Love, Death and Gratitude: Seven Stories AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss

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Episode: Love, Death and Gratitude: Seven Stories

Author: The Free Press
Duration: 00:33:45

Episode Shownotes

As you’re recovering from indulging in stuffing and pecan pie, we wanted to bring you a special bonus episode we put together in collaboration with our friends at StoryCorps. If you haven’t heard of StoryCorps, it’s an organization that has been gathering individual stories from across the country for over

20 years and collects them in the U.S. Library of Congress. StoryCorps’s online archive now has the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. Today, we wanted to play seven stories about gratitude. There’s one about a man’s deeply held appreciation for his father, a story about a mother who forgave the man who killed her son, and one about a busboy who prayed over Robert Kennedy right after he was shot in 1968. There’s a story about a first love, an unexpected friendship, and being yourself. We know it sounds cheesy, but these stories made us laugh and cry, and we think you’ll love them, too. And as StoryCorps’s founder Dave Isay tells us, “Don’t forget about the beauty in poetry, and the grace in the stories of our loved ones and neighbors hiding in plain sight all around us.” Thank you so much to Dave and StoryCorps for partnering with us for this episode. If you want to have a conversation with a stranger across the political divide, sign up at One Small Step. If you want to honor a loved one over the holidays with a StoryCorps interview that goes straight from your phone into the Library of Congress with one tap, participate in their Great Thanksgiving Listen. And, of course, if you want to support one of our favorite nonprofits, you can donate here. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In this bonus episode of 'Honestly with Bari Weiss,' produced with StoryCorps, seven poignant narratives centered on gratitude unfold. The stories illustrate heartfelt moments, such as a son's appreciation for his father, a mother's forgiveness towards her son's killer, and a reflection on unexpected friendships. These narratives capture the beauty and grace within everyday experiences, highlighting how personal stories drive connections among individuals and reveal the often overlooked elements of humanity.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Love, Death and Gratitude: Seven Stories) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
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00:01:00 Speaker_12
From the free press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss.

00:01:04 Speaker_12
This Thanksgiving weekend, as you're recovering from stuffing and pecan pie, we wanted to bring you a special bonus episode that we put together in collaboration with our friends at StoryCorps.

00:01:15 Speaker_12
If you haven't heard of StoryCorps, it's an organization that's been gathering individual stories from across America for over 20 years. It collects all of them in the U.S. Library of Congress.

00:01:26 Speaker_12
StoryCorps' online archive now has the single largest collection of human voices ever gathered. And today, we wanted to play for you seven stories about gratitude.

00:01:37 Speaker_12
There's one about a man's deeply held appreciation for his father, a story about a mother who forgave the man who killed her son, one about the bus boy who prayed over RFK right after he was shot in 1968, a story about first love and unexpected friendship and being yourself.

00:01:56 Speaker_12
I know it sounds a little cheesy, but these stories really moved us. They made us laugh and cry, and we thought that you'd love them too.

00:02:03 Speaker_12
After the break, you'll hear StoryCorps founder Dave Isay explain a bit about the organization, and then he'll walk us through the stories that we're sharing today. Happy Thanksgiving. Stay with us. Today's episode was made possible by Ground News.

00:02:23 Speaker_12
America's trust in the media has been on a long and steady decline, especially over the last few years. If you listen to this show, you know that's something that we care about and talk about a lot.

00:02:35 Speaker_12
Mainstream media often have their own agenda, which leads, and we've seen this many times, to bias coverage, public polarization, and ideological bubbles that reinforce readers' opinions rather than challenging them.

00:02:48 Speaker_12
That's why Ground News is so important. Their app and website allow us to access the world's news in one place to compare coverage with context behind each source.

00:02:59 Speaker_12
Reading the news this way helps you see discrepancies on how certain topics are covered or ignored so you can think critically about what you read and make up your own mind. Check it out at groundnews.com slash honestly

00:03:13 Speaker_12
to get 50% off the Ground News Vantage Plan for unlimited access. Ground News is subscriber funded. By subscribing, you're supporting transparency in media and our work in the meantime.

