The Legendary Dad

Has PODRE ever been credited with reviving an entire literary genre? No, but our guest today has. Mary Karr, author of THE LIARS CLUB (Viking 1995), two other best-selling memoirs, and five collections of poetry, comes from a long line of legendary storytellers. Mary talks to PODRE about her new memoir-in-progress, her famed childhood with a larger-than-life father, being a single mom in the 80s, and what makes Texas storytellers different. Then, a very special conferring of the Not A Terrible Father In This One Instance Award (NATFITOIA) upon poet, playwright, and gourmand John Harvey.

Mary Karr's many bestsellers, including THE LIAR'S CLUB, CHERRY, LIT, and THE ART OF MEMOIR, are available to order here.

You can read John Harvey's blogs on gourmet cooking, literature, and life here, or follow his Instagram for his series on Dante's Divine Comedy, food, and the meaning of life here.

Julian's favorite podcast, Circle Round, from WBUR Boston, can be found here. But don't forget, PODRE is "also... pretty good."

For our beloved close listeners, yes, the host does claim in the monologue that it's been 12 years since March 12, 2010, when in fact it's now been 13 years since that day when he began his recovery. But what happens when you produce a podcast by yourself is: it takes a while. All special edition collector DVDs of this and future episodes will come with AI-enhanced *years-elapsed technology* to account for those kinds of necessary temporal modifications, including the one in this paragraph.

Please head over to podrepod.com for more information about the show and to sign up for email updates so you never miss an episode or that moment in the near future when we blast out the super special patented PODRE secret instructions for how to be the perfect dad.

New episodes every Monday.

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Transcript

Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning, but what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE.

Julian: Hello, people. This is PODRE, the podcast. We are very happy to have all of you. Favorite podcast? Let me guess, Circle Round. I watch it too. It's a pretty good podcast, but this is also pretty good.

Chris: Speaking of podcasts, I've mentioned Marc Maron of the WTF Pod on the show before. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of his. That's probably the first podcast I ever really got into. And Maron got his start as a podcaster by bringing on guests who he didn't always know well or even when he did. The one thing that united all of them was that he had a problem with them, because at some point in the past, he'd been a huge **** to them. And so during the interview, he's getting to know them, he's realizing that I had them all wrong, and he's basically mending the relationship which he had harmed by being a ****. And as dramatic and satisfying as that framework was for Marc, this isn't really a strategy that's available to me, because one of the things that I'm known for is not being a ****. I have a different strategy for steering the ship of PODRE in its debut season, and that's to bring on people who, for the most part, I know pretty well. Sometimes very well, too well. There'll be some exceptions to this, like Keith Gessen in the last episode who I knew of but had never met before. But the majority of my guests in this first season of PODRE are people that I already have a relationship with and are going to be willing right off the bat to open up to me about really private and intimate stuff, their experience as parents, and their memories and feelings about their own parents. I got a big one for you today. Mary Karr is on the program. How do I know Mary, author of The Liars Club? Well, this is a story that spans about 30 years and starts right back when that book was first published. I grew up in a town called League City, Texas, which is halfway between Houston and Galveston on the interstate. And at the time, it was a pretty small town. It was about 34,000 people. Now it's it's tripled that, and it's just become part of the greater blob of Houston, the city that never ends. But when I was in elementary school, my best friend was a guy named Case Scaglione. He's still my best friend to this. Day, by the way, but we became. Best friends when we were in elementary school. And he had an Aunt Mary that. He'D talk about a lot. And one day he said to me, my Aunt Mary's going to come read to our class. I said, wow, okay. So the day of the reading incomes. Mary Karr And she comes to our. Language arts class, which is in a trailer on the outskirts of the school, and she comes and she sits at the tiny little desk, and she read from her brand new memoir, which at that time was, I think, number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And it's a memoir of her childhood growing up in East Texas, just outside Port Arthur, and it's about her mom and her dad and her sister and her, and it's an incredible book. It's beautiful, it's funny. It's credited with reviving the genre of literary memoir. She was hilarious. She was way too funny and way too real and way too kind of gritty and profane to be in a 7th grade classroom. And yet she still kind of kept it in bounds enough that it was good. She knew what she was doing. She read from that book, and it was so alive, it was so funny and it was so real. It was amazing to see someone who was sort of from my world, but but had also it was like she she landed from a helicopter and had made this incredible work of art out of a place that I had thought was where art goes to die, right? Sort of small town Texas. Now, that being said, she's from an oil work in town on the Carcinogen coast. Much more hard scrabble and hard bitten and blue collar than where we lived, which was close enough to the beach. That there were, like, ******* boats everywhere. And close enough to Houston that there were plenty of doctors and lawyers and close enough to NASA that I think a couple of people in our class had, like, parents who were astronauts. We weren't living out in the country. There weren't too many cows in my hometown. There were a few, but Mary came in like a freight train. She wasn't worried about how she was going to present to a classroom full of 7th graders. She seemed like she was talking to a room full of adults. And she was hilarious and magnetic and charismatic, and I've known her ever since. I was always around in this family. I was like the Owen Wilson character and tenon bombs. I was always just showing up for dinner. I was always at their house. And whenever Mary came, I made sure I was around and I'd get to hang out with her. And as I got older and I started to want to become a writer and writing poetry, she was patient and tolerant enough to read my first poems, my horrific, embarrassing, pitiful, 17 year old poems. Mary would read them, and that's how lucky I was as a young writer. I had somebody like Mary Karr looking at my stuff and going, yeah, you got something here. Keep going. And she'd tell me what to read. She'd send me out to go read Spanish poets or the surrealists or should tell me, go get Octavio Paz's book, The Bow and the Lyre. And I'd be like, yeah. And everything she told me to read, I read. So I kind of got, like, a Mary Karr poetic education for free as a teenager. And after that, I didn't see her a lot. If I was ever swinging through New York City, sometimes we'd meet up and hang out for a little bit, but mostly I just would email her things that I was writing, things I was thinking about, questions I had about being a writer, and she always responded. It was like having a mentor who was a famous poet personality. I mean, she you know, her boyfriend was like Steve Martin at the time. Like, she had this rarefied life. She knew everybody, and everybody knew her, and but she had time for me. She always had time for me. I could always reach out to her, and she'd be there, and that just made me feel like I must be. A little bit special too. Maybe I can get somewhere like that one day.

