Host: Dame Wilburn

Dame: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host, Dame Wilburn. This week, we're talking about the saying, "It takes a village." We have two stories for you about the ways in which communities can rise to this occasion. 

When I was little, we lived in a two-family flat, and my aunt and uncle lived on the first floor. They would take care of me from time to time. And my uncle once told me, "The only thing you need to know how to do in this world is to be able to scramble egg and make a proper cup of tea." Now, I don't drink tea that often, but I can scramble some serious eggs. And I learned at the hand of a master. Every time I make them, he crosses my mind. 

First up this week on the podcast, I got my boy, Maxie Jones. What up, Maxie? Maxie told this story at a Detroit SLAM, where the theme of the night was Education. Here's Maxie, live at The Moth. 

[cheers and applause] 

Maxie: [00:00:57] In February of 1978, I started the second semester of the 10th grade. That was on February 1st. On February 2nd, which would have been my second day of my second semester of the 10th grade, when I woke up to go to school, my mother didn't wake up that morning. Now, that following week, I missed school, of course, while we laid my mother to rest. When I came back to school about a week or two later, it was quite different for me. I remember that when I came back to school, I really didn't care much to be there at all. It was a new semester and my teachers didn't really know me very well.

I had this one English teacher, his name is Mr. Goldberg, and Mr. Goldberg would ask the class a question, and he would call on people. When he called on me, he would say, "Maxie, do you know the answer?" He pretty much like waked me up from wherever my mind would be. And I would say, "What? Excuse me? What was that?" And he would ask me the question again, and I would always have the correct answer. So, one day, he asked me to meet him after class, and I met him after class and he said, "I don't understand what's going on." He said, "You always seem lost. You're always someplace else during the class, but you know all the answers. You did all your homework." 

I just explained to him what was going on, and I told him that the reason I came to school every day was because my mother made me come to school. And now, my mother's not here to make me come to school, and I don't really feel the need to be here anymore. So, he said, "Well, just do me a favor." He said, "Listen. A teacher teaches eight." Well, there are eight periods in a day. A teacher teaches five periods in a day, and there are three prep periods. Usually, the teacher will use one of those prep periods for lunch and his other prep period. Mr. Goldberg said, "I want you to meet me in my office, sixth period." And so, I met him in the office sixth period just to talk. And then he said, "Meet me tomorrow, sixth period."

And this went on and on. Every single day, he had me meet him sixth period during his prep period. I would help him grade papers, and we would talk and we would do whatever. When open school night came, I didn't have anyone to come with me. My mother always came with me to open school night. When open school night came, my sister, who had just graduated from that same school, came with me to open school night. My social studies teacher wouldn't talk to her. He said, "I know who you are. You just graduated from this school." 

So, he thought we were trying to play some kind of game or something. So when the teacher wouldn't talk to her, Mr. Goldberg was standing outside the room, and he came in and he said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Talk to her." And he said, "I'll explain later." So, the teacher talked to my sister and told her about how I was doing in school and so on. And then, Mr. Goldberg, what he did after that was he went around to all my classes and talked to all my teachers and told them what was going on. He told them all, he said, "If you have any issue with Maxie Jones, come to me." And so, that's what he did. And so, it went that way for the whole semester, every day. I met him at sixth period, and he checked on my classes and all that stuff. 

What ended up happening was that the next year, when I was a junior, he did the same thing. He had me meet him every single day, and we talked, and he talked to all my teachers about whatever was going on with me and he let them know, "Listen, if you got any problem with Maxie Jones, come and talk to me." I didn't really realize that by the time I graduated from high school, I never missed a single day of school. 

Sorry. At my high school graduation, [sobs] Mr. Goldberg was there, and I asked him, I said, "Hey, Mr. Goldberg, how you doing?" He said, "This feels funny." He said, "I don't come to graduation." And I said, "Why?" He said, "Because I teach 10th graders." And he said, "I don't teach seniors, so I never come to the graduation." So, I said, "Well, why are you here?" And he said, "Because I wouldn't miss seeing you graduate [sobs] for anything in the world." [audience applause] 

I didn't realize then what he had done. It took me years before I finally realized that I graduated from high school with honors, and I was in the top 85 percentile of my class. I had a Regents Scholarship, and a full ride to college and all that stuff. The truth is I was really always academically capable of that. But it was one of those situations where all I really needed to do was to show up for it. At 15 years old, having lost my mother, not really seeing the value of education, I was really in line to be a statistic, a high school dropout, and who knows what would have come of it. But the thing is, I showed up to school every single day. And I realized that the reason I showed up was, because there was somebody there who was expecting to see me. And that was Mr. Goldberg. Thank you very much.