00:03:25 Speaker_17
The Credit Card Competition Act would help small business owners like Raymond. We asked Raymond why the Credit Card Competition Act matters to him.

00:03:33 Speaker_05
I'm Raymond Huff. I run Russell's Convenience in Denver, Colorado. I've ran this business for more than 30 years, but keeping it going is a challenge. One of the biggest reasons I've found is the credit card swipe fees we're forced to pay.

00:03:45 Speaker_05
That's because the credit card companies fix prices. It goes against the free market that made our economy great. The Credit Card Competition Act would ensure we have basic competition. It's one of the few things in Washington that both sides agree on.

00:04:01 Speaker_05
Please ask your member of Congress to pass the Credit Card Competition Act. Small businesses and my customers need it now.

00:04:08 Speaker_17
For more information on how the Credit Card Competition Act will help American consumers save money, visit merchantspaymentscoalition.com and contact your member of Congress today. Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition.

00:04:19 Speaker_17
Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. merchantspaymentscoalition.com

00:04:26 Speaker_13
So StoryCorps is a nonprofit that started 20 years ago. It's a simple idea. We put a booth in Grand Central Terminal where you bring anybody who you want to honor to listen to their story, a parent, grandparent, a friend.

00:04:38 Speaker_13
A facilitator brings you into the booth, door is shut, complete silence. It's kind of a sacred space. The lights are low. And for 40 minutes, you ask questions and listen.

00:04:47 Speaker_13
And I knew from making radio documentaries for decades before that, the microphone gives you the license to say things, to ask things that you don't normally get to talk about.

00:04:55 Speaker_13
People from the very beginning thought of this as if I had 40 minutes left to live, what would I say to this person who means so much to me? And, you know, StoryCorps is just about us. It's about America.

00:05:06 Speaker_13
It's about the beauty and the poetry and the grace in the stories all around us when we take the time to listen. And here we are 20 years later. We've had about 700,000 people participate.

00:05:18 Speaker_13
And, you know, because of the nature of what happens in the booth, we're kind of collecting the wisdom of humanity. So I thought I'd start with a very early StoryCorps story.

00:05:28 Speaker_13
This is Josh Lippman, who's 12 years old, who actually brought his mom, Sarah. He heard about StoryCorps and brought her to the booth.

00:05:35 Speaker_13
Josh has autism spectrum disorder, and kids with autism spectrum disorder are super smart, have very difficult times socially, often develop obsessions. In Josh's case, it's animals.

00:05:48 Speaker_13
So Josh wrote his own questions and came to the booth with his mom, Sarah, and this is what it sounded like.

00:05:53 Speaker_08
From a scale of 1 to 10, do you think your life would be different without animals?

00:05:58 Speaker_09
I think it would be an 8 without animals because they add so much pleasure to life. How else do you think your life would be different without them? I could do without things like cockroaches and snakes.

00:06:09 Speaker_08
Well, I'm okay with snakes as long as they're not venomous or constrictive or anything.

00:06:13 Speaker_09
Yeah, I'm not a big snake person.

00:06:14 Speaker_08
But cockroach is just the insect we love to hate. Yeah, it really is. Have you ever felt like life is hopeless?

00:06:23 Speaker_09
When I was a teenager, I was very depressed. And I think that can be quite common with teenagers who think a lot, you know, and are perceptive.

00:06:31 Speaker_08
Am I like that?

00:06:32 Speaker_09
You are very much like that. Do you have any mortal enemies? I would say my worst enemy is sometimes myself. But I don't think I have any mortal enemies. Have you ever lied to me? Hmm.

00:06:45 Speaker_09
I probably have, but I try not to lie to you, even though sometimes the questions you ask make me uncomfortable.

00:06:50 Speaker_08
Like when we go on our walks, some of the questions I might ask?

00:06:53 Speaker_09
Yeah, but you know what? I feel it's really special that you and I can have those kind of talks, even if sometimes I feel myself blushing a little bit.

