Episode 234: Looking for Parking, Late Winter, 1996

This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DiMeo. I am going to do a couple of things I don't usually do here. I'm going to tell you a story about myself from my own history. I keep finding myself telling it. I had a book of Memory Palace stories come out last November and did book events at readings and interviews and stuff. This specific memory or set of memories or...

memory set among a context of other memories, however it really is that memory really works, keeps coming to mind. This one story just keeps coming out. It has been my go-to answer to a question I keep getting asked. And I have become so quick to go to that answer that I have at times found myself mid-answer and mid-telling of this story, regretting having started telling it.

Suddenly wondering whether I'm just giving some pat answer as though there was something less than sincere happening. That this is some sort of canned response. Like some script handed to someone with a headset at a call center to help them answer common questions about health insurance claims or clearing printer jams. And this is a thing for me as just like a person in the world. I have a hang-up.

I tend to distrust words that come too easily. I have the sense that real thought requires new language. And so there, mid-response to an old question, I get this nagging feeling that maybe I'm not digging deeply enough. not meeting this question with the same sincerity with which it had been posed. But no, the answer keeps coming to me because it is the correct one. So someone asked me why I tell these stories this way.

I am a writer. I have a specific set of fascinations like writers do. I could, the question goes, be writing about my particular... very particular fascination with the past, telling stories about the past in presumably any format, in novels or magazine articles or screenplays or blog posts or whatever. So, why audio? They are looking for an origin story.

A radioactive spider bite. Probably not really expecting one. Why a podcast? Some version of that question. And I tell them that I was looking for a parking spot on March 21st, 1996. In Providence, Rhode Island, one of those miserable New England days, late afternoon and late winter. Like maybe a few days before it had just been beautiful, low 60s, sunshine. Maybe you'd seen the first purple crocus poking up through the grass.

Maybe a pink-bellied robin or two. You saw bare arms. The winter coats were in the closet. Everyone was walking around, almost giddy. One of those days that fools you into thinking that it's spring, but it is really not. There is still more cold and more dirty slush to go. And it is dark, and it's only 5.15, which doesn't seem fair anymore. And it is spitting rain and sleet, and there is nowhere to park.

And the windshield wipers that I have known I have needed to replace for months and of course haven't replaced, they are, and this is my failing, failing to beat back the sleet. And the defroster can't keep up with the fog generated by the temperature differential between inside the car and outside the car, and from my own breath as I harumph and mutter. Because I am just circling the block looking for parking. Sheldon Street to Hope Street to Wickenden Street to Brook Street.

Sheldon, Hope, Wickenden, Brook. Sheldon, Hope, Wickenden, Brook. And there are no spots. No one is leaving. But I am driving back from class. I am finishing up my degree at Rhode Island College after what was a tumultuous three-stop undergraduate journey. I'm 23 years old. My girlfriend is waiting for me in our apartment. And I am anxious to get home mostly because she is anxious for me to get home. She is going through a lot. She is falling apart in a real way.

In a way that I am not able to help her with. Not in the way that she needs it. And I have known that for a long time. But I don't know. Well, I do, but... I'll just say that I know that there are times in your life when you don't fix the windshield wipers. And so I am circling, Sheldon, Hope, Wickenden, Brooke. And I am not listening to music, though I almost always do. I'm sick of the CDs in my car.

I'm sick of most things in that moment. And so I am spinning the dial. Or clicking. I don't remember what kind of radio it was or what kind of car it was, actually. But I do remember that there was nothing on. No song that could match my mood or even better change it. That has always been both the utility and magic of music radio. That I am caught up in the fog of the day and into that day.

Some DJ or their program director or some corporate mandate from a radio station's parent company, whichever, which in this case we'll just call the universe, delivers a song. And it is just the right one. And it changes your day. Maybe it makes you feel better. Maybe it makes you feel worse in some deeper way. But it makes you feel more. It makes you more present. And I've always valued that. It is one of the best things, I think, that art can do. But circling there in March of 1996...

No song is coming in to clear out the fog of that day or from my car, and I keep flipping, and I land on NPR. What is your relationship to Eric Morris? He my cousin. How does it make you feel that your cousin is gone? Make feel bad. I cry every night when I go to sleep.

Rhode Island had just gotten its first public radio station, and so I heard a story on All Things Considered. It was about the death of a five-year-old boy named Eric Morse, who was thrown from a window of a Chicago housing project by two other boys. 10 and 11 years old themselves, lived in the building. They'd ask Eric to steal some candy for them, and he refused. The story was reported by two teenagers, Lloyd Newman and Lee Allen Jones.

Just kids themselves with the helper producer David Isay. It was a long two-part documentary that aired, I believe, over two days. I caught some of the second part. It was about this kid's death. Unbelievably senseless, tragic thing. It's about grief, justice, and poverty, America. It's about everything.

There was this part when the little boy's half-brother sees him fall and tries to run down the 14 flights to catch him, as though he could. I haven't forgotten that. Though I don't remember parking. I just remember sitting in the car until the story was done and thinking that it was incredible that a story could hold all that and that it could just slip into my life like a song and cut through everything and help me.

Help me connect with these other human beings I was never going to meet. To understand that these other lives that I was never going to live were just as real as mine. And the fog cleared. And I was left wondering if that was something I could do too. And I tell that story for a reason.

This is the other thing I don't do very often, if at all. And I'm going to tell you why I am telling you this story. And it will be transparent and pretty blunt. If you are like me... lucky enough to have money that you can spare. And if you, like me, value stories on the radio that expand your understanding of the world and change your day and maybe your life. then I'm going to ask you to do like I am doing now and support a public radio station.

Here in the United States, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have canceled promised funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which does a lot of things. But the thing that I am most focused on here and just in general... as it supports local journalism and individual public radio stations in ways that are vital to each of them but are existentially vital to ones in smaller communities.

And I know that there are a million causes, and so many of them like this one have been made newly urgent by the sudden capricious at best and cruel at worst funding cuts in so many areas historically supported by the federal government. um so you know like follow your heart but this is where mine is leading me today here in july of 2025.

I will be donating my net income from this episode to a few different stations. In the continued spirit of transparency for this atypical episode, I will say that I am already a monthly supporter of one of the two stations out here in LA. And I'm going to step up like I should have done a long time ago and support the other one too. And then I'm going to do something that you might want to do. I'm going to go to a very helpful website that someone has pulled together called adoptastation.org.

where you can search state by state and find the stations that rely on this funding. And for most stations, it's going to show you just how much of its operating revenue is suddenly being lost. They also have this thing where it will generate one in particular need at random. I will be donating to KUYI Radio 88.1 on the Hopi Reservation, a bit north of Winslow, Arizona.

which has just lost about 64% of its funding. And I will be donating to that station in Providence. I owe it much more than that.

This episode of the Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMeo, in July of 2025. The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw and is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independent, artist-owned, listener-supported podcasts. From PRX, a not-for-profit public media company, which itself does a ton to support public radio and vice versa.

I am going to link to adoptstation.org in the show notes, as well as links to the two incredible documentaries Newman and Jones and I Say made about Eric Morse. These are some of the best audio things you can ever listen to.

Full stop. If you want to drop me a line, you can do so at nate at thememorypalace.org. If you want to follow me on social media, I am nate at Blue Sky. I'm sorry, I am nate de Mayo at Blue Sky. I'm nate everywhere else. I am... at the Memory Palace podcast on Instagram and threads, and at the Memory Palace on Facebook and Twitter. Radiotopia.