#59 Etta

Pushkin. Hello, I'd like to welcome to the show, Jackie Cove. Jackie. It's a new season. I'm with a new company, Pushkin Industries, and I thought it might be nice for you to, you know, tell everyone how much the show is meant to you.

Do you?

People look at my face right now we're on the telephone.

Could you imagine what kind of look I have on my face?

Right now?

Ecstasy discussed Heavyweight is back, Mamala. They thought we were down for the count. But what's this? Oh oh with a right now left? Heavyweight's back, pushing it with Pushkin, Mamala, Bushkin Industries. I got okay, you go with that.

Bye bye.

From Bushkin Industries. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight today's episode. Eda, right after the.

Break, all right, you're ready, you're rolling, You got levels, Mimei, mamomu. Okay go.

This is Gregor. You might know him from such previous episodes as Gregor. Gregor is one of my oldest friends, and today he's coming to me with a problem.

I'll take it from the top, Okay. So I have two parents, Milton and Eda.

Edda and Milton are both pushing ninety and Gregor's problem is that they refuse to move out of their house. It's the same three story Victorian Gregor grew up. He was twelve when the family first moved in. He still remembers the excitement as they unloaded boxes from the moving truck or moving trucks.

You know, normal people move with like a big giant eighteen wheeler moving truck. I believe when we moved we had six moving.

Trucks, one for the family's belongings, the other five for the collections. Some people collect coins, some people collect comic books. Gregor's mother, Etta, collects collections.

She has like maybe two hundred egg beaters, antique egg beaters. She has you know what a bisk nodter is.

No.

In occupied Japan, people bought these little figurines where the head would wobble back.

And forth like a bubble headed doll, something like that.

Anyway, she probably has two thousand bisc mounters.

Then there are the nineteenth century weaving looms, the handmade baskets, the medieval scythes. Eta airlic Is artist and her collections are the source of her inspiration. Edis's beauty in everything and in her hands, everything becomes art. She'll sculpt lint from the dryer. She'll put googly eyes on a splatter of dried bird poop.

My mother has been unbelievably prolific in making art for like the last thirty five years, to a degree where now the living room is like full to the brim with a million pieces of art, and every week she probably makes five or ten more pieces of art.

None of this would be a problem except that a large, cluttered house is becoming increasingly dangerous for Gregor's elderly parents.

I fear the more conventional fears. I fear my mother falling down a flight of stairs, or my father. I mean, there's all kinds of dark things that can happen in a house full of staircases.

And so Gregor wants to move his parents into a smaller apartment, something more manageable. That's his plan.

Yeah, that's his plan. But that's not my plan. This is eda The practical thing is, we can't be in the house too much longer. I'm eighty eight.

Yeah, but to move out.

Of the house isn't simply a question of selling the furniture. It's my god, what do we do with all this?

All this all the collections is what's keeping Eta in the house. And of all her many collections, of all her milking stools and antique rolling pins, it's her collection of fragile, colorful bottles that is perhaps the biggest impediment to moving. By Gregor's estimate, Eta has thousands wine bottles, perfume bottles, all decanters, bottles washed up from the bottom of the ocean. As well as being an artist, Eta is a Buddhist and her bottles are not just bottles

Noose to titropuce and madly dance upon it.

Isn't it gorgeous?

Very nice?

But how's about this one? It's a black popple with gold calligraphy, and it has the first letter shows a breath, somebody blowing a breath. Do you see it?

It really does look like a breath is blowing. That's by design.

There you go, there you go. You want me to give that away for nothing?

Other inscriptions are stop schlepping your old being into the future, or we cling to illusions of control. After hearing a few, I start to recognize a theme. All the bottles bear messages imploring one to let go. Yet Eda is incapable of letting go of the very bottles doing the imploring, or much of anything else. There is a little bit of a paradox, or there's something to kind of be struggling with.

Then you're very, very sharp. That is exactly see, exactly true. These works would talk about being stuck with the grasping level I suffer from that.

I could leave tomorrow.

This is Gregor's dad, Milt. If the taxi pulled up right now, you would you would jump in.

I'm ready to go.

Yeah, I'll stop you there.

He's never taken a tax in his life.

