Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
184 Plays3 years ago
Issue 2 of the audio magazine "Summer" is now available on the public feed!
Essays from Jake Gronsky, Matthew Denis, Carrie Hagen, and Krystina Wales, as well as three original poems by Jorah LaFleur.
Recommended
Transcript
Call for Submissions: Issue Three
00:00:01
Speaker
Before we dive into this episode of the podcast, not an interview this week, oh boy, what are we gonna do? I wanna remind you that the submission deadline for issue three of the audio magazine has been extended to December 31st. The theme is heroes. Essays must be no more than 2,000 words. Bear in mind it's an audio essay. Think about that. Pay attention to how the words roll out of your mouth. Think simple, shorter sentences.
00:00:30
Speaker
tighter words, you get the idea. Email submissions with heroes in the subject line, the creative non-fiction podcast at gmail.com. And by the way, I pay writers to dig it and to give you a sense of what the audio magazine can be. Well, stay tuned.
Podcast and Patreon Strategy
00:00:55
Speaker
Alright, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? I polled the gracious people over at Patreon page recently. That's patreon.com slash cnfpod.
00:01:11
Speaker
about whether or not to make the audio magazine public or keep it exclusive. The issue one was public. Issue two, I dialed it in. I made it just for the Patreon community. Like I said, first was public. It was downloaded close to 800 times, which is amazing. And that's 800 people who got to consume the work of the writers and see what we're up to with regard to that.
00:01:38
Speaker
And don't we just want our work to be read and seen, in this case, heard? Then I made issue two exclusive to Patreon because it's a lot of work and I wanted to create some degree of tension and like a magazine subscription like, oh, okay, if I'm going to consume this original work, then I'm going to have to go to the newsstand and buy it or subscribe to a magazine. You'd get the drill.
00:02:03
Speaker
And for this kind of work, you'd need to pay just $2 a month, ideally for the year, so you'd be helping pay for the two issues that I subsequently put out every year so far. Anyway, as a result, there was a little
00:02:20
Speaker
Like a little bump in Patreon membership, but then only about 16 people got to listen to Issue 2 versus, say, 800. Or more, because the show's been steadily growing over the year. Who knows, maybe Issue 2 would have been closer to 1,000. And since I pay writers, I figure the best advertisement, maybe, is to just put it in the public feed.
00:02:41
Speaker
You know, free for all. I don't know if it should expire after a certain amount of time, after a few months, or it expires when the next issue goes live. I don't know. Those are little things I can tinker with. Or just keep it free indefinitely. I don't know. But it's, like I said, it's kind of an advertisement as a beacon of this place where you can go and find this kind of work.
00:03:02
Speaker
In the end, maybe it'll draw more people in and be like, oh, okay, I can get on board with supporting this magazine, but also the interviews that are always coming out on a weekly basis and are always free for all. Free but not cheap. You've heard me say that before.
00:03:19
Speaker
And so, like I said, I polled the Patreon audience because I didn't want to violate their trust. And 100% of the voters said to make it public so we could reach the biggest possible audience. Like I said, I was afraid I'd be violating some degree of trust with them because the Patreon signed up for that exclusive access to that thing, among other things.
00:03:41
Speaker
The deal will be that if I make the magazine public, I'll figure out some other crafty exclusives, like something similar to what I did for my Hippo Camp Talk, but shorter, where I might tease out, let's say, a bunch of writers on voice, where I kind of riff in, I come in and narrate, and a bunch of tapes, so it gives you a little, a pill of a particular theme with multiple voices, which is kind of fun.
00:04:07
Speaker
or have AWP-style panels with a few writers where I'd moderate but more or less turn them loose. You know the drill. So with all that said, I suspect that maybe some people will stop being members but maybe several more will hear the work in the magazine and want to contribute and consider becoming members themselves to help keep it afloat and say they published an audio essay that can boost their body of work.
Preview of Issue Two Content
00:04:31
Speaker
I mean this is legit shit, man.
00:04:34
Speaker
So as the temperature is dropping in the northern hemisphere, heating up in the south of the equator, we're going to revisit summer, the theme of issue two of the audio magazine on this the day after Thanksgiving. Ooh, it's cold out there.
00:04:50
Speaker
We have essays from Jake Gronsky, Matthew Dennis, Carrie Hagan, and Christina Wales, as well as three original poems from Eugene-based poet, Jora LaFleur. If you dig what we've put together, consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash cnfpod to help put money in the pockets of writers and keep the podcast sounding sharp for the entire community.
00:05:18
Speaker
share and keep the conversation going on social media at cnfpod on twitter and at creative nonfiction podcast on instagram tag the show and i'll give you some digital love
Sponsorship and Community Engagement
00:05:29
Speaker
But before we get to the magazine, support for the Creative Nonfiction podcast is brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College's low residency MFA in creative writing. Now in its 10th year, this affordable program boasts a low student to faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. Recent CNF faculty include random Billings Noble, Jeremy Jones, and Sarah Einstein.
00:05:50
Speaker
There's also fiction and poetry tracks, recent faculty including Ashley Bryant Phillips and Jacinda Townsend as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple. No matter your discipline, if you're looking to up your craft or learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. Visit mfa.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
00:06:10
Speaker
And be sure to head over to BrendanOmera.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly up to 11 newsletter. Lots of good goodies, good goodies that I hope will put fuel in your tank. Book raffles, links to cool articles I come across, podcasts, books, writing prompts, an exclusive monthly CNF and happy hour. Hey, first of the month, no spam, so far as I can tell you can't beat it.
00:06:36
Speaker
And that's the last you'll hear from me as a fresh voice on the mic for this issue. The following is issue two of the audio magazine that did come out on the first day of summer 2021. Enjoy and share widely.
Reflections on Summer
00:07:11
Speaker
What is it about summer? It could be a distinctly American feeling because our schooling, whether it be public or private, gave us three full months of pure, largely unsupervised vacation. I know when I look back on life, most of my memories are from summer, at least my fondest, and some of my most turbulent, and I guess that's why it's so visceral.
00:07:34
Speaker
We come of age in summer, don't we? We dream of summer. We have summer flings, summer jobs. We say goodbye to our classmates at the very dawn of summer and then say hello to them at the dusk of summer. And many of us are bronzed from sun and clad in new clothes for a new school year. Maybe we grew taller. Maybe we got our braces off. Maybe our skin cleared up.