Cut to years later. I'm going to Syracuse University for a master's in creative writing, where Mary teaches. So Mary not only got to witness me as a sweet little kid and me as a awkward, presumptuous teenage poet, but me as a full blown alcoholic spiraling out of control in my mid 20s. So she knows me pretty well too. Now, of course, she's famously in recovery, and at the time when I was a grad student, she was just publishing her third memoir, LIT, which is about her drinking and her getting sober. So it's like, you're going to class with the ******* yoda of AA, and I'm in denial about my own alcoholism. It was pretty uncomfortable for me. I'm trying to keep my **** together around her, but by that point, I can't really keep my **** together at all, and it's just out of my control at that point. What was it like? Well, drinking had been a lot of fun in the beginning, but the fun had dropped away. I drink every day, and by that point, I was blacking out three, four, sometimes five times a week. I was having panic attacks. I was having withdrawal seizures. I was doing a lot of dumb ****, getting in more trouble for it. There was a moment where Mary herself threatened to more or less remove me from the MFA program, and I knew that if I squandered the greatest opportunity that had ever been given to me, I would not recover from that. Mostly I didn't understand why I felt so afraid of myself all the time. One time in my second year, I was taking a class with George Saunders. It was his class on the Russian short story. It's the class that he recently turned into a book called A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which is out in paperback now, and it's easily the best book on writing fiction I've ever read. But Mary used to drop into that class from time to time. Even though she was this distinguished professor, she loved George and she loved to hear him teach. So sometimes she'd just show up and take a seat with the grad students and sit there and take notes and raise her hand and be a student for a day. And one such day, I get to class late. I know that I smell like a ******* distillery. And there's Mary. She's sitting in the student section. And she calls over to me, brunt, come here. I saved you a seat right in front of her. And it was wearing this T shirt that this stupid T shirt with a blazer. And I remember that because when I sat down in front of Mary, she reached up and she patted me on the back, gave me a kind of little maternal pat on the back. And I knew that she could just ******* feel the bourbon infused sweat that had soaked through my clothes. And I remember writhing in shame and self disgust and dread. Oh, no. She knows what I was doing last night, early this morning, as if up until that moment, I had been hiding it well enough that I'm going to get found out. A little while after that, she calls me into her office. She says, Brunt, again, it's like 10:00 in the morning, so I'm not feeling so great. I probably thrown up a couple of times that morning. She calls me in her office. She goes, brunt, when are you going to get sober? Just looks me dead in the eye and asks me that. And I look at my watch, and I'm trying to be ******* cute. And I go, I happen to be sober right now, Mary Karr. I mean, like, my knees are knocking. I don't ******* know what to say to that. I just get the hell out of there. I had to keep going a little bit. I wasn't quite finished. On March 12, 2010, I was finished. Nothing in particular had happened. It wasn't like that was the day I killed nine people on the highway because I was driving. Wasn't anything dramatic. It was just that was the morning where my denial broke. That morning, for whatever reason, I knew it like I knew my own name. I was going to die like this. I nearly had a couple of times for real just in the last year. I was going to die a drunk death. And I didn't want to. I had a moment of clarity. And it's like once you have it, you got to use it. Because if you don't, you're going to slip right back into the same cycles of denial and dread and mania that you've been in all this time. I have this moment of clarity, and I know I got to do something right now. I have this like this window that's rapidly closing. And I was walking through a park in Syracuse, up a little hill. I took up my phone and I called Mary Karr and she picked up right away. She said, hey, what's going on? And I could barely speak. And I said, I can't keep doing this. And she said, Doing what, honey? And I'm like whispering now, like I can't keep drinking. And her voice just melted. She was so tender. She said, oh honey, you don't have to you don't ever have to feel this way again. She was right. She was right. That was thirteen years ago. And I've never felt like that again the way I did on that hill that day. Not once I got sober when I did. Because she was there. Because she picked up the phone and an hour later two guys showed up to my apartment and took me to my first meeting. And I haven't had a drink since. One of those guys is still my sponsor and the other one helped me make this episode. Mary saved my life. That's what that thing is about. And she's to this day, she's a huge part of my recovery and so many people's recovery. And she's somebody that I talk to a lot more than just about anybody. About sobriety and addiction and family. Addiction moves through families up and down the family tree. That's how it spreads. It doesn't randomly select people in the population and moves through households. And because it's a family problem, it helps to have a family solution. Mary has been that for me. Mary Karr is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which, Tropic of Squalor, was long listed for the Pulitzer Prize as well as three bestselling memoirs. She's a chaired professor of English at Syracuse University. And when the Paris Review launched their Art of Memoir series to go along with their Art of Fiction and Poetry series goes back like 70 years now. Mary is the first writer they interviewed. She's the number one memoirist on planet Earth. My interview with her is coming up right after this. 