[cheers and applause]

Dame: [00:06:37] That was Maxie Jones. Maxie grew up in the Bronx, New York, on Story Avenue. I know, right? Since 2014, when he came to his first StorySLAM in Detroit, Maxie has told more than 75 stories on Moth stages. He says, as long as there's The Moth, he will have a story. Maxie and Mr. Goldberg are still friends to this very day. 

Ever since he graduated from high school in 1980, they've never been more than a phone call away. You can check out some photos of Maxie’s 1980 high school yearbook on our website, themoth.org/radio-extras. 

Bruce Feiler is next. Bruce told this story way back in 2011. You might have heard it before on The Moth Radio Hour. We're bringing you Bruce's story this week in celebration of some very exciting news. Bruce’s bestselling book, Council of Dads, has been made into a TV show. It premieres March 24th on NBC. Bruce told this story at a New York City Mainstage, where the theme of the night was Home for the Holidays, family gatherings and ungatherings. Here's Bruce, live at The Moth.

[cheers and applause]

Bruce: [00:07:52] It was the last weekend of June, and the next day was our fifth wedding anniversary. Linda and I had planned a trip, not really so much to celebrate that we had been married five years, but more to celebrate that our identical twin daughters had just turned three. Because after three years which we were on the defense, finally we could be on the offense again. We could live once more. But first, I had to go get this full body bone scan. I had this routine blood test a few days earlier that suggested something was wrong with my bones. And the bone scans showed that I had some large nondescript tumor in my left femur. So, two days later, I had to get an X-ray, the next day, an MRI. 

And that afternoon, I got a call from my doctor. “The tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor,” she said. It took my mind a second to convert that double negative into a much more horrifying single negative. I have cancer. For years, I had traveled and hiked and walked around the world, and suddenly I was facing the very real possibility that I might never walk again. 

I went home and lay on my bed and tried to make sense of all the emotions that were swirling through my head. And I quickly thought, I'm fine. I've lived a full life. I'm at peace. I also thought Linda would be fine. For all the pain she would experience, she'd find a way to live a life of passion and joy. But I kept coming back to my girls and what this would mean for them. Later, someone told me, “Oh, don't worry. They won't remember what happened to you at this time in your life.” And I said, “Yes. But if I die, that means they won't remember me.”

And just then, Eden and Tybee came running in this world of pink and purple. Our favorite nicknames for them were actually Pinkalicious and Purplicious. Though really, the nickname that we most liked came from the day they were born, April 15th, when the doctor looked at his watch and said, "Mm, Tax Day. Early Feiler and Late Feiler." [audience laughter] But on this day, they did this dance, and they swirled faster and faster until they tumbled to the ground. I crumbled. I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the art projects I might not mess up, the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down. 

Would they remember who I was? Would they miss my love? My approval? My voice? You don't really sleep when you just learn you have cancer. You just lie awake and fear. But a few days later, I sat upright in bed one morning before dawn, and I suddenly had this idea of how I might give them my voice. I would reach out to men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present in the lives of my daughters. “I believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities,” I wrote. “They'll have loving families. They'll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad. Will you help be their dad?” And I said to myself, I would call this group of men The Council of Dads. 

Now, my first instinct was not to tell my wife. Linda is a very upbeat person. She's got a big personality, she's got a big smile, she's got big hair, though I'm not allowed to say she's got big hair. [audience laughter] But I really couldn't control myself. And so, the next day I told her-- I got to say she loved this idea, but she quickly started rejecting my nominees. [audience laughter] She said, "Well, you know, I love him, but I would never ask him for advice." So, it turned out that starting a Council of Dads was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends. [audience laughter] 

So, anyway, we decided we needed some rules, and so we quickly came up with a number. First, we would have no family, only friends. Then we would have only men. We were trying to fill the dad space. And then, we went through my personality and tried to pick a different dad for every side. So, the first of these was Jeff Shumlin. Now, Jeff led this two Europe I took when I graduated from high school in 1983. We did a lot of crazy things on that trip. We picked up a car in Florence and turned it around in its parking spot and put it back. [audience chuckle] We actually broke into the Paris Opera House and ran through the tunnels. 