00:07:58
Speaker
Maybe the gawky girl you'd never noticed emerges from summer like a monarch butterfly. Summer is metamorphosis. And I don't mean to get too lyrical because I'm not a fan of lyrical writing, by and large, and I'm certainly not a lyrical writer myself. It's not a good color on me.
00:08:16
Speaker
Stephen King's narrator in his novella The Body writes, different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that's cool. So if I say summer to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are all the way different from mine. That's cool.
00:08:32
Speaker
But for me, summer is always going to mean running down the road to the Florida market with chains jingling in my pockets, the temperature in the gay nineties, my feet dressed in keds. The word conjures an image of GSNWM railroad tracks running into a perspective point in the distance, burnished so white under the sun that when you close your eyes you could still see them there in the dark only blue instead of white.
00:09:03
Speaker
The great pull is that summer is literary. If you ask me, it's a crucible. Tests us, burns us. The days are long and the nights are not. My birthday is in the summer and we summer babies don't get the acclaim, call it whatever you want, of being celebrated during the school years.
00:09:21
Speaker
But our parties are better as we slid down our slip and slides and blasted each other with super soakers and hucked water balloons at each other. We blew out our candles and made our birthday wishes with sweat pouring down our brows. The slideshow of my summers clicks around like a Kodak carousel in my head. Well, there's tying Buddy to a tree so we can pelt him with water balloons like we did. Like we imagined ourselves to be characters in Lord of the Flies.
00:09:50
Speaker
Hitting a home run to dead center field and being named the games MVP. 12 year olds straddling our bicycles from atop a hill and looking at the girl I thought liked me and she smiled back and I knew that maybe she did too. And that was enough and that's all it ever was and that's how it ended.
Summer Issue Highlights
00:10:11
Speaker
Driving to see Kim, my college girlfriend, watching movies in her room with the door open because her father would check on us every 20 minutes.
00:10:22
Speaker
Awkwardly kissing that girl in the final summer between high school and college. What was her name? I think it might have been Kate. She's the most perfect strawberry blonde hair. Missing my friends from middle school and high school because they are to this day the best friends I will ever have. Working at the downhill grill.
00:10:44
Speaker
That time I got way too drunk and fell asleep during sex. And she called me out on it and I said, no I had not. The time John got his face kicked in, had to have his jaw wired shut.
00:11:02
Speaker
I heard commotion, yelling, maybe even some thumping, but didn't run to it and instead sat in an empty stairwell outside the apartment holding a cordless phone, drunkenly trying to call my girlfriend when I should have seen what was going on and maybe I knew what was going on all along and I chose to hide anyway. And to this day I hang my head for how cowardly I was, and if I'm being honest, how cowardly I am.
00:11:28
Speaker
Summer 2002, maybe the last time I had true, unadulterated, unadulterated, like, unabashed fun. Fun I know I will never see again.
00:11:44
Speaker
It's all summer, baby. And we have for you four essays on the theme of summer, essays from Jake Gronsky, author of Short Season and a Best American Sports Writing Notable Selection, Carrie Hagan, author of the book, We Is Gautam, and an award-winning features writer in her own right, and also the writers Christina Wales and Matthew Dennis. They'll take you to the Boys and Girls Club. They'll take you to the beach, to Christian Camp in the woods, into the ball fields where a dream went to die.
00:12:13
Speaker
But first, let's hear from the spoken word poet Jorah LaFleur, who has kindly written a trilogy of summer-themed poems for this issue. Hey, welcome CNFers! Welcome to issue 2 of the Audio Magazine. In case you haven't figured it out, the theme is summer. I'm so glad you're here.
00:12:31
Speaker
I want you to sit back and enjoy this compilation of curious and courageous writers as they unpack what summer means to them. So sink into Jorah's first poem titled August as we look up at the hot blue skies of summer here in this northern hemisphere. Please enjoy.
00:12:59
Speaker
at dusk reclined in canvas camping chair. My sun-soaked skin still drinking in warm air, warm fire, feasting. Each perfectly charred kernel of corn burst like pinata in my mouth. This meal, a bounty of earthen candies, salmon soaked in berries, green beans pliant with oil,
00:13:26
Speaker
I am sloppy, dribbling watermelon down my greedy thumbs. I am too pleased to care. While somewhere in this great fullness, emptiness waits like a barren plate. In the midst of summer, I found there was within me an invincible winter, raw pit and ripe fruit, a terribly juicy understanding of sweetness.
00:13:56
Speaker
My wedding cake was baked in August. Put one piece in the freezer to take out on your first anniversary. Mother-in-law instructed, we obeyed. There were real flowers laid atop the soft buttercream. The marriage didn't make it through March. Some petals are never meant to be frosted.
00:14:21
Speaker
In loss, harvest, in bloom, leaving. Tell me, August, why is everything fleeting, salted with sorrow? Less and less light tomorrow than today. Shall I beg you to stay, summer?
00:14:37
Speaker
Summer says, I am the season of savor. Salt brings out every flavor. I want you to taste it all before you fall. And if I stayed, you couldn't.
00:15:01
Speaker
That is August by Jora Lafleur and now we come to our first essay titled The Last Summer by Jake Gronsky. Jake is a former minor league baseball player who played in the St. Louis Cardinals organization and his essay takes a look at what it means to be cut and two dreams die at once. Here is Jake Gronsky.
00:15:29
Speaker
It's the end of spring training, a hopeful time for a professional baseball player where rosters are made and seasons begin. But the end of spring training also means it's cut week, and the Reaper crew, as we dub the executive and his henchmen, stand at the door waiting to break the news to anyone who won't see another year. Anyone who says they aren't scared of making this walk is either lying or delusional, and today, we are both. It's simple. If they say your name, you're cut.
00:15:56
Speaker
Last week, I almost took the henchman's block off when I reached for the door and he said, Gronsky, my heart dropped. I wasn't ready yet. He continues, I like your shirt. I could hardly stomach breakfast that day. What are we going to do when we all get cut? Mitch, our center fielder says he's loud and talks strictly for shock value. I walked towards the stadium entrance. I haven't thought about it. That's a lie. That's all I think about.
00:16:27
Speaker
The reason I stare at my hotel ceiling an hour before my alarm goes off is because I'm thinking about what happens when my life ends. I crunch in numbers to see if it's possible, compare stats for his potential replacement players, go over what I think they think. I only think about it. We cross the street getting closer to the stadium. Rivas keeps his hands in his pockets. And he negotiated a front office job yesterday. Don't think he got it, but I'll do that. Rivas is delusional. He don't negotiate being fired.