But if I pulled up that.

Uber duber so I don't get attached to furniture and bottles and stuff, I'll.

Just reinforce that point that while my father made positive that he's a Taoist and not attached to anything, he is very much complicit lmentlessly bringing home the raw material to which my mother, you know, turns the art out.

When was the last time you brought something home melt yesterday?

I'm always interested in what she's doing, and I often find the raw materials walking around in the woods or anywhere, fine stuff. Her only requirement is if I find something, it has to have what she calls a charm.

As for Melt, what he's charmed by, exceedingly charmed by, is that a Milt is a poet, and after over sixty years of marriage, he still writes poems about her, rhapsodizing about the way she creates art or cooks, or the way she dances. Milt says he can watch Eda dance all night. He just doesn't understand her being so chained to her belongings.

I'm stuck.

But I am not coming up with the solution that's any better, am I? Yeah, except dying, And that's not a solution. No, it's not a solution for greg He's left holding the whole.

Thing of Milton. At his three kids, Gregor is perhaps the one most ready to serve the child his parents handed to do list when he comes to visit.

I mean, he talks me, and that's because he has meanness in him. I'm not saying he doesn't, but he's also a very kind, giving, generous, loving person.

Yes he is.

Yeah, Yeah, don't tell him, I said, so.

In action is a choice not doing anything. Something's bound to happen sooner or later, and just sort of watch the secondhand sweep around the clock face until somebody's dead is the most passive and weakest possible way to exist. And it just feels like, you know, the Damoclean Sword of mortality is coming, and all we're going to do is sit here and watch Rachel Maddow until it cuts our head off.

And so, because Eda can't let go, Gregor wants my help in pulling off a most extravagant workaround, one that will allow Eda to both keep her stuff and still move out. It's a plan of action that Gregor wants to present to her.

What if you don't get rid of your possessions and we make a museum of your stuff?

Gregor explains to me the details. It seems that in the nineteen sixties, Etta and Milt about a two hundred year old farmhouse with no running water or indoor plumbing. Gregor's plan is to convert the barn into the Eta b airlike museum, convincing one's mother to downsize by way of a feral farmhouse museum that by Gregor's own admission is probably a breeding ground for the haunt of virus.

I hate to see a Minneapolis area code when you call. It makes me sad.

Your business doesn't bring you to Minnesota.

I'm guessing it does sometimes. I interviewed Prince for a cover story. Ever earned one may be very trap both prints. He's very touching.

Dmitri is a personal trainer who's kickboxed his way across Thailand. He's also a journalist who interviews celebrities.

So I went there, waited all day for the interview.

And a musician who had a song go platinum six times in Belgium.

And he was like, hey, you want to jam and I was like okay.

So I wound up actually jamming with Larry Grant and Prince for like twenty minutes.

What that was one sence.

Before Dmitri you can launch into his next sentence, I jump in. So your brother Gregor.

I'm familiar with him.

He has his plan, which maybe you're also familiar with. When I'm finished rehashing Gregor's museum plan, Dmitri offers a laundry list of issues.

Sons of getting Lemez's walking out of your part of the barn because it's high grassed, a lot of deer getting poison ivy.

So there's also like a horrible black mold. Because as you know, the farmhouse burned down.

My I'll buy it baker friend THEO stayed there and lit a fire in the roof and the whole house burned down in the.

Wad and along with his friend Theo's trouble. There was also his friend Sonem's trouble in that cursed place.

My friend, who spent twenty five years as a Buddhist monk under the dolly Lema, had to use a broom to fight off a very large raccoon that was.

In the house and was like growling at us and like his harrifind.

But for Dimitri, even more daunting than the rabid raccoons is changing his mother's mind on the matter. Whenever he's trying to clear space in his parents' home, it refills overnight, suggesting Eda's problem can't be solved by physical means. Instead, he thinks the problem has to be attacked at its psychological root. She needs to learn how to let go, and for this Dmitri has just the solution.

Well, maybe hypnosis.

It stopped her from smoking, which is probably a more powerful psychological and physical addiction than collecting things.

Eda was a packadet smoker, a habit she hung on for nearly thirty years.

Our friend, who was a hypnotist, said I can hypnotize you, and she went into the session thinking this isn't gonna work.