Chris: Do you remember anything about me as a little kid?

Mary: Yes, I do.

Chris: Can you tell me what?

Mary Karr: You were extremely beautiful. You were no, you were. You were extremely, extremely beautiful.

Chris: I was awkward. I had braces and glasses.

Mary Karr: You were a very beautiful child. Extremely beautiful. Very brilliant, very sensitive. Trying to act like you weren't. And the best thing about you was your humor and your sensitivity and your presence. But you had this Sicilian godfather thing going on with my nephew.

Chris: We were mafiosi, the two of us.

Mary Karr: That's right. The double dons. As I thought of you.

Chris: We were made men at 14 years old.

Mary Karr: More like twelve. You were made men.

Chris: What about do you remember when I was your student? Do you remember that day when you came to George Saunders class? The Russian Lit class.

Mary Karr: Yes, I do. I remember how you smelled, mostly.

Chris: So not as beautiful as when I was a child.

Mary Karr: You were still extremely beautiful. You were still often extremely either drunk or hungover.

Chris: Yeah, I think that's right. Those are the modes that I toggled back and forth between.

Mary Karr: That's right.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: People had said, what are we going to do about Chris? What are we going to do about Chris? And I said no. I said, I'm afraid he's going to die. And I talked to Case. I went behind your back and talked to your consiglierie, and he was as despairing as I was, as was Miss Lecia. And then I took matters into my own hands.

Chris: What did Lecia think?

Mary Karr: She was worried about you. We were both worried about you. And I don't even were Lecia and I in touch then? What year did you get sober?

Chris: 2010.

Mary Karr: Yes, we were in touch. We stopped talking in '99 after Mother died, and then the next time we stopped talking was for good was 2013.

Chris: Yeah. So this was sort of the tail end of the period where you all were somewhat in touch. What are you working on, Mary?

Mary Karr: Well, since my sister died two years ago. I found myself really kind of cornered by this book. Cornered almost like you're in a ring with a boxer who gets you down in the corner, and it's like, pummeling you. As you know, before she died, we hadn't been in touch for seven years. It had always been a very fraught relationship. She was my childhood hero. She saved my life in some ways, and she was the worst adversary I've ever had in that even though she loved me enormously, she really often, I think, really intended me harm, and she was a powerful person.

Chris: So this book isn't like the others.