00:16:55
Speaker
We sit and jump off a bridge, I say, half joking. We laugh. Morbid humor is the only kind that works. Like a morpheum drip, we try to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. Conversation stops. We walk down the sidewalk, 100 yards from the stadium gate and clovers of baseball field span the entirety of our site. It's the same view I had in the first day I called myself a St. Louis Cardinal years ago.
00:17:21
Speaker
The day before, I was a nobody in a no-name town, a no-name field, playing against another no-name team in the independent leagues. Now I was in Cardinal Red. We see the glass door. The sun grows over the field as the morning dew turns base paths into diamonds. I love this view at this time of day, at this distance, at this moment. Only the one standing at the player's entrance would see it like this. That's what I dreamt about as a kid. That's what I dreamt about last night.
00:17:50
Speaker
I watch the sprinklers turn and spin until the matted grass litters with pops of color. I look through the fence's black iron bars and the infilled clay gradually turns dark brown. I can hear the shoes crunching over the sod while red hats drag and manicure the eight fields in the distance. I see the batting cages and breathe in the smell of the game, which feels to be constructed of the same fibers that I am. Dirt, oil, leather, and dab of pine tar.
00:18:18
Speaker
My heart thumps. I wish my dad could see this view. We used to practice on a field just like this before sunrise and first period English. He always wished that could be something great. I always wished he could have been right. We pull the gate's handle. Kronsky. This time he doesn't like my shirt. Gary wants to see you.
00:18:43
Speaker
I first saw doors like these when I was a real baseball player. T-ball hat, elastic pants, leather glove and hand, wrapped around my father's ankles waiting for the doors to open. Dad was young then. Peg's sleeves to make his arms appear bigger, sleek black hair with a wingtip hairline I used to draw with a squiggly. His career as a Scranton Wilkesbury Red Baron's chiropractor and the AAA affiliate of the Phillies made sense to me. He's been molding and shaping players since the day he taught me to oil my glove.
00:19:12
Speaker
My brother and I look forward to Summers and Scranton. They were nobodies to the world, heroes to us. Before batting practice started, my brother would follow Dad into the player's entrance, me following him, matching his attire in every detail. That's how I became a real player too, matching his every swing, throwing just as far, hitting just as hard. I was never better than him until he made me be.
00:19:38
Speaker
My mother would always wait at the gate until we would run into her arms smiling from the stick of gum a player pulled from his pocket. She was the one who started us on this baseball journey. Baseball camp. Every day after school until dad got home. No excuses. Her dancing school idea began to take off but our camp was two days a week with her. Another three days were taking ground balls at the field with dad, no pussyfoot in it like we did with mom. We left when the sun went down or when we did it right.
00:20:05
Speaker
And the final two days of the week were spent here at Lackawanna County Stadium, waiting for the gates to open. We'd get to Scranton early, usually after taking more ground balls in the parking lot. Mothers walked by, my brother and I asking if we wanted to be a baseball player, we grew up with a silly question. What else have I ever been? I looked confused. My brother smiled. He loved the game, but he loved pushing me more. We all knew he'd be more successful beyond the field than anyone on it.
00:20:34
Speaker
I didn't know there could be success anywhere beyond it. I stared through the gate into the old cement stadium and all of the beige speckled concourse stretching in both directions with Astrator filling everything between, waiting to hear the echo of the cleats clacking from inside the black iron bars. That meant they were coming. The real baseball players.
00:20:56
Speaker
Men in maroon hats walked and yawned and shuffled to the field and began stretching and throwing and hitting. Each weekend, this view made something pound inside my chest. My father stood above me and pointed. A point was worth more than gold. A point from him meant something. One day, his finger directly pointed at me. You're going to be inside this gate.
00:21:23
Speaker
I press my face against the bars knowing that was the moment a dream began. But they never tell you how your dreams end. They just tell you to leave. I pack my Cardinals gear in what seems to be a red body bag.
00:21:42
Speaker
Some guys will cry. Under the circumstances, we deem their tears acceptable. Some guys were relieved. Some can't process it. One, even completing his daily routine, getting dressed in cardinal beer, eating breakfast, pilfering bacon with his now former teammates before the news bled through. Some sit in the middle tube they once called their locker, laughing while crying, unsure how to feel.
00:22:05
Speaker
I zip it shut and lean back into my former locker that now feels like an empty cage. You know, I say, there's no one around to hear me, but I'm not speaking to them anyway. I honestly believe that can make it. I text my dad. I say everything is okay, but I'm no longer a baseball player. He was in his workshop. He read the text and went back to the house. How else was I supposed to tell him that our dream was over?
00:22:33
Speaker
This past year I went down to the wood shop with him. He retired from chiropractic care a decade before they tore down Lackawanna County stadium. His hair is thinning like the rest of his body. He spends most of his days in his wood shop, taking pieces of everyday items and creating a masterpiece from it. It's his new hobby. Perhaps once his job at molding and shaping players was complete, rough cut logs became his choice. He breathes, Zoe builds.
00:23:01
Speaker
Old shotguns become wine racks, fishing rods become board games, leather baseball gloves become fully functional desk lamps. He looks at something, sees potential, and creates something no one believed possible, like he did with us. Jesse left the diamond and became a lieutenant in the Air Force, then a master's degree recipient, then a captain, then a PhD recipient, then a surgeon, then a major, and then he turned 30.
00:23:29
Speaker
My mom's dancing school is now six days a week plus a digital studio. I stopped playing a few years back. I now work 40 hours a week on someone else's stream.
00:23:40
Speaker
My dad has a new wood shop, but it looks the same. Building materials everywhere, equipment discards he fixes or makes new. He builds nothing that can't be sold and carved and sanded by calloused hands and hard work. No technology, no computers, no shortcuts. He flicks a switch. The electricity down here is a nice upgrade and pulls out an old mahogany tabletop fully buried from a pile of scrap.
00:24:08
Speaker
He knocks off the cake on dust and we examine it. It's a simple frame with a saw line cutting through its heart. He tells me it was the piece he was working on when his phone buzzed, when I texted him the day the Cardinals cut me. It still bothers me, he says, trying to scratch off a patch of stuck on mud that's solidified over the years. I forget what was even supposed to be. I hold the piece and try to see it.
00:24:37
Speaker
It could have been a nice coffee table with a little work. It could have even been a serving platter at a winery in the countryside. Even a dozen coasters, people need those. I see the patch of stuck on mud and try to scratch it off too. The overhead light makes the mahogany look maroon. I wonder what it could have been too. I ask him if I could take it. He nods. I tell him I want to hang it in my office and he flashes a smile.