00:07:00 Speaker_08
Have you ever thought you couldn't cope with having a child?

00:07:04 Speaker_09
I remember when you were a baby, you had really bad colic, so you would just cry and cry.

00:07:08 Speaker_08
What's colic?

00:07:10 Speaker_09
It's when you get this stomach ache and all you do is scream for like four hours a night.

00:07:14 Speaker_08
Even louder than Amy does? You were pretty loud, but Amy's was more high-pitched.

00:07:19 Speaker_09
I think it feels like everyone seems to like Amy more like she's like the perfect little angel Well I can understand why you think that people like Amy more and I'm not saying it's because of your Asperger's syndrome but being friendly comes easily to Amy whereas I think for you it's more difficult but the people who take the time to get to know you love you so much Like Ben or Eric or Carlos Yeah and Like I have better quality friends but less quantity

00:07:49 Speaker_08
I wouldn't judge the quality, but I think... I mean, like, first it was like, Amy loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia, she loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia.

00:07:56 Speaker_09
Part of that's a girl thing, honey. The important thing for you is that you have a few very good friends, and really that's what you need in life.

00:08:04 Speaker_08
Did I turn out to be the son you wanted when I was born? Like, did I meet your expectations?

00:08:11 Speaker_09
You've exceeded my expectations, sweetie, because, you know, sure, you have these fantasies of what your child's going to be like, but you have made me grow so much as a parent because you think... Well, I was the one who made you a parent.

00:08:24 Speaker_09
You were the one who made me a parent. That's a good point. But also because you think differently from, you know, what they tell you in the parenting books. Yeah. I really had to learn to think out of the box with you.

00:08:36 Speaker_09
And it's made me much more creative as a parent and as a person. And I'll always thank you for that.

00:08:42 Speaker_08
And that helped when Amy was born.

00:08:44 Speaker_09
And that helped when Amy was born, but you were just so incredibly special to me. And I'm so lucky to have you as my son.

00:08:59 Speaker_13
Josh got hundreds and hundreds of letters after this broadcast telling him what an incredible kid he is. And his mom, Sarah, put them together in a binder.

00:09:09 Speaker_13
And when he'd get picked on at school, they'd go through the binder together and read those letters to remind him what an amazing human being he is. So let's move on. StoryCorps started in New York and a few years later it went national.

00:09:21 Speaker_13
We launched Airstream Trailers that still travel the country. And this is an early story from the Airstream Trailer. It was part of an initiative we did recording African-American stories all across the country.

00:09:32 Speaker_13
And a guy named Lynn Weaver came with his daughter to the booth and she had interviewed Lynn about his dad, Ted Weaver, who worked as a janitor and a chauffeur in Knoxville, Tennessee.

00:09:43 Speaker_06
My father was everything to me. And it's actually kind of difficult talking about him without becoming very emotional. Up until, you know, he died, every decision I made, I'd always call him.

00:09:58 Speaker_06
And he would never tell me what to do, but he would always listen and say, well, what do you want to do? And he made me feel that I could do anything that I wanted to do.

00:10:07 Speaker_06
I can remember when we integrated to schools that there were many times when I was just scared. And I didn't think that I would survive. And I'd look up and he'd be there. And whenever I saw him, I knew that I was safe.

00:10:25 Speaker_06
I always tell you that your mama is the smartest person I've ever met. But I think my father ranks right up there as brilliant. When I was in high school, I was taking algebra and I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to do my homework.

00:10:42 Speaker_06
I got frustrated and said, I just can't figure this out. So my father said, what's the problem? He came by, he said, what's the problem? And I said, it's just algebra. And he said, well, let me look at it.

00:10:52 Speaker_06
I said, Dad, they don't even have algebra in your day. And I went to sleep. And around four o'clock that morning, he woke me up. He said, come on, son, get up. He sat me at the kitchen table, and he taught me algebra.

