National Story Project
With Paul Auster

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October 2000 --It's the first Saturday of the month, time for another installment of the National Story Project with Paul Auster. This time around, Paul reads stories by Randy Welch, Stew Schneider, and Sharli Land-Polanco. Plus, Paul shares a special story in honor of the first anniversary of the National Story Project.

Randy Welch
Randy Welch of Denver, Colorado writes: My friends Lee and Joyce live in North Shrewsbury, Vermont, about a four-hour drive from Logan International Airport in Boston. Back in the 1970s, an uncle of Joyce's died in Chicago. She decided to drive to Logan and fly to the funeral.

She drove east across the Green Mountains, then absent-mindedly turned left instead of right and drove the wrong way for half an hour before she realized her mistake. A little panicked about being late, she turned around and hurried across to Vermont, then across a corner of New Hampshire, and was now only about a half-hour's drive from Logan. She saw a big exit sign for the airport and pulled off. She kept following the signs pointing toward the airport and finally arrived--at a big grassy field with a couple of hangars. She had been following signs for a local airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. Now she really had to hurry to make her plane.

She raced back onto the highway, south into Logan, ran out of the parking lot, and begged the passengers at the ticket counter to let her go first because her plane was about to leave. They let her run to the next agent. She told him that she needed to get on the next flight to Chicago, pulled out her checkbook--and discovered that there were no checks left in the book. The only credit card she had was for a gas station chain. All the money she had was a single dollar. There was no way she could buy a ticket. Disconsolate and ready to cry, she decided to take her last dollar bill and call her relatives to tell them that she would have to miss the funeral. With tears welling up in her eyes, she saw the machine where she could get change for the pay phone. She put her dollar in--and out came two tickets to the Massachusetts State Lottery. She'd put the dollar in the wrong machine.

As the tears began to roll, a man who was walking by patted her on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry lady. Best buy you ever made." Now all Joyce wanted was to be alone so she could cry in peace. She went into the ladies' room. All the stalls were pay toilets. I don't care, she said to herself. I have no pride left. I just want to be alone and cry. She got down on her hands and knees and started crawling under the metal door. Halfway through, she heard a woman's voice say to her: 'Sorry, honey. This one's occupied.'

Stew Schneider
Stew Schneider writes: My second cousin's name was Farrell. He suffered from uncontrolled epilepsy and lived in a small brown room at the back of his mother's house. There was little hope for epileptics in those days, and he never held a job. Twice a week, he walked a block and a half to the Bluegrass Grill and bought strawberry pie. Other than that, he seldom left the house...

When I was young, I saw Farrell only once a year. On Christmas day, we would all pile into the Plymouth and drive to his mother's house and give them a fruitcake. Farrell would come out of his room and try, embarrassingly hard, to make polite conversation with us. More often than not, he would wind up telling enormously long stories. They must have seemed witty to him, since he guffawed a lot as he told them, but I could barely follow what he was saying and my mind would wander.

At a certain point, I would begin watching the door, praying that we would get out of there soon. Finally, my father would clap both hands on his knees and stand up saying, "Well, we've got many more stops tonight. Merry Christmas!" And then, in a rush of coats and hats and long woolen scarves, we would be gone for another year....

As I grew older, I paid less and less attention to Farrell's stories. They washed right over me, with no more effect than the blare of the television his mother kept running the whole length of our visit. Farrell's voice became just one more noise to be endured until that blessed clap on the knees that signaled my salvation for another year....

Eventually, the visits stopped. I went to college, graduated, and came back, but there didn't seem to be the same need to deliver fruitcakes anymore. Without the visit, Farrell disappeared from my world. He was a childhood memory for me now rather than a live human being....It therefore came as a great surprise when I was startled awake one night from a terrifying nightmare. In the dream, Farrell was standing across a wide street from me. With an exaggerated motion of the arm, he was beckoning me to cross the four lanes of traffic that separated us. His expression was utterly blank, but I knew that he wanted to tell me something of great importance. Again and again, I stepped into the road to try to reach him. Each time, however, the traffic picked up. Horns blared, and I couldn't get to him. I woke with a start....

The next morning, my father called to tell me that Farrell had unexpectedly died that night....I think I can come to terms with the idea that something of Farrell reached out to me at the moment of his death. But why couldn't I cross the road? I'd like to think that there is a chasm between the living and the dead, a gulf that mortal flesh cannot cross, even in sleep, which kept me from hearing that last story he wanted to tell me. But it may be that in those endless visits, so long ago, I learned too well how to ignore another human being, living out his life in a brown room at the back of his mother's house.

Sharli Land-Polanco
This one comes from Sharli Land-Polanco of Providence, Rhode Island: For many years my parents had a fortune from a fortune cookie that said, "You and your wife will be very happy together." They kept it in a framed picture of themselves smiling near a beach in Cuba. I always enjoyed seeing the picture and the fortune; it gave me a sense of stability. It felt like they were saying to anyone who cared to look that they were happy and that they were actively planning to stay happy.

I would say that they had a wonderful twenty-six year marriage. There were, of course, good times and bad times, but they were able to work together to make the life they wanted. In my opinion, there's not much more that one can ask for....When my mother was 51, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer on her tongue. Operating would have rendered her mute and would have required her to use a feeding tube for the rest of her life.