00:25:05
Speaker
He strings a wire on its back and I slide it under my arm. He hits the lights before leaving. It now hangs on my wall. A nail holding a mahogany countertop with a solid line through the middle. When my fiancé first saw it, she tilted her head. What's it supposed to be? It's art. Has it finished? I try to smile. I hope not.
00:25:35
Speaker
Thanks to Jake, he's the author of short season and his work has been a notable selection to the Best American Sports Writing Series. And that brings us to our next essay, this one by the writer Christina Wales. It's titled, Where Are We? Christina takes us to the beach of her youth and the stark realization that her father's eyes and attentions were never where they should have been.
00:26:12
Speaker
The condo is on the beach yet feels much further with pounds of beach gear strapped to your shoulders. Walking in the sand with sandals can be treacherous, but so hot it makes them necessary. Our family of four looks like a rich woman Christmas shopping as we cumbersomely cart four beach chairs, an umbrella, bags of beach towels and toys, a bulky camcorder to make sure this excursion is memorialized, a cooler with water,
00:26:37
Speaker
juice boxes, and sun-safe snacks in the early morning hours to claim a decent spot. After I unload my portion of the loot, I stand at the water's edge. My feet sink into the wet sand as the water regresses and collects. Amid the chaos of the beach, it is still easy to hear the sounds. I close my eyes to listen to the squawking of the seagulls looming overhead, the crashing of the waves as they break the surface, the whoosh the water makes as it recedes.
00:27:07
Speaker
When I open them, hermit crab shells poke up as the water retracts, but disappear as quickly as they came. I bend down, scooping away clumps of wet mush to try and catch one, but they are gone already, sunken as easily as my feet, down into the dark depths of the beach. I marvel at the consistency of sand. Whether wet or dry, it is so easy to maneuver and manipulate. Bend to your will. Yet it sticks to you.
00:27:35
Speaker
travels with you and your belongings, no matter if you want it to or not. You can put a beach chair in the trunk of your car and have sand in the crevices of the leather seats for a year. I glance behind me, further up the beach for my parents. All I see is two bodies, slick with oil, lying prostrate on the blankets we lugged from the condo. My little sister is busying herself under the umbrella. Sweat slides the sunglasses off her nose and sandy fingers maneuver them back into place.
00:28:02
Speaker
It is the height of the summer season. I could be six, nine, or 11. The year doesn't matter because we pass them all the same. The week down the ocean, hon, is as carefully planned as the rest of our lives, even though it is designed to be a reprieve from it. Both my parents enjoy the art of getting tan before skin cancer threatened my mom's life. At that point, so much more was already threatening it. Skin cancer needed to take a ticket and get in line.
00:28:28
Speaker
Somehow the ease of going from a dull white to a beautifully baked brown skipped a generation. My sister and I go from white to red and don't deviate from the color spectrum. Earlier in the morning, we lather naked bodies with sunscreen, not wanting to miss a spot for fear of a massive burn. Not until we are whiter than we were to start would we put on our swimsuits and coverups.
00:28:49
Speaker
It is some hours later now and the sun is at peak performance. I have eaten the snacks, spent as much time in the hot sun as my lobster skin can muster, played with beach toys and read bits of library books. I am bored. I grow more impatient by the second and my restlessness is on full display. I never tire of hearing my mother proclaim my future career as a lawyer, thanks to my boisterous argumentation and negotiation skills. I walk over to my parents and beg one of them to entertain me.
00:29:18
Speaker
They share a large blanket, but each has a smaller blanket carefully folded underneath their face. Both lie on their bellies, arms carefully turned out. My shadow hovers over my dad's back, which is something I will be reprimanded for as soon as his attention is drawn to it. His watch indicates they have five more minutes on this side, like they are stakes on a grill. The sun isn't the only thing searing, marking, branding them. I sit with my sister under the umbrella to wait, where five minutes seems an eternity.
00:29:48
Speaker
Finally, my mom takes my hand in one of hers and my sister's in the other as we walk towards the open ocean. Already, I'm almost the same height as her. Her petite frame is something I aspire to have but will never achieve. If not for genetics, then for discipline. I am built athletically, but for now, I think I'm fat. Body image issues are as genetically predetermined as our dark curly hair, a trait she has unconsciously passed along to me as her mother did to her. What else will she pass down to me?
00:30:19
Speaker
My mom is beautiful and thin. I assume she got that way eating no breakfast and a bag of pretzels for lunch. So I limit my eating as well. I am too young to comprehend how stress and trauma play a role in physical health. What is informing her health now will reveal itself to me in time as fast as the crashing of the waves. I catch a glimpse of my dad standing back where our stuff is piled up. A light bounces off a giant gray old school camcorder sitting on his shoulder trained on the three of us.
00:30:48
Speaker
We stop to wave, jumping and splashing, playing it up for the camera. He waves back. One eye shut, the other trained in the soft cushy viewfinder of the lens. He looks happy in this moment. It never occurred to me our life could be anything other than this. It wasn't designed to be. The question later becomes, who is the designer?
00:31:10
Speaker
That beach day passed like all the others, refreshing reprieves among the waves, combing through library books in between breaks to bury our dad in the sand, or find friends to build castles with. Locals worked full days while we lounged by the water. After straining to take our gear back to the condo, we'd collapse on the floors, sticky and streaked with over-applied sunscreen, sand hiding in crevices we couldn't reach.
00:31:33
Speaker
Weeks later, beach chairs tucked away in the closet under the basement stairs. Towels long ago laundered and folded neatly in the cabinet. My sister and I asked to watch the tape from our trip to relive the languorous days of summer. We cross our legs on the floor in front of the TV in the basement as my dad pops the tape into the VCR. I can almost smell the ocean air as it hits the screen.
00:31:56
Speaker
I am transported back, listening to the beach sounds amid the chaos of family fun. I see the three of us waving in the distance, muddled and slightly blurred by the sun behind us, darkening our image against the backdrop of the open ocean. In the background, I hear my dad say, hi, to no one. Simply verbalizing the hand waving gesture I know from memory accompanies it.
00:32:18
Speaker
The image stays like this for a moment, until it doesn't. After a few moments of capturing our glee, he pans over to a woman sunbathing on her own blanket. A small girl builds a castle next to her. I recall helping to build that castle, though for now, in this recorded moment, the castle is still in its infancy. I no longer remember the girl's name, and certainly don't remember her mother. Yet here she is, immortalized in this moving image.