00:11:07 Speaker_06
What he had done is sit up all night and read the algebra book, and then he explained the problems to me so I could do them and understand them. And to this day, I live my life trying to be half the man my father was, just half the man.

00:11:24 Speaker_06
And I would be a success if my children loved me half as much as I loved my father.

00:11:40 Speaker_13
Lynn sadly passed away a few years ago, but his spirit and the spirit of Ted Weaver, his dad, live on in the StoryCorps archive.

00:11:49 Speaker_13
So on the theme of gratitude, you know, sometimes at StoryCorps, these kind of impossible conversations happen, and I thought I'd play one of those. This one took place in Minnesota.

00:12:00 Speaker_13
When he was 16 years old, O'Shea Israel got into a fight with a kid named Loramium Bird at a party and killed him.

00:12:08 Speaker_13
And 12 years into his prison sentence, Loramian Byrd's mom, Mary Johnson, decided she wanted to find out who the person was who had murdered her son.

00:12:18 Speaker_13
So we're going to listen to a conversation between O'Shea Israel and Mary Johnson, who came to StoryCorps about two years after he got out of prison. Let's listen.

00:12:29 Speaker_01
You and I met at Stillwater Prison. I wanted to know if you were in the same mindset of what I remember from court, where I wanted to go over and hurt you. But you were not that 16-year-old. You were a grown man. I shared with you about my son.

00:12:49 Speaker_07
And he became human to me. You know, when I met you, it was like, OK, this guy is real. And then when it was time to go, You broke down and started shedding tears. And the initial thing to do was just try to hold you up as best I can.

00:13:06 Speaker_07
Just hug you like I would my own mother, you know.

00:13:10 Speaker_01
After you left the room, I began to say, I just hugged the man that murdered my son. And I instantly knew that all that anger and the animosity, all the stuff I had in my heart for 12 years for you, I knew it was over, that I had totally

00:13:29 Speaker_01
Forgiving you.

00:13:31 Speaker_07
As far as receiving forgiveness from you, sometimes I still don't know how to take it because I haven't totally forgiven myself yet. It's something that I'm learning from you.

00:13:43 Speaker_07
I won't say that I have learned yet because it's still a process that I'm going through.

00:13:47 Speaker_01
I treat you as I would treat my son. And our relationship is beyond belief. We live next door to one another.

00:13:56 Speaker_07
Yeah. So you can see what I'm doing, you know, firsthand. We actually bump into each other all the time, leaving in and out of the house. Nah, conversations, they come from, boy, how come you ain't called over here to check on me in a couple of days?

00:14:11 Speaker_07
You ain't even ask me if I need my garbage to go out. Uh-huh. I find those things funny because it's a relationship with a mother for real.

00:14:18 Speaker_01
Wow. My natural son is no longer here. I didn't see him graduate. You know, you're going to college. I'll have the opportunity to see you graduate. I didn't see him get married. Hopefully one day, I'll be able to experience that with you.

00:14:36 Speaker_07
Just to hear you say those things and to be in my life in the manner in which you are is my motivation. It motivates me to make sure that I stay on the right path. You still believe in me.

00:14:49 Speaker_07
And the fact that you can do it despite how much pain I cause you, it's amazing.

00:14:54 Speaker_01
I know it's not an easy thing, you know, to be able to share our story together, even with us sitting here looking at each other right now. I know it's not an easy thing. So I admire that you can do this.

00:15:09 Speaker_07
I love you, lady.

00:15:12 Speaker_01
I love you too, son.

00:15:29 Speaker_13
So, postscript to this story, Mary started convening a group of parents who lost children to gun violence. In that group, she met a guy named Ed Roy, who also lost his son to gun violence.

00:15:40 Speaker_13
Mary and Ed fell in love, and when Mary and Ed were married a few years ago, O'Shea walked her down the aisle. Mary passed away this year from fast-progressing dementia, and O'Shea was one of the pallbearers at her funeral.