Mary Karr: It's not, because for one thing, I'm interviewing people.

Chris: Had you never done that before?

Mary Karr: Not really. I mean, I called Mother and said, what year did this happen? So much. Interview her as help me. Is this the chronology?

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: No, that was in 1943, not 1950.

Chris: Obviously. You researched the liars Club. You researched Cherry. You researched LIT. You had to call people. You had to have conversations no. Or write to people.

Mary Karr: No, I did not. I called them and notified them what I was working on and said, this is what I think will bother you about what I'm thinking of writing. So if you have a problem, now is the time to squawk.

Chris: Speak now.

Mary Karr: Speak now.

Chris: But you've never done this process of sitting people down and interviewing them and saying, tell me everything you remember about my sister.

Mary Karr: When was the first time you saw her?

Chris: Do you feel like this process is working?

Mary Karr: I feel like I'm as confused about her as I've ever been about anybody in my life. I thought I was confused. I'm even more confused now. It's a saga. It's complicated. And it's a ghost story. Yeah, it's a ghost story. It's a story about the most secretive person I've ever known.

Chris: Do you think there'll ever be a way that you talk to her through this book?

Mary Karr: I just had an amazing thing happen. I found all this video, including videos of you and Case at Doonie's party.

Chris: No, extremely. There's video of that.

Mary Karr: Oh, yeah.

Chris: That is some compromise right there.

Mary Karr: I know. I've looked at it. Great videos of Doonie telling stories, too. But I had this amazing experience where I've been looking for her in these videos, and mostly it's like the kids, or she passes through a lens, or it's mother telling a story, or it's something. And I saw in the little icon, her face, circa maybe she was the 80s, maybe Case was four. So what year were you for?

Chris: 86.

Mary Karr: I clicked on that video and she went like this, held her hands up like a girl popping out of a cake. And then she turned her head like this and bit a cuticle. And I held the camera there on her. And then she went like this, and swung her head so fast, your little big heavy gold earrings swung. And she looked at me, and I saw her see me.

Chris: Wow.

Mary Karr: And I said out loud, in my empty apartment, there you are. And she said, Maybe I should go watch a movie. And I said, Maybe you should stay right here. And she looked at me again, and I saw her see me again. And I thought, she's been looking for me, too, on her side of the dark. God, it was a real ghost story. It was time collapsed.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: And we saw to the backs of each other's skulls for a moment in not extraordinary time, not ordinary time, but extraordinary time.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: So, yeah, that's what it's like. I'm haunted. I mean, it's a ghost story, and I'm haunted by her ghost. And I hadn't seen her for seven years before she died, and she's been dead two years. So I've been looking for, in a way, for nine years in the past 18 months, interviewing people. The depth of her secrecy, so profound.

Chris: I can't stop thinking about her, and I'm not even writing about her. I've only really written about her once since she died, and it destroyed me to do that. It caught me completely. I thought it was going to be fine, and then I was working on it, and then I read what I wrote, and I just broke down, like weeping. I just overcome with feelings of grief that hadn't really been possible until I wrote about her.

Mary Karr: I know. Welcome to my world. That's what I do for a living. Can you believe I do this? Believe this? The fourth time I've done it.

Chris: Yeah. And I'm like, sign me up. Let me in there. So tell me what you remember about Pete Karr.

Mary Karr: Pete Karr? The thing to remember about my daddy other than that I think he was one of the planet's great fathers, is that he was born in 1910.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: So he was 45 when I was born. But you've got to understand that he grew up in a logging camp, and his first job was hauling water to wood, haulers the guys who were out in the woods. So what he had was he had a yoke like oxen had on their necks from end in with a bucket on each end with a dipper in each bucket. And he would go out in those old piney woods across that old red clay.

Chris: East Texas.

Mary Karr: East Texas Piney Woods 1920.
 
Chris: I used to bring my dad a big jug of water while he was mowing the lawn in East Texas. And that was hard because it was a big jug and I was little and I had to carry it. I didn't want to spill it.

Mary Karr: Right.

Chris: I can relate how hard it was for Pete Karr.

Mary Karr: Yeah. That and Normandy Beach through to Buchanan.

Chris: Ardenne Forest, Liberating Europe, so on and so forth.

Mary Karr: I just got his discharge papers from World War II. He had seven Ron stars with valor citations.

Chris: What steps you got to do to get those?

Mary Karr: Well, the V for valor is a very big thing. You have to have done something to save a lot of people's lives. If it had been witnessed, you would have a