00:32:44
Speaker
Minutes and minutes pass as we watch. The woman gets up. My dad's eye through the lens follows her to the water as she bends down, wades in to cool herself. She is innocently unaware of the intrusion, capitulating to a performance she doesn't realize she's making. Her tan frame bends languid into the waves, gracing the water with her fingertips, straightening up as the wave breaks at her feet. She brandishes her long flowing hair, moving it seductively back and forth in accordance with the wind.
00:33:14
Speaker
The uncomfortable silence that accompanies the image is palpable, on and off the screen. I know, even at this tender age, that what I'm seeing isn't right, but I can't figure out why. I can't make it fit into the puzzle of our life. This doesn't fit the script. This isn't how it plays out. I don't yet have the other pieces of knowledge for it to make sense. Instead, I just want to go back to my childhood. I want to watch my innocence on the screen before it evaporates and disappears.
00:33:44
Speaker
My sister and I are incensed. Where are we? We shot from the floor. Who is this lady? Why are you taping her?
00:33:51
Speaker
I don't remember his response. In fact, I don't think he answered at all, pretending he didn't hear us. We asked and asked until we grew bored of the silence and the image. We likely resumed playing with some other toy. The video and reminiscence of our summer are forgotten. But those moments preserved in film are not. Ignoring requests for an explanation may have prevented him from burying himself in the sand. But we brought those memories home with us.
00:34:17
Speaker
He built a castle of ignorance, silence, and lies, and those decisions would hide in the crevice of our lives forever. I stand at the water's edge, looking out at the breadth of the ocean. It will be some years before I comprehend the vastness of it, before I understand that not knowing what lies beyond what I can see is something to fear.
00:34:52
Speaker
So if Jorah's first poem was about the end of something, her next one, titled, Mirrored, is about the start of something unexpected. Mirrored. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep.
00:35:14
Speaker
I gotta be back at the car by 4pm to meet the man I'm dating. I've been chomping around on snowshoes, exploring the frosted capillaries of several major trails in a soft, silent solitude while he skims down the mountain, a maverick in motion. I am 41 years old and for the first time starting a real relationship with the snow.
00:35:40
Speaker
I didn't know how much winter could remind me of summer, how reliably snow can glow, the contagious brightness of light reflecting light. Trees turned to beacons, illuminated ground offering frozen miracle. Look, I'm walking on water, gliding like floating, like boating, the newness of Nordic skiing after years of paddle boarding,
00:36:08
Speaker
Who knew that blue and white could still write me a new story about how to stay okay through the long gray march of western Oregon's soggy winter? This is the season of absence in which I've always ached most for you, Summer.
00:36:27
Speaker
And now, somehow, beneath falling frigid flakes, like ripples on warm lake, I am inhaling your essence, the excitement of your extremities, your radiance mirrored, my understanding cleared, I hadn't been willing to drive far enough away from my familiar temperate home. I'm so used to being alone, I could not have guessed the value of forced isolation.
00:36:56
Speaker
how it could crack me open to a new closeness. Whoever wrote this narrative I live gives good value. See me falling on my butt and downy drifts, falling in love during a global pandemic, everything sliding and scary and beautiful.
00:37:27
Speaker
All right, we're halfway through the essays. You know, you having fun? You enjoying yourself? Seeing where these people take us is like the, it's like the unpredictability of a summer's day, isn't it? I mean, didn't Bruce Springsteen write the entire album Born to Run like it was one long summer's day? I think I've heard him say that once or twice.
00:37:51
Speaker
Okay, so Carrie Hagan, she used to attend, as a young girl, a Christian camp way up I-87 in upstate New York, and I remember driving by the word of life signs on my way to Lake Placid.
00:38:06
Speaker
and I was always eerily weirded out whenever I saw that sign and my friends and I would always poke fun at that and how cultish it felt and it would and who would go to such a place but looking back that's not entirely fair but that's what comes with age and maturity that we realize that sometimes maybe people go there against their will and maybe sometimes they're going there to impress a family member and Carrie certainly did that to impress her grandmother and as a result of this camp
00:38:35
Speaker
And she wrote this wonderful essay titled, Western Jesus. Here's Carrie Hagan. I started attending the Western themed Christian camp near grandma's house in the summer of 1984. So that means I was seven when cowboys first taught me about Jesus.
00:39:04
Speaker
My grandparents lived in the Adirondacks, where they were involved in an evangelical Christian organization that hosted youth summer camps. Grandma wanted her grandchildren to benefit from the Christian instruction, and as she offered to pay the costs, my parents were happy for me to have an outdoor Adirondack experience. I attended the camp one week every summer for 10 years. Some years my two younger brothers went as well. They never felt a devotion to it like I did,
00:39:34
Speaker
More than anything, I went to make my beloved grandmother happy. But I'm sure if she realized the effect that camp programming would have on my spiritual life, she never would have sent me. Throughout my adolescence on the last Saturday of June, my dad would throw my duffel bag into the minivan and drive me several hours north from our home in Levittown, Pennsylvania to upstate New York.
00:39:59
Speaker
About 100 miles south of Quebec, we turned off the highway and found a dirt road that led us through woods to the seasonal youth camp. Much of the property resembled a makeshift Western movie set with primitive cabins, a petting zoo, a rifle range, and a corral that featured a weekly rodeo. During registration on Saturday afternoon, speakers projected country gospel music throughout the campus, and cowboys on horseback directed foot traffic.
00:40:28
Speaker
Frontier themes echoed through every part of camp programming. After dinner on the first night, a mariachi band greeted elementary-age campers in the meeting hall. As we climbed stadium-style steps and assembled along rows of benches, the musicians played on a stage and encouraged us to clap and sing along with the songs. One was called, I Wanna Be a Rancher for My Savior.
00:40:55
Speaker
Announcements followed, delivered by program directors, male Bible college students posing as the sheriff, the deputy, and the marshal. The men reviewed the rules, which included no smoking, drinking, listening to rock music, or being alone with a member of the opposite sex. Then they told us about the bandits. Bandits lived in the woods and prowled around at night looking for bad boys and girls.
00:41:23
Speaker
Sometimes they would disrupt camped activities, and if that happened, we could be sure the cowboys would protect us. Upon delivering this bit of bandit lore, the program directors became gods to us children, and probably also to those counselors with braces. The bandits didn't disappoint. They interrupted meals and Bible meetings throughout the week.