00:15:54 Speaker_13
Okay, moving on to our next story. A couple of days ago, I was giving a talk to college students, and everybody knew, obviously, who RFK Jr. is, a huge cultural and political figure of the moment, and he and Maha are everywhere.

00:16:09 Speaker_13
But no one seemed to know who his dad, Bobby Kennedy, was. That got me thinking about this story. On June 5th, 1968, as many of your listeners will know, Bobby Kennedy won California's Democratic primary.

00:16:23 Speaker_13
And that night, after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Kennedy was shot in a famous photograph taken just seconds after Kennedy lies on the floor with a teenage busboy kneeling beside him, cradling the senator's head.

00:16:39 Speaker_13
That busboy's name was Juan Romero, and he came to the United States from Mexico as a kid.

00:16:44 Speaker_13
At StoryCorps, just before the 50th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assassination, Romero came to remember the night that Bobby Kennedy was killed and how he met Senator Kennedy the night before when he delivered his room service.

00:16:58 Speaker_15
They opened the door, and the senator was talking on the phone. He put down the phone and says, come on in, boys. You could tell when he was looking at you that he's not looking through you. He's taking you into account.

00:17:12 Speaker_15
And I remember walking out of there like I was 10 feet tall. The next day, he had his victory speech. So they came down the service elevator, which is behind the kitchen.

00:17:24 Speaker_15
I remember extending my hand as far as I could, and then I remember him shaking my hand, and as he let go, somebody shot him. I kneeled down to him and put my hand between the cold concrete and his head, just to make him comfortable.

00:17:43 Speaker_15
I could see his lips moving, so I put my ear next to his lips, and I heard him say, is everybody okay? I said, yes, everybody's okay. I could feel a steady stream of blood coming through my fingers.

00:17:58 Speaker_15
I had a rosary in my shirt pocket, and I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me. I wrapped it around his right hand, and then they wheeled him away. The next day, I decided to go to school. I didn't want to think about it.

00:18:16 Speaker_15
But this woman was reading the newspaper, and you could see my picture in there with the senator on the floor. She turned around and showed me the picture and says, this is you, isn't it?

00:18:27 Speaker_15
And I remember looking at my hands and there was dry blood in between my nails. Then I received bags of ladders addressed to the busboy. There was a couple of angry ladders.

00:18:43 Speaker_15
One of them even went as far as to say that if he hadn't stopped to shake your hand, the senator would have been alive. So I should be ashamed of myself for being so selfish. It's been a long 50 years, and I still get emotional. Tears come out.

00:19:03 Speaker_15
But I went to visit his grave in 2010. I felt like I needed to ask Kennedy to forgive me for not being able to stop those bullets from harming him. And I felt like, you know, it would be a sign of respect to buy a suit. I never own a suit in my life.

00:19:24 Speaker_15
And so when I wore the suit and I stood in front of his grave, I felt a little bit like the first day that I met him. I felt important. I felt American. And I felt good.

00:19:55 Speaker_13
So when we launched StoryCorps, the great oral historian, Studs Terkel, came to New York to cut the ribbon on our booth. I think he was 93 years old at the time. And Studs used to talk about bottom-up history, history through our voices and stories.

00:20:08 Speaker_13
You know, it's so often told through the voices of politicians and statespeople, but Juan Romero is an example of bottom-up history.

00:20:17 Speaker_13
Until Juan Romero came to the booth and told that story, no one knew what Bobby Kennedy's last words were, is everyone okay? Juan Romero died just a few months after the 50th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

00:20:30 Speaker_13
And we got a letter from a listener shortly after the news of his death. And he wrote, I should start by saying that Robert F. Kennedy is my personal hero.

00:20:38 Speaker_13
So on the 50th anniversary of his death, I took the subway to Arlington Cemetery to pay my respects. I made it just before the gates closed. At RFK's grave, I sat down next to an older Hispanic man on the wall opposite.

00:20:50 Speaker_13
Bobby was important to you, he asked. I told him yes before asking why he was here. I'm here to pay respects to an old friend, he said. I was the one holding his head when he died. I remember that his eyes were wet with tears.