In Holland one night, we actually went cow tipping. [audience chuckle] But this is really what we wanted Jeff to teach our girls. We wanted him to teach them how to travel. So, not long after my diagnosis, we packed everybody in the car, we drove up to Vermont. Jeff and I sat in this apple orchard, and I read him my letter. "Will you help me there, dad?" I got to the end, and he was crying, and I was crying and I was waiting. He looked at me and he said, "Yes." I was like, "Yes?" I had forgotten, there was a question at the heart of it. [audience laughter] Frankly, it never exactly occurred to me that anybody would turn me down under the circumstances. [audience laughter] 

So, then I did him and it turned out to be a very moving thing I did with all the dads over the months. I said, "What's the one piece of advice you would give to my girls?" And he said, "Be a traveler, not a tourist. When you travel, get off the bus. Seek out what's different. Approach the cow." [audience chuckle] So, I said, "It's 10 years from now, okay? And my girls are about to take their first trip, and I'm not here. So, what would you tell them?" He said, "I would tell your girls to approach a trip as a young child approaches a mud puddle. You can bend over and look at your reflection and maybe kind of run your finger in and make a small ripple, or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like or smells like." I would tell your girls, "I want to see you back here at the end of this experience, covered in mud." 

Two weeks after my diagnosis, a biopsy confirmed I had a 7-inch osteosarcoma in my left femur. 600 Americans a year get an osteosarcoma. 85% are under 21. Only 100 adults a year get this disease. 15 years ago, they would have cut off my leg unhoped, and only 15% of the people survived. But they discovered about 10 years ago that one cocktail of chemo could be effective in some cases. So, quickly, I began this regimen. I got five months of chemotherapy, then I had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey, took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium, took my fibula from my calf and relocated it to my thigh where it now lives and took out a third of my quadricep. 

This surgery is so rare, only two human beings before me had ever survived it. And my reward for surviving it was to go back for four more months of chemo. It was, as we called it in my house, a lost year. We were so worried during that time about how this would affect our girls. But I think we came to feel perhaps it made them an ounce more caring, a dose more compassionate. They would run to the playground and embrace the girl with the amputated leg, or they loved to point out the rabbit with the crutches at the back of the children's book. 

One night, Eden came to my side of the bed and she had one of those nighttime frights. As I lifted my leg out of bed to take her back to her room, she reached for my crutches. If I could cling to one memory from this lost year, it would be walking down a darkened hallway at 04:00 in the morning with five little fingers grasping the spongy handle underneath my hand. I, of course, didn't need the crutch at that moment. I was walking on air. 

One of the things that was so powerful about starting The Council of Dads was that it forced me to do something we never do, and that's sit down with my closest friends and tell them what they meant to me. I also learned a lot about men in this process. So many of these guys are so much more communicative and emotional than their dads were. I mean, the things that we would talk about, our feelings, our fear, even our weight, one person really embodies this mix, and his name is David Black. 

David, in a lot of ways, is a classic man's man. He answers the phone, "Yo, Mother." [audience laughter] He gives boring-- That's, by the way, edited for The Moth. [audience laughter] He gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine and he bought a sports car on his 50th birthday. But actually, like a lot of men, he's impatient. He actually bought it on his 49th. [audience laughter] But he's also a new man. He leaves work early to coach little league. He hugs. He bakes. If somebody asked me if David cried when I asked him to be in my Council of Dads. I was like, "David cries when you invite him to take a walk." [audience laughter] 

So, David is a literary agent, which means he's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams don't come true. And so, this is what we wanted him to teach our girls, how to dream. So, I said, "Okay, David, what advice would you give to a dreamer?" He said, "Believe in yourself." I was like, "Okay, fine. But when I came to see you, I didn't believe in myself. I was at a wall." He said, "But I don't see the wall, and I will tell you the same. You may encounter a wall from time to time, but I'm going to show you how to get over it, around it or through it. But whatever you do, don't succumb to it. Don't give in to the wall." 