00:41:47
Speaker
They disguise their faces with bandanas, shot cap guns, and provoked the cowboys by running through the dining hall. During my third summer at camp, nine years old, I explained their antics in a letter that Grandma saved. In the woods, they have mean men called bandits. They capture the good men and don't give them back until the next day. That summer, a ghost rider also lived in the woods.
00:42:13
Speaker
When we were in lunch today, the ghost writer came in and shot a pretend gun, but a little girl was afraid and started to cry, I reported. In between meetings, campers played games and learned daily Bible verses that we recited to counselors before bedtime. Cabins with 100% memorization rates earned ingredients for s'mores and the public praise of the cowboys during meetings. I learned every word of every verse every day.
00:42:41
Speaker
Late on the last afternoon of camp, the staff lit a giant bonfire by the lake. At dusk, when the air smelled of burning pine needles, campers and counselors walked quietly towards a small beach instead of the meeting hall. The night held our final opportunity to accept Christ. Here, a special guest pastor would deliver a passionate message in front of flames that shot sparks into the sky.
00:43:10
Speaker
light breezes coasted over the water. The stars felt closer on those clear Adirondack nights. So did hell, especially as the speaker compared its eternal fire to the flames before us. During the final prayer, he repeated the salvation call. It often began with the same words, with every eye closed and every head bowed.
00:43:34
Speaker
and the instruction to silently repeat a prayer that he said aloud. It went something like this, Lord Jesus, I know I am a sinner and deserve to go to hell. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. At the end of the campfire service, the cowboys told those who had accepted Jesus during the week to publicly display their faith by taking a stick from a stack of twigs and throwing it into the fire. I threw a stick every year.
00:44:03
Speaker
Every July, when I would return home, I'd have a fresh fear of the cowboy's god, a damning force that judged my every move and intention. My parents worked in academia at a Christian college, and although I went to public school, the themes idealized through summer camp echoed through Sunday school stories, sermon illustrations, and youth group discussions. Avoiding temptation, smoking, drinking, listening to rock music, being alone with a boy,
00:44:32
Speaker
led to heaven, and sin led to hell. The older I got, the more I asked God's forgiveness for sinful behaviors. Not because I was flirting with fire myself, so to speak, but I was with others who did. Guilt by association, as the cowboys would have said. As I entered my teenage years, I didn't know how to act. I wanted to express myself, but I didn't know how to fit the convictions of my faith within the social code of a public high school.
00:45:02
Speaker
Embarrassed much of the time, I shied away from friends who explored sex and drugs. I feared the eternal consequences that they no doubt faced. When I finally aged out of camp at 17, college brought me closer to the edge of social temptation. My conflicting desires confused my friends at Penn State. I agreed to go to fraternity parties, but I only stayed for a little while and flush my natty ice down the toilet.
00:45:29
Speaker
How could I explain, as an intelligent young adult to other intelligent young adults, the dramatic altar calls and clear-cut images of heaven and hell that had driven my social behaviors for so long? Surely the cowboys could have used the image of me in those moments as an illustration of what happens to someone who ignores the themes of summer camp programming.
00:45:53
Speaker
Flirt with sin and you end up alone in a filthy frat house stall, avoiding beer pong and the drunken brother taking a leak in the urinal by the door. At least I didn't have an unrepentant heart. With every flush of the beer and wash of my hands, I ask God for forgiveness. Friends didn't try that hard to understand my hang ups. I was, after all, the perfect designated driver.
00:46:19
Speaker
It wasn't until after college, in my early twenties, that I needed a ride home myself. After my summer camp days, I don't remember encountering a cowboy for more than a decade. That changed the very night I became a participant in my wilder friend's behavior.
00:46:37
Speaker
After a few years of flirting with social temptations, I was ready to take a step forward when a couple of work colleagues invited me to a happy hour at a storied local bar. Or, as my grandfather would have called it, a storied local den of iniquity. The Bent Elbow Tavern could surely have been a hangout for bandits. Before repeated violations closed its doors, the loud suburban Philadelphia bar catered to college students and young professionals for decades.
00:47:08
Speaker
The night I went, I wore my sexiest outfit. A long-sleeved black Oxford shirt, a pair of tight cotton pants that look like jeans, and high-heeled black boots. I followed my girlfriends towards a back area where a band played. Extending from the stage, counters formed a large square bar in the center of the room. Patrons piled into sticky runways between the counters and the walls.
00:47:33
Speaker
To my horror, as soon as we pushed our way to a bartender, my girlfriends climbed onto the bar and started dancing. Carrie, one screamed, gesturing for me to climb up. No, I panicked. Why not, a voice next to me asked. I turned to face an overweight man wearing a cowboy hat, a plaid shirt, and boots. He knelt and offered his hand. No, I said.
00:48:02
Speaker
Come on," said the cowboy. He tapped his hand against his knee. I didn't know where to go. I guess I wanted to make him happy. Stepping onto his knee with my left foot, I tried to reach the bar with my right, but my pants were too tight. The cowboy lifted me onto the counter next to my friend. A few minutes later, the cowboy tapped my boot and motioned me down. What? I yelled. He shook his head and laughed.
00:48:30
Speaker
He cupped his mouth with his hands and shouted. I could only make out, come down and get it off. I held onto his offered hand and jumped down. Something's hanging from your jeans. It looks really bad, he yelled. I pushed the crowd to a bathroom mirror. A white tuft of fabric hung from between my legs. It looked like a tampon string.
00:48:57
Speaker
My tight pants had split when I stretched to get up on the stage. I took off without saying goodbye to my friends. For days and nights I replayed the flawed bar dance in my mind. Eventually the humiliation faded and I could think more about the cowboy's presence that night and his participation in my then most embarrassing adult moment. Christian camp counselors might have seen him as a reminder of my campfire vows.
00:49:26
Speaker
a cautionary symbol sent by God. I would have disagreed. He had offered his knee to help me up and then his hand to help me down. He wasn't testing, but rescuing me, kind of like a savior should. It's been about 35 years since I first entered those Adirondack woods for summer camp.
00:49:53
Speaker
and I still struggle to articulate my thoughts on God. More often than not, it's easier to view him as a punisher than as a rescuer. When I fall into this faulty thinking, I remind myself that the summertime cowboys represented a type of God, but that I found a truth in another, one reflected in the arms of a very different kind of cowboy.
00:50:26
Speaker
Carrie is the author of the book We Is Gautam, and you can hear her way back, episode 11 of this podcast. Pardon the audio, but it's there, should you want to go check that out. It's a way back episode of the podcast run, and Carrie and I kind of go way back. It's like 2007. That's getting into the way back range.