The whole time the hypnosis was going on. She was like, this isn't working, This isn't working, and then she walked out and never smoked again. He was an interesting person too. His name is Saul Feldstein.

He actually had one of his eyeballs was like hanging out of his face, and like it was like a sort of early commune hippie thing, and like.

Having grown up on TV sitcoms of the nineteen seventies, I'm well aware of the power of hypnosis.

Hanging out of his face.

Hypnosis gave Fred Flintstone the self control to stop beating Brontosaurus Berger Communie. It gave the Fonds the confidence that jumped Snake Canyon on his motorcycle his eyeballs. As a boy, I always wondered what it would feel like to have my full potential unlocked through the hypnotic arts.

Hanging out of his face, And he was very successful as a hypnotist.

Wow. Unlike building a museum, hypnosis requires neither time effort. Are those awful stanchions that snap back with that loud thwacking sound that make everyone turn around and stare at you. Fully convinced that Saul Feldstein is the solution to all of our problems and that museums belong in a museum. Dimitri and I say our goodbyes.

We're slating in. On part two, Johnny discusses post talking to Dmitri. Here we go.

I need to tell Gregor that I like Dmitri's idea much better than his. But I need to tread lightly from Cain and Abel to Stephen and Alec Baldwin. I know how competitive brothers can be, and unlike the Lord or Alexander Ray Baldwin Senior, I don't want to be seen playing favorites. Do you think you're like hypnotism has a role in this, Well, I hear.

That, like your voice went up in octave when we started talking about hypnotism and you got excited about hypnotism.

Well, Dimitri seemed to think that it would that it could help.

Okay, so the two of you should go see a movie together.

Going to movies is Gregor and my thing. Clearly I'm arousing some jealousy. I need to keep my arguments away from Dimitri and grounded in the merits of hypnotism. This whole barn thing as the symptom but through hypnosis.

Why are you saying it with like the weird accent on the word hypnosis.

I mean, do you think that hypnotism has something to offer here?

My short answer would be absolutely not. I think it's a waste of time. Hypnosis, hypnosis, hypnosis.

Hi, Johnny, how are you.

Hey, Dimitri?

Hi?

I've got your brother Gregor on the line with me.

We've met, Hi.

How are you?

Can you make the case to your brother?

Sure?

I just think that you know there's no harm, there's certainly no nothing to lose. It takes fifteen or twenty minutes, and she's proven that she's very susceptible to hypnotic suggestions, so why not try it?

I agree with all those points. My main feeling is that getting someone to stop a behavior like smoking is much much easier than getting someone to change their personality, which is harder to hypnotize someone out.

Of That may be true, I wouldn't disgrew there, swept up in a wave of brotherly bonamy. I decide it's a safe space to cautiously share my one secret boyhood longing, and along the way I could get hypnotized that as something too. Yeah, A lot of stuff, yeah, and immediately regret it. What do you mean a lot of stuff?

I mean, that's a smug smile. They could work on.

We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the.

Time, being more able to look people in the eye.

Not always hide behind a microphone.

Actually, you know there is all joking aside.

There is a new hypnosis that works on what's called voluntary baldness syndrome, where they realize that a lot of men are sort of doing it on purpose.

Why would someone do that on purpose?

Which is it?

It turns out that that hair loss is more of like an act of willful insolence often and a cry for peace.

I used to love my hair.

Well, if you loved it so much, why did you get rid of it?

First of all, I find the defensive and Gregor chime in here because I'm sure you're equally offended.

Now, Dimitri used to be bald as an egg and then he willed it back.

I think you you did at the same time with my mother.

We can get a two for one deal package deal.

I'm just saying it's science. If you read the New England Journal inmentivis.

With Gregor and Dimitri aligned in friends again. At my expense, I set out in search of the one eyed hippie hypnotist, Saul Feldstein. But it turns out Saul died in twenty nineteen at the age of ninety two. So I reach out to other hypnotists, all of whom pretty much hang up on me once I explain the project. So hypnotism is out, the museum is out. I'm stuck with my crap personality, and Edta is stuck with her house full

Just now, This guy told me that I was beautiful.

You are what's going on yet?