00:21:04 Speaker_13
He still had his suitcase from the airport. He had flown over for the anniversary, and like me, had just made it in time. As he left, he shook my hand. It's good to know that he's remembered, he said.

00:21:14 Speaker_13
Anyway, I thought you might like to know that Juan Romero got to say goodbye one last time. Okay, for our next story, we're gonna lighten things up a little bit.

00:21:24 Speaker_13
Let's listen to Laura Greenberg, who came to StoryCorps in Atlanta with her daughter to talk about what it was like growing up in Queens in the 1950s.

00:21:33 Speaker_02
My father would be in his boxer shorts in front of the stereo with a baton. He loved classical music and he would play it really loud and he would conduct the orchestra. The problem growing up in my home was that I didn't know what was normal.

00:21:49 Speaker_02
We're yelling and we're pinching and we're hugging and we're cursing and we peed with the door open. I mean, I didn't know this was not normal behavior. I didn't know people had secrets. You didn't tell your mother everything. When did you learn?

00:22:03 Speaker_02
Well, it's still hard.

00:22:05 Speaker_14
Who were your old boyfriends? How many did you have before that?

00:22:08 Speaker_02
I didn't have a lot of boyfriends. I had the neighbor boy. My mother loved him, but he wore his pants really high, and he had an underbite. Ooh, God. But nobody wanted to have sex with me, really, till I met your father.

00:22:22 Speaker_02
He was cute, but very, very quiet, and I scared the crap out of him. The first time he kissed me, he had a nosebleed all over his face. He was so nervous. It was terrible. It was, I don't know. Still married 35 years later. Unbelievable.

00:22:40 Speaker_14
Has your life been different than what you imagined?

00:22:43 Speaker_02
Yeah, a little bit. I married a Jewish lawyer, and he makes no money. So I thought I'd found success. And, you know, he's an indigent defense criminal lawyer, and he saves lives.

00:22:59 Speaker_13
After we broadcast this story on the radio, Laura came back to StoryCorps with her daughter and her husband, Carl, so he could offer a rebuttal.

00:23:06 Speaker_14
So your first kiss, we heard about how you bled all over mom. Do you have any different take on that story?

00:23:13 Speaker_03
That's how it happened. But I do have some Laura stories. We were having people over. She was going to make spaghetti, didn't have enough. So she broke the package of spaghetti in half. So she figured she had twice as much.

00:23:25 Speaker_03
And Carl had to explain to me, a pound is a pound. We make a very odd couple.

00:23:31 Speaker_02
He's from a New England family, and I remember we would sit at the dinner table at his house when we were dating, and no one would talk. And then I would start to giggle. I would get this, like, psychotic, hysterical laughter.

00:23:46 Speaker_02
So they already knew I was nuts. And I said, this is so refreshing. They don't ask about when I'm getting my period or how much money I make or Did I make a duty today? You know, my family was so intrusive.

00:24:00 Speaker_03
Your mother wasn't very happy with me. No. She thought my name was Paul for many years. Mark. Mark?

00:24:06 Speaker_02
Mm-hmm. She said, this is my son-in-law, Mark. And I'd say, Ma, his name's Carl. She'd say, son of a bitch, I can't remember his name.

00:24:15 Speaker_14
It's so weird, because our family now is the most functional of all of our friends. I mean, all my friends, they'd rather hang out at my house with my parents than hang out with me.

00:24:24 Speaker_02
But Rebecca was the one who said she really wanted to do a StoryCorps interview. You know, when I listen on my way to work, I'm crying, and my mascara's running, and they're very tender, you know, heartfelt stories.

00:24:36 Speaker_02
And I said, they're not ever going to play ours. But we didn't do it for that. We just did it to have that experience and share that moment and have it forever.

00:24:54 Speaker_13
So something a little bit different. We at StoryCorps became concerned with toxic polarization in the U.S. a bunch of years ago.

00:25:01 Speaker_13
Not the fact that we argue with each other, which is great and healthy for a democracy, but what happens when we can't see each other as human beings across the political divides anymore.