00:50:49
Speaker
Anyway, so that brings us to our final essay this by features writer and journalist Matthew Dennis his essay evokes the mood at times of Stephen King's The Body which we I read a little excerpt from at the introduction to this audio magazine the novella that would become the basis for Stand By Me. It's a great story and a great movie and Matt braids
00:51:12
Speaker
the story of his youth at the Boys and Girls Club in suburban Detroit with a turbulent and ultimately doomed relationship to a woman he had known in San Diego. It should be noted that the woman's name in this piece, Tanya, is not her real name and was changed to protect her privacy. Here is Matthew Dennis.
00:51:38
Speaker
I met Tanya in early 2012 on just another perfect day in San Diego's eternal summer. She was a jeweler, a metalsmith, sported a leather jacket, silver stained fingers, and an unguarded laugh. Another Great Lakes refugee, she'd only recently moved to Wisconsin for a man. Instead of a welcome mat, her trailer of stuff cramped his style though. She'd end up with garage storage and a spot on the couch. Tanya gave up on San Diego after a year and a half battle to scrape by.
00:52:07
Speaker
On a lazy June day, she called to tell me the news. She was packing up to move back home. With high school over and my teaching service on hold, I had nothing but free days ahead. A cross-country trip sounded like a great summer break. We left the coast and fell in love hours later in the Sonora Desert investigating deserted commercial oases, straight edges against a lunar landscape.
00:52:29
Speaker
In Vegas, we argued and separated, Tanya going to seek the neon night, me choosing to stay behind in the dark. We made up over Lafayette Coney Chili Dogs, a little Detroit on the old strip. Askewing the super highway, we took Nevada back roads that interspersed desolate casino towns. Parking lots already packed, we filled backpacks and trespassed hotel pools, cool respites from July's relentless heat.
00:52:54
Speaker
We broke down in Daniel, Wyoming, just south of the Tetons, and we camped under the stars. Great mountains rose before us, and Yellowstone geysers crashed into the mineral pools below, dragging a thousand-pound trailer across mountain passes, hammering at her poor Subaru's shocks. We had many secrets shared between us as we rolled into the Great Plains. Our great escape from San Diego would end at Tanya's parents' place in Wisconsin.
00:53:20
Speaker
The trip's magic followed me back to Golden Hill in San Diego. Following a woman across the country sounded like it might work. I wouldn't be easily convinced though. Four months after several indecisions, I committed to moving to Milwaukee from San Diego back to the Midwest, where I too had grown up.
00:53:37
Speaker
Leaving California was natural. I'd reached a dead end and needed to shake up. Five years teaching, five different schools, then substitute teaching, private tutoring, unemployment, the LSAT a few times, a year as a financial advisor. In San Diego, I was at home for the first time in my life, and I was lost. Tanya was not only a way out, but a new direction. My heart leapt at sharing constant voyage.
00:54:04
Speaker
We were soon engaged. After three years living together, I made my final play to win the game, proposing to Tanya in February 2016. By that summer, though, it'd be over.
00:54:15
Speaker
Leaving San Diego, the place I'd made home for almost eight years, darkness welcomed me to the road. Instead of sleeping under the stars of the Tanya now, November's chill greeted my SoCal clothes. Empty hotel rooms creaked from the plane's wind outside. In bed, my chilly skin betrayed a warm feeling in my gut. No plan, I'm back on this flat, soon to be frozen land. I knew that this wasn't where I wanted to be.
00:54:39
Speaker
If I could see through it, though, I thought, digging through a wan gas station dinner, maybe Tanya and I could make it with a steel will. We were still committed to trying in April 2016, driving from Milwaukee to Metro Detroit to introduce Tanya to the family and to my Motor City roots.
00:54:58
Speaker
We stopped in to see my stepdad, the second time I'd seen him in my adult life. A 60-year-old bachelor, the man lined his fireplace shelf with pictures of estranged kids and grandkids. The place smelled of marijuana smoke and the coffee tables were stacked with playboys. Tonya wondered just what he was trying to prove. Leaving the hotel, our itinerary promised art in downtown Detroit after one nostalgic quest. The Boys and Girls Club, the place I'd spent my summers. Tonya was thrilled and so was I.
00:55:29
Speaker
I began spending my summers at the Boys and Girls Club in the late 1980s. When we weren't in the water, my best friend Cobie and I blazed away days with the other semi-feral children. We would shepherd volunteers and forest marchers on a half-mile hike to J.C. Park's open fields and forested paths to sap the season's never-ending electricity.
00:55:49
Speaker
Besides driveway basketball courts, simple hide jinks, and backyard football, suburban vistas offered limited adventure for a wild child. During humid Michigan summers, though, myth and mystery lurked under broadleaf trees along moss green rivers. We schemed at the man-made beach at Spencer Park. We squirmed on yellow school buses scorching rubber seats. Kobe said that we should throw our stuff down and run right into the water.
00:56:15
Speaker
Yeah, I want to be the first one in," I responded, stripping to bathing suits in three steps we'd be across the grass. Sand kicked back as we rips down to the shore, swimming out until the seaweed tickled our toes. We turned upside down and dived to the mucky bottom before bursting through the surface to the brilliant sun above.
00:56:35
Speaker
The strong took advantage of the weak at the Boys and Girls Club. Take Mike Smith, a ruddy-haired elder. He leaned in close. I could see the white heads of his acne and skimpy whiskers as he delivered a warning. He said that two boys, just about our age, got lost in the crawl space of the building. Smith told us they never got out, that they never even found their bodies.
00:56:58
Speaker
They're trapped under there right now," he said. Kobe sprinted ahead of me. He needed to know if it was true. We rushed across cool ceramic floors and down dusty rubber stairs to the opening of the crawlspace below. Halfway in, garden tool shadows danced from particle board walls. An unwelcome silence resounded. Kobe stood looking down stone-gray stairs. Let's prop the door open, I said, looking at the abyss beyond.
00:57:25
Speaker
Creating an escape hatch, I turned to find the maintenance room empty and yelled for Kobe. I followed a white glow from what turned out to be a single bulb over a dirt floor. At the cellar's right corner, a chest-tie wooden door loomed. This is it, Kobe said. A faint light exposed the brown rocky terrain. They're under here somewhere, Kobe said. There's only one way to find out. We paused.
00:57:51
Speaker
As Kobe pulled himself up, the lights went out and a metal door slammed shut behind us. We screamed, afraid if we'd stop, we'd be forever entombed with the bones of the bodies we were hunting. We raced through the door. Adrenaline fueled up my legs, two then three stairs at a time. When I crashed through the waiting room and out into the yellow day, bright life smiled again. We huffed, we made it out, and there was Mike and his acne and his terrible whiskers.