Gregor tells me that Edda has been offered a show at the Carter Burden Gallery in Manhattan. Edda is an outsider artist, so the offer of her own solo exhibition feels like finally, at the age of eighty eight, she's being invited inside. The show with its formal invitations and co check, feels like validation. It's the kind of opportunity Edda has always hoped for, and for Gregor, it feels like an opportunity for her pieces to find good homes

Sure.

I flew into town from my mom's art opening. Okay, we're here at the art opening. It's a pretty good drought. Everyone's eating wine and cheese.

And but it's so loud.

It was almost like a cartoon version of my mom's success story. And that like some stranger guy came up, was like, you're a beautiful woman, utiful. Her ego was buffed from many sides. Everything going great.

Oh.

Gregor's dad, Milt, on the other hand, wasn't having as good a time. He spent most of the evening in the corner nibbling on crackers. At the end the night, Gregor approached him.

Oh, father, let'd you make it up?

Oh it's very nice.

A little bit exhausting, he seemed like, even though he sometimes talks in a quiet voice, he was especially quiet, like I could hardly hear him.

On the drive home, Milt conked out When the family couldn't rouse him, they realized he wasn't just sleeping, but completely unconscious. Eda began yelling, wailing Milt's name. He was driven to the hospital, where the EMTs lifted him onto a gurney. The doctors thought he might be having a stroke,

Oh, and I thought this was a scam call.

How do you like that?

How are you well?

I wouldn't be so sure. It's not.

We haven't finished the call yet, right, So what's the bitch?

Johnny wanted to dredge up a bunch of painful family issues.

Oh sure, why not? The painfuler the better.

I want to talk with about the night of the art opening and the way it affected our thinking about remaining in the house.

I won't be able to stay here alone. Either I will become ill or Milt will become ill, and I need somebody to help me. There is a new little piece in my head that says things are going.

To change in the aftermath of the art show opening. As that is new reality sunk in, another plan began to take shape, one that Eda came up with. Her idea is to pair each of her message on the bottles with the right person. In this way, each one will find the right home.

I now have a whole shelf full of stuff that I'm now earmarking to give away.

That's something that you've not normally done.

No, I only gave very few things away, you know, to my best friend or to the kids, or something like that. Very few, very very few.

Do you think it at the beginning of something more of this to come?

Yeah, yeah, it has to be. It has to be. I take it very seriously. When I think of giving a person a bottle, I have to think would it be good for that person?

Okay? Oh really? All right?

A few weeks later, I called Gregor to see how Eda's bottle drive is coming along.

So she called me this morning saying, I thought of the perfect person to give the perfect bottle to, but I'm afraid it's going to hurt his feelings. Okay, she wants to give you a bottle.

She wants to give Okay, well that wow, that's really nice. Why would that hurt my feelings?

You know, if you give someone a bottle that says like I wish like I was present, then it's sort of an implication that you're not present, you know what I mean? It could be interpreted sometimes as like a sort of a criticism. So I don't know how you'll take it.

What did she tell you? What my bottle says?

That's as much as I can say at this point. It's as much as I'm authorized to say.

Even though I should know better know how Gregor will dangle this knowledge over my head like a cat dancer. My curiosity gets the better of me, and so I keep asking Gregor what the bottle says, which he uses as an opportunity to dissect my personality. All I can say, he says, is that it addresses some of your deep seated issues.

Despite all your insights about other people, you sort of tend to remove yourself from the collective and put yourself in the position of like journalistic observer.

Uh huh.

When you have these insights, you know, your dime store insights, you bolt on at the end of things where you're like, maybe we all need someone to run to that hallmarking nonsense that you did this about at the end of the day.

Jerk, you feel comfortable to saying something like that to someone telling me about my diet.

I knew you were going to take it the wrong way.

What's the that's the right way to take that?

I think sometimes you sort of make yourself resistant, like, oh, I don't matter, I'm just the fly on the wall to watching the human condition. As you know, people live and die and suffer, and babies are born and old people lower it into the ground. Oh when the dirt hits the coffin. That reminds me of my sponsor. I think you just you use the thing to remove yourself from what's actually going on. Okay, all right, you're like,

Maybe Gregor thinks I'm being too prying with his mom and this is just an expression of his protectiveness, so I apologize to him and tell him I'll try to be more respectful. It turns out that Gregor has little respect for my respect.