00:25:10 Speaker_13
So we started putting, for the first time, strangers across the political divide together. not to talk about politics, but just to get to know each other as human beings under the premise that it's hard to hate up close.

00:25:21 Speaker_13
And we did thousands of interviews, tested this, launched in a few cities a couple of years ago, and actually made it possible for anybody to participate anywhere across the country as of a couple months ago.

00:25:33 Speaker_13
It's called One Small Step, and the dream is to convince the country that it's our patriotic duty to see the humanity in people with whom we may disagree.

00:25:42 Speaker_13
So I'm not going to play a One Small Step interview, but I do want to play a story that helped to inspire One Small Step. And this takes place at the University of Texas in Austin, soon after Trump was elected for the first time.

00:25:53 Speaker_13
There was a protest there, and Amina Amdi, a student at Texas, was one of the protesters. A young man named Joseph Widenect showed up, a laid-off sheet metal worker, in a Make America Great Again hat.

00:26:05 Speaker_13
Later, they came to StoryCorps to remember the moment that brought them together.

00:26:09 Speaker_11
I noticed you with the hat. And I noticed that you were surrounded by some people. And I noticed that they were being kind of threatening.

00:26:18 Speaker_04
I heard a click of a lighter right behind my ear. And there were about three people trying to light my shirt on fire with lighters.

00:26:25 Speaker_11
And then somebody snatched your hat off your head. And that's the point where I, something kind of snapped inside me because I wear a Muslim hijab. And I've been in situations where people have tried to snatch it off my head. Wow.

00:26:39 Speaker_11
And I rushed towards you and I just started screaming, leave him alone, give me that back.

00:26:46 Speaker_04
I don't think we could be any further apart as people. And yet it was just kind of like this common, that's not okay moment. You are genuinely the only Muslim person I know. I just, it's not that I've actively avoided.

00:27:02 Speaker_04
It's just, I've just never been in the position where I can, interact for an extended period of time. So, I guess my views on the Muslim community have been influenced by a lot of the news articles and things of that nature.

00:27:16 Speaker_11
I feel like a lot of times in the media, you don't see the normal Muslim, the one that listens to classic rock like I do. You don't meet that Muslim.

00:27:25 Speaker_04
Can you tell me about where you grew up? What was that part of your life like?

00:27:28 Speaker_11
So I was born in Baghdad, in Iraq. I moved to the U.S. when I was 10 years old, being a Muslim girl. I stood out in almost every single way that you can in middle school, the worst time to stand out. What about you? How was it like when you grew up?

00:27:45 Speaker_04
I was homeschooled, so it was a vastly different experience socially. I didn't have, I guess, as many friends as most people would. I only went to public school one year of my life, and I got in three fights, and I lost all of them.

00:28:02 Speaker_04
I've actually lost a lot of friends because of this election, because of my political stance. So I hope that I can be the reason that someone decides to talk to someone as opposed to just cutting them out of their life or blocking them on Twitter.

00:28:18 Speaker_11
I'd like for this to encourage other people to engage in more conversations with people that you don't agree with.

00:28:24 Speaker_04
That's what it's all about. I'm so glad I wasn't the only one who felt like that.

00:28:38 Speaker_13
So after all these years of working on StoryCorps, you know, this effort has made me much more hopeful and incredibly proud to be an American and absolutely certain with every cell in my body that, for the most part, people are basically good.

00:28:54 Speaker_13
So on that note, final Thanksgiving generosity story. We've recorded a lot of interviews about what it was like being gay before Stonewall, which was the Rosa Parks moment of the gay rights movement in 1969.

00:29:08 Speaker_13
And one of those interviews comes from Patrick Haggerty, who grew up in rural Washington during the 1950s, the son of a dairy farmer.

00:29:16 Speaker_13
He came to StoryCorps with his daughter to tell the story about a school assembly he performed at when he was a teenager.

