

My mom was a labor lawyer from a Catholic Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, and she didn't look or behave like any of the other moms at this small-town Methodist church. But that first week with her as the teacher was awesome. She was fun and cool, and I felt like the luckiest kid there. And then the next week, she got fired.

And when she asked why, the youth pastor told her that she'd given the wrong answer to a question. A kid had raised his hand and asked, where does God live? And her answer was, God lives everywhere. God lives out in the lake and in the trees and in this room and in you, everywhere. The youth pastor told her, this is a Methodist church. We don't believe God lives everywhere. You should have told the kids that he lives up in the skies.

And after I found out what had happened, I felt like my family had been discovered, that the town had realized that we didn't really belong, and I was a little bit heartbroken by that. And when my mom noticed how disappointed I was, she suggested that we start our own Sunday school.

Just the two of us down in the woods behind our house, and so that's what we did. The next Sunday she woke me up and instead of walking toward the church, we walked in the other direction, past our barn and through the field where the grass got taller and taller and then turned to sumac. And we picked our way through rose thorns and stumbled through spider webs until we got down to where the underbrush opened up and the trees towered, these giant, oval

old oaks and maples, and we kept walking farther and farther and farther all the way down through to this creek. And at the creek, we sat and we prayed, which to my mom meant reading Mary Oliver poems. Every Sunday morning, we took that same walk down to the creek, and every Sunday, the great blue heron that lived down there would take off from the same place with the same reluctance.

We'd sit and read poems or write stories, or sometimes we'd just try to be still enough for the deer to come out. And no matter what we were doing, I had the constant feeling that it was important and serious work. And so we didn't go back to that church down the street. I didn't even really think about that church very much, not for several years, not until...

I was 14 years old when suddenly and disastrously I fell in love with a girl in my class. She and I had been in school together since we were little kids but we never really interacted there and I don't know why I felt so strongly so quickly but I did

And I knew that she sometimes went to that church down the street, so every Sunday I started walking over. And if she was there, I'd sit for the whole sermon and take notes. And if she wasn't, I'd play pool in the basement with my best friend, Paul. Paul and I were the only two teenagers who regularly went to that church without our parents. And I think we went in part because that was the only pool table we had access to. And in part because we were 14-year-old boys and we thought we were going to hell.

But mostly I went because I thought I might see her there outside of school and we might strike up a conversation. And I did see her, but we never ever talked. I was still too shy and too afraid of everyone. And this went on for months and months until finally I caught a little break, not at church, but in English class when I wrote a short story.

And then after school that day she sent me a message on AOL Instant Messenger to tell me that she liked it. And so I wrote another one and another one and like a dozen more and I sent each one to her under the guise of peer editing.

She liked to write stories too and poems or she'd be drawing or singing or dancing. She just always seemed to be making things and she seemed to love and understand art and beauty in a way I had no idea anybody could, in a way I don't think most people ever come close to. She was teeming with that love. She was far away and right down the street. And then one day, miraculously, she was at my house.

We'd been talking every day on instant messenger, but in person we still didn't really talk at all, so I don't know how I had the nerve to ask her to come over, but I did, and she was there, and it was just the two of us, and as always, I couldn't think of anything to say. So I asked if she wanted to go for a walk down through the woods. This was late spring in western New York, when everything is green and lush, and every afternoon the light is hazy and honeyed and warm.

She and I took that same walk my mom and I had taken so many times past our barn and through the field and the bushes and the trees all the way down through to the creek. And it was there at the creek where she turned to me and she looked at me and she told me that I always made her feel super awkward. And she was sorry, but she only wanted to be friends. And so just like that, without ever getting to date this girl that I was in love with,

I got dumped. After her parents came to pick her up, I took off running. I went farther into those woods than I'd ever been, so far that I ended up at the highway, which I crossed. And then I went down through the town cemetery and the town golf course and all the way into the center of town. And in the center of town, I just happened to run into my best friend, Paul. And I was so relieved to see him, but I couldn't bring myself to tell him what had happened.

I was certain that it was both a great love story and completely pathetic. Afterward, for months, I was embarrassed and heart sick and on instant messenger I was always away. And my away messages were often dashboard confessional lyrics.

And I think I could tell you that that was the end of the story. And I think if I did tell you that, that would be kind of like saying that God lives up in the sky. And the truth is, the story really didn't end there, although I was sure that it had. A couple years later, when she and I were both juniors in high school, we got cast as husband and wife in the school play. We were Mr. and Mrs. Keller in the very serious drama, "The Miracle Worker."

The story of how Helen Keller learned to read and write. And all of a sudden I didn't need to think of anything to say to her anymore. It was all just written out for me. And I don't know if that's why, but even in between scenes she and I found we could talk easily and joke easily. And we laughed a lot, like more than I'd ever laughed with anybody.

In the play, I was supposed to be Helen Keller's father, this stern, sad, southern man. And I really wanted to do a good job, but at rehearsal, all I thought about was talking with her and laughing with her. There was this one moment where she and I were laughing so hard, we were just crying. And then the lights came up and the scene started, and I had to slam my fist on the dining room table and shout, "Dammit, Katie! She can't see!"

That's the southern accent that I prepared for the role. And so the play was bad. But by the end of it, she and I were headed out on our first date. We went to Applebee's. It was early winter in western New York when everything is gray.

The slush on the ground was gray. The strip mall was gray. The sky was low and gray. And to me, on that night, it all felt endless. And it seemed entirely possible that God lives everywhere.

These days, Max Garcia Conover lives in a small town in Maine. He is a songwriter and splits his time between writing, touring, and teaching. He says his songs are both personal and political. And when he performs, he'll often tell stories. You can see a picture of Max and find out more about his music on our website, themoth.org.

Max's latest album is called Among Horses 3. You're listening to a track from it now called Crow Song. Slate rockin', teamin' with Storm Carry on bird, caught in the hearth And killed by collision with Dorn Feathers all over the floor I'll be home where I go I'll be home wherever I go I'll be home where I go someday

You can find and share all the stories you heard in this hour on our website. You can also check out the calendar and see if we're producing a main stage or slam event in your area. That's on our website, themoth.org. And I saw the killers in costume And I saw their satellites burn And I saw them measure their money And whether they look like the people they hurt

That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us again next time for the Moth Radio Hour. I'll be home wherever I go. I'll be home wherever I go someday.

Your host this hour was Meg Bowles. Meg also directed the stories in the show. The rest of the Moss Directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin-Janess, and Jennifer Hickson. Production support from Emily Couch. Moss Stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our pitch came in from Donovan Hall in Oakland, California.

Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Bruce Springsteen, Henry Kaiser and David Lindley, and Max Garcia Conover.

You can find links to all the music we use at our website. 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 us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.