So, it's 20 years from now, I said, “And again, I'm not here. And my girls come to you with a dream. They want to climb a mountain or open a coffee shop or write a book. What would you tell them?” He said, "I would tell them we have to make the awesome mundane. We need to find a roadmap to the top of that mountain or an outline for that book or a plan for that restaurant. And if that dream should fail," he said, "we have to find a dream that can work. Because anybody can dream an impossible dream, but only a few find a dream that's possible. Those are the ones that are happy." 

On the one-year anniversary of my diagnosis, I went to see my doctor, Dr. Healey. By the way, Healy, great name for a doctor. [audience laughter] He's this lovely man, he wears these small candy-striped bow ties. He is the president of the International Society of Limb Salvage, [audience chuckle] which is the least euphemistic name I have ever heard. [audience laughter] He also pauses longer than anybody I've ever met. So, I said to him, "I said, doctor, if my girls ever come to you one day and they say, ‘what should we learn from our daddy's story,’ what would you tell them?" And this man pauses. He paused longer than anybody I had ever heard. And he said, "I would tell your girls what I know, and that is that everybody dies, but not everybody lives. I want you to live." 

A year later, when our girls turned five, we convened The Council of Dads together for the first time. As they walked through our door in Brooklyn, Linda leaned over to me and she said, "They're here. And you are too." Two years had passed since my first diagnosis. The quarterly scans I got showed they continued to be clean. And then, as now, I was cancer free. Also, after a year and a half on crutches and a year using a cane, and now, 500 hours of physical therapy later, I just walked onto the stage with only a slight limp. 

People kept asking me, "Well, are you going to now, disband The Council of Dads?" And I was like, "No. In fact, if anything, I can't imagine living without it." And one of the reasons is because our girls have come to love it. In fact, that morning as they walked through the door-- These are men, by the way, so they're competitive. So, they walk through this door. Each one had a bigger and bigger presence. I was like, "No wonder our girls love the council. [audience laughter] They have scored--" [audience laughter] But there's another reason that works, and that's because all these people related. I mean, it was interesting as we all started talking to one another that afternoon. I mean, at one point, I looked around and I thought, "You know what? I should have called this the Council of Bald Spots." [audience laughter] 

But Linda walked in and she said, "You know, I always wondered what you guys were going to talk about when you got together. And now, I know. It's midlife crises and sports cars. I mean, you are such men." That night, we all sat around the table and talked about what the experience had meant to them. One dad said that it helped him remember and rediscover the voice of his lost father. Someone else said it had made him a better father himself. What I kept thinking was that maybe this works for a different reason. 

Something in our culture today conspires against friendship, particularly as parents. We have our work, we have our family, but friends keep getting pushed aside. But what this had done was it had built a bridge and allowed us to invite our friends into the thing that means the most to us, and that is our family. Finally, that night, my friend Ben spoke up. He's very much the contrarian. He's the one when I asked him to be in The Council of Dads, who said, "I reject the premise, you're going to survive. I hereby tender my resignation." [audience laughter] 

And this, by the way, is a guy who doesn't like to admit he's wrong, all that much. But on this night, he said, "You know what? I was wrong. And now, I realize, whether you're healthy or sick, whether you're a man or a woman, we all need a council in our lives." And that ended up being the secret of The Council of Dads. Linda and I did it for our girls, but really, it changed all of us.

[cheers and applause] 

Dame: [00:21:35] That was Bruce Feiler. Bruce Feiler is the author of six consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including the book this story is based on, The Council of Dads. 

That's all for us this week. Until next time, from all of us here at The Moth, have a story worthy week.

Julia: [00:21:56] Dame Wilburn is a longtime storyteller and host at The Moth. She's also the chief marketing director for Twisted Willow Soap Company and host of the podcast, Dame's Eclectic Brain.

Dame: [00:22:07] Podcast production by Julia Purcell, with help from Rowan Niemisto at WDET. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.