00:58:20
Speaker
The ghosts almost got you guys. Kobe called him a son of a bitch and bolted after Mike. Mike dashed up the stairs at the club. With Kobe halfway up, I sprung after them, chasing the day. There's JC Park, I said to Tanya, pointing to the left. We'd walk up there on days that we didn't go to the beach.
00:58:47
Speaker
My truck took us down the last mile along Long Lake Road. Lining up beside us, hedges formed green facades that walled in middle-class castles. Alright, the Boys and Girls Club should be coming up right over here. As we emerged from the tree-lined corridor, however, Coleraine's brick chimney did not appear on the eastern skyline. A few more feet ahead and it was obvious. Coleraine's school was gone. I blinked.
00:59:11
Speaker
What the hell? Where the hell is it? I said. Instead, sitting a few hundred feet back from the curb, another strip mall stood anew, complete with chili peppers tanning, two nail salons, and the Troy Fitness Center. Tanya and I pulled into the lot where my mom used to drop my brother, sister, and I off each day in a blocky blue Toyota Tercel station wagon, or piled out of my stepdad's black BMW.
00:59:36
Speaker
Tanya stayed quiet, looking on. Coleraine had given way to consumer progress. Troy, the city of tomorrow, today, always did take its motto seriously.
00:59:48
Speaker
Not unlike Coleraine, my engagement to Tanya was raised to the ground. If I was to be a man of tomorrow, today, it couldn't include her. Whatever we once had was gone, a distant memory not unlike the times I spent spooked by ghosts in the boys' club basement or running carefree into the water with the best friend I'd ever have. I would soon drive to the Lake Michigan seawall and sit and stare out at the blue beyond.
01:00:13
Speaker
The hurt was no longer hopeless. I heard a seagull's call, waves beckoned to a silent secret world below. I remembered cruising through Troy's straight streets with Tonya by my side, passing sprawling plazas, stubby one-story commercial centers, populated by party stores, grocery centers, pizza parlors, international restaurants, dry cleaners and doctors and dentists and chiropractors.
01:00:40
Speaker
In childhood, these were foreign intrusions upon the real world, and I'd remember how summer days began, my feet slapping the concrete, climbing four ornate stairs past a whispering dogwood, leaves still wet with the dew, the boys and girls club welcoming with a beveled portico and a sweet stone smell past closed glass doors, promising yet another intrepid day and clashes for the impatient restlessness of my youth.
01:01:13
Speaker
Matt is a journalist based for now in Eugene, Oregon. And so that brings us to our final installment in Jorah's trilogy of summer poems. It's titled Mermaid, but made part of mermaid is spelled M-A-D-E as in the past tense of make. So sink in and let Jorah take you away with this final poem about summer.
01:01:42
Speaker
river, creek, ocean, reservoir, lake. I am inside of you and you own me. With your soft power encircling my neck, let's talk about wombs, about where we all came from. Each plunge my attempt to return. I swim all summer long, one dusk to dawn, season of access.
01:02:11
Speaker
Who else can touch me everywhere at once? River, creek, ocean, reservoir, lake The rest of the year I can only be near you Hear your compelling currents Siren song along my spine Your rock bed
01:02:30
Speaker
I get my best sleep lying next to you. Dreaming of when I had fans and will again feel so completely supported that I could drown in satiety and surrender. Flow is a word that means yes. Exalted rest, held breath, diving in, diving in, alive and skin made of shimmer, shivering, delivering depths to surface with a surfeant of certainty.
01:03:00
Speaker
I was made for these waters. And that brings us to the end, and I guess I have to say that I have complicated feelings about summer because those were some of the most uncomplicated days of my entire life. When my worry was more on the spectrum of how much fun I was going to have, not whether I was going to have any fun at all, it was just a matter of how much.
01:03:29
Speaker
because it was all fun, at least for a privileged little twit like myself, making enough money to take Kim or Megan or the other Megan or Amanda or Vika on a date. It was summer jobs where I worked the graveyard shift at a liquor distribution warehouse where the wage was really good.
01:03:48
Speaker
But the regulars looked at us transient college kids with such hate and disdain that we might be on a path that would take us away from here. We knew we were temporary. They knew they were not.
01:04:03
Speaker
They were definitely there for good, and for as long as their booze-addled temperaments would keep them employed. I mean, we dug ditches every now and again, we loaded trucks, we served meals, we poured drinks, we drank too much, and somehow, my God, how did we manage to survive our 20s? We weren't weighed down by 401ks or children or even the thought of retirement or reproduction. In the parlance of the day,
01:04:28
Speaker
We were so myopically and pathologically present. And now we're older and summer is just something we see on the calendar, sometime in the third week of June. I miss summer more than anything because it held all my hopes and my best friendships. And most of my hopes are gone and the friendships have largely wilted on the vine.
01:04:47
Speaker
because that's what happens when we get older and your friends have children and you do not when you move across the country and they do not when you text them and they do not reply and so the calendar pages they keep flipping over and farther and farther away from when you felt most alive even in the moment you knew it would never be better than this and twenty years later you realize something horrible you were right
01:05:19
Speaker
you
01:05:25
Speaker
This issue of the audio magazine on summer was produced by me, Brendan O'Mara, as part of Exit 3 Media, along with, of course, our wonderful contributors, Jora Lafleur, Matthew Dennis, Jake Gronski, and Kerry Hagan, and Christina Wales. Thanks to the Wistia Free Music Library for the music, and thank you for listening, CNFers. As you know, this is an exclusive product for the Patreon audience, and you may share this MP3 with anyone you want. There's nothing to stop you from doing that.
01:05:53
Speaker
And I hope that those who might would encourage them to be members. I mean, if you subscribe to the New Yorker or something, there's no stopping you from photocopying a story and sharing it with your people. So I hope you'll consider supporting this operation, patreon.com slash CNF pod. Should you stumble across this MP3 as a, as a freebie, you might want to support the enterprise. It helps put money into the pockets of the writers who make this possible.
01:06:18
Speaker
As always, keep the conversation going on social media, at CNF Podnapper, and in Omera. Let me know what you think. And of course also visit the Patreon page where there's exclusive content. And that's how you get this beamed into your feed once or twice a year.
01:06:37
Speaker
So I'm just going to leave you with that. All right. As always, thanks for listening. Stay cool. See you in efforts. Stay cool forever.