She chose radiation treatment, but the cancer moved to her lymph nodes. She had an operation on her neck to remove all of her lymph nodes. Within a year, the tumor returned on her tongue. She was so weak and thin that she no longer had the choice of an operation. Weeks later, she was forced to have a tracheotomy, which meant that she lost her voice and was required to use a feeding tube. She decided with my father not to undergo any more treatments and to stay at home.

During this extremely difficult time, I married my husband. We moved in with my parents to help my father and to be with my mother. Five weeks after my wedding, my mother died at home with the whole family present. (I am crying as I write this.) The day after her death, my family went out to eat--we really weren't up to cooking a big family meal. My father chose a Vietnamese restaurant. We ate our dinner, talking about my mother, and sharing memories. It was a bittersweet moment. We had all loved her so much, but at the same time we were glad that her suffering was over. After dinner, we opened our fortune cookies. My husband's fortune read, "You and your wife will be happy in your life together." We keep it in a framed picture of us smiling on our wedding day.

The National Story Project Celebrates its First Anniversary

Paul Auster
This is the twelfth broadcast of the National Story Project. It seems impossible, but we've been at it for year. When I came on air to talk about it for the first time last year, I said that I wanted to create a museum of American reality. With somewhere between four and five thousand submissions so far, we are well on our way to achieving that. Reading the submissions has been an extraordinary adventure for me. Somehow, though, it never occurred to me that the Project itself would become a part of the reality we were trying to record. But listen to this beautifully written piece by Ameni Elizabeth Rozsa, and you'll understand why it made such a strong impression on me. So here it is--in celebration of the first anniversary of the National Story Project:

It is with small shame that I move to turn on the radio today. Radio is the friend I usually neglect; the friend I only think to call upon when life has turned sad and desperate. I always return to it flushed with guilt -- but it is always waiting for me, it is always ready to take me back.

When I first lived alone, I listened, like so many, each day: when I awoke in the mornings, and again in the evenings, when I returned from work. While I waited out the siege of my first New York summer, radio's sounds were the only ones I could tolerate.

And so, when my first relationship went bad, I found myself in an apartment steeped in brown, and again I turned to radio. The taste of yucca, which I fried for the first time in that tiny kitchen, the smell of smoke-saturated curtains and Murphy's Oil Soap, the interviews, the news reports, the long recitation of member stations in the Berkshires -- these are bound to each other and to me, they are the taste, the smell, the sodden air of that isolation.

Radio was made for the lonely, after all, the displaced and the out of touch. Unlike television -- which stares stubbornly in a single direction, which demands the attendance of the whole, battered body -- radio is everywhere. Single people need radio, for only it can fill the enormous spaces that even their smallest apartments harbor. It does not spite us for out distraction, but tactfully begins from the moment we switch it on.

Its sound is our guardian angel; ubiquitous but unassuming. We move about our business while radio patiently follows. Its persistent soothes even our most sodden and sharp-edged isolations, softens the spaces between our souls and the ever-distant walls.

In these ways, radio is forgiving, and the lonely are in need of forgiveness.

Last spring it seemed my whole life abandoned me -- a needed job fell through, my relationship failed. I took the first, smallest, dingiest apartment that offered itself. I didn't have the patience, or the courage, to look further. I switched perfumes. I listened to the radio. And words started to drop in on me without warning.

As I shivered in the rush of possibility, my comforts and routines wrestled away from me, I became aware of the air nearest to me. This air knew skin, it was warm with my own voice. Sheltered, I grew still. I lifted plain and shining words from the cold that braced my insides. They swam to me, they offered themselves to my net.

For months I lived like this, avoiding new friendships, neglecting the few that had survived my prior couple hood. I postponed getting a new job, preferring to subsist on coffee, on toast, on the sun that would brave my filthy windows. These days were indulgent and untenable -- I would have to find work, I would have to revive old friendships, I would have to form new ones. The harvest would fall off.

Though I cried myself to sleep each night, this time was as sweet and as thick as any I ever lived. Each moment I distilled and drank off at my leisure: each day I reaffirmed my greed for my own uninterrupted time and only radio was invited. I grew strong, alone like that. But slowly, practicality ended my respite. I moved in with a friend, I took a job. I fell in love.

Falling in love is like painting yourself into a corner. Thrilled by the color you've laid down around you, you forget about freedom shrinking at your back. Neglected, my river slowed, my catches grew meager. I stopped listening to radio. I once again to think of time alone as something to spend or will away, rather than something I could stretch myself across.

And now, now that I have forgotten, things prepare themselves to fall away again -- another love will leave; I will take an apartment by myself. I feel the air turn crisp, the walls edge further from my body.

Shivering, nervous, I turn on the radio, for the first time in months. Paul Auster is reading a story about a girl who lost her father, who dragged a Christmas tree down the streets of a midnight Manhattan. He is asking us for our stories.

There are conditions: that they be both brief and true.

But I have no deaths, no travels worth repeating. I have no strokes of wild fortune or incredible tragedy. I have only an average sadness. Worse, I have been unable to write for weeks now, my mind riddled instead by imminent departures, imminent change.

Then it strikes me: this moment is the friendly hand of solitude. The radio is inviting me back, back to the rooms it will fill with its voice of warmest flannel, back to the warm light of time spent alone.

I have recognized the invitation only as I have written these lines. That is my story, complete with the climax that is now.

Sometimes it is good fortune to be abandoned. While we are looking after our losses, our selves may slip back inside.

The National Story Project can be heard the first Saturday of every month on Weekend All Things Considered.