Yeah, hey, lady, I can be more respectful out there. I won't tell you to throw your stuff in the gar bitch, I'll tell you to throw it into recycling bin that way. Don't want why there'll be no landfill, you understand.

Very respectful?

Who even separate out the green bottles from the Clini glass?

Very good?

John?

Why would you even let me speak to your mother?

I don't know.

I mean I thought maybe you could patch things up, I don't know.

Over the next couple years, Eda continues to slowly search out the right homes for her bottles, whereas in the past, Edda was only able to give away a few. Gregor estimates that she hands out about one hundred. During this time, Milt is in and out of the hospital with cardiac issues ranging from fainting spells and high blood pressure to an actual heart attack. But then in the summer of twenty twenty two, it's Edda who received some bad news.

And I stayed there for six weeks, eight weeks, and sort of did the bedside vigil as she slowly died.

In those final weeks, Gregor saw a change come over Edda.

In the years running up to her death, she would say things like, listen, there's a rolled up rug in the attic that's worth a lot of money. Make sure that they don't, you know, cheat you out.

Of that one.

That was always kind of a sort of joke, sort of real thing. But when the actual room of death and dying was happening, that stuff didn't really come up. It felt more like she was at peace with a lot of stuff, and a lot of the stuff. She told me she would be laying there with her eyes shut but smiling, and I'm like, you know, Mom, what are you thinking about it? And she's just just with her hand. She would indicate that she's like dancing by

The words on the bottles had finally sunk in. In the end, Eda could dance out of the world gracefully, no grasping. It's the living who are left to grasp.

Since my mom died, it feels like it's harder to throw things out than I thought.

This is Gregor's sister Lexi. Again, like Eda, Lexi is an artist, and like Gregor, she's surprised by how, after all the years trying to get her mom to let go of her stuff, she herself is finding it so hard to let go of that very same stuff.

It just feels really hard to like her art. It feels it's like a part of her. Yeah, but it's not her.

Yeah.

I had an interesting conversation with my dad the other day, who is of course, really you know, grief stricken, and he.

Was saying why do people art?

And he thinks the reason people make art is so that they're not forgotten when they die, like you do something that remains in the world.

I think of her a lot.

Do you still carry with you your mother's love? Do you feel it?

I carry her with me. I mean in the way that you know, when I experience something I can't help but hear my mother's voice making fun of me for my description of what I'm experiencing. I might be describing something, telling her about just some Quotadian thing in the day. You know, this is a nice sunset, but I've a nicer if that truck weren't backing up, and I can hear her being like, why are you so rotten? You know what is wrong with you? I mean, that's that type of thing.

You can try to move your aging parents out of their house. You can treat death like a to do list with items to check off, but ultimately you can't control how people live or die. Even after Eda's death, Milt remained in that very same house. It's Dmitri and his own family that move in so that Milt doesn't have to be alone. And over the next few years, Gregor, in fits and starts and with disregard for what anyone thinks,

Love to live like a river flows carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

See what I mean, I do? But how dare she? I'm kidding? Cue the outro music, Cue the dime story in sight. Whether it's to a museum in the wilds of upstate New York or to a landfill, none of us knows where we're flowing. In the face of that, we need to learn how to let go. My feeling about what comes after death is constantly changing. I don't have a spiritual practice, so all I have is a feeling.

Now that the furnitures returning to its goodwill home, now that the last.

Month's rent is scheming with.

The damage to posle, take this moment to dissolve. If we meant it if we see we felt around for from things that accidentally.

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Phoebe Flanagan and me Jonathan Goldstein. Our senior producer is Khalila Holt and our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Editorial guidance from Emily Condon. Special thanks to Steve marsh Amy, Gaines McQuaid and Sarah Nix. Our production council is Jake Flanagan. Emmamonger mixed the episode with a music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson and Bobby Lord. Additional scoring by Boxwood Orchestra and Blue Dot Sessions.

Is that correct. She's called you geez okay.

How many times would you say you were rejected by girls in the dozens?

Is that correct?

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