00:29:23 Speaker_16
I'm riding to school with my oldest brother and on the way to school I'm putting glitter all over my face. And my brother said, what in the hell are you doing? I said, I'm putting on my costume. He said, well, I wouldn't be caught dead wearing that.

00:29:37 Speaker_16
So he dropped me off at the school and he called my dad up and he said, dad, I think you better get up there. This is not going to look good.

00:29:47 Speaker_16
So my dad drove up to the high school and he had his farmer jeans on and they had cow crap on him and he had his clodhopper boots on and when I saw him coming I ducked around the hall and hid from him.

00:29:58 Speaker_16
And it wasn't because of what I was wearing, it was because of what he was wearing. So the assembly goes well and I'm climbing the car and I'm riding home with my father.

00:30:09 Speaker_16
And my father says to me, I was walking down the hall this morning and I saw a kid that looked a lot like you ducking around the hall to avoid his dad, but I know it wasn't you because you would never do that to your dad.

00:30:22 Speaker_16
And I squirmed in my seat and I finally busted out and I said, well, dad, did you have to wear your cow crap jeans to my assembly? And he said, look, everybody knows I'm a dairy farmer. This is who I am. And he looked me square in the eye.

00:30:38 Speaker_16
And then he said, now how about you? When you're a full grown man, who are you going to go out with at night? And I said, I don't know. And he said, I think you do know.

00:30:48 Speaker_16
And it's not going to be that McLaughlin girl that's been making goo goo eyes at you, but you won't even pick up the damn telephone.

00:30:55 Speaker_16
I'm going to tell you something today, and you might not know what to think of it now, but you're going to remember when you're an adult. Don't sneak. Because if you sneak, like you did today, it means you think you're doing the wrong thing.

00:31:07 Speaker_16
And if you run around spending your whole life thinking that you're doing the wrong thing, then you'll ruin your immortal soul.

00:31:16 Speaker_16
And out of all the things a father in 1959 could have told his gay son, my father tells me to be proud of myself and not sneak. My reaction at the time was to get out in the hayfield and pretend like I was as much of a man as I could be.

00:31:34 Speaker_16
And I remember flipping 50-pound bales three feet up into the air going, I'm not a queer. What's he talking about? But he knew where I was headed, and he knew that making me feel bad about it anyway was the wrong thing to do.

00:31:51 Speaker_16
I had the patron saint of dads for sissies, and no, I didn't know it at the time, but I know it now.

00:32:11 Speaker_13
So one last thought to leave you with. There was a StoryCorps interview between a dad and his son. The son, Zach Skiles, had served three tours of duty in Iraq and came back with terrible PTSD. He ended up homeless.

00:32:25 Speaker_13
And he and his dad sat down to talk about what he had seen in Iraq for the first time at StoryCorps and had this incredible conversation. Zach ended up going into recovery and going back to school and getting a PhD. I met his dad, Scott.

00:32:39 Speaker_13
He walked up to me and he handed me a sheet of paper and he said, this has meant a lot to me and I hope it can be helpful to you.

00:32:45 Speaker_13
And I opened it up and it was just one line, a simple quote from a theologian I'd never heard of before named Frederick Buechner. And it said, here's the world, beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

00:32:57 Speaker_13
So that's my wish for all of us this Thanksgiving. Don't be afraid and don't forget about the beauty and poetry and grace in the stories of our loved ones and our neighbors hiding in plain sight all around us. So that's it.

00:33:10 Speaker_13
Have a good Thanksgiving, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving, Barry.

00:33:20 Speaker_12
Thanks for listening, and thanks especially to Dave Isay, who's just a wonderful guy, and the team at StoryCorps for making this collaboration possible. To learn more about StoryCorps, go to StoryCorps.org, that's story, and then C-O-R-P-S dot org.

00:33:37 Speaker_12
Last but not least, if you want to support Honestly, there's just one way to do it, and we are running a great discount right now because of Thanksgiving.

00:33:44 Speaker_12
You can take advantage of that by going to the Free Press' website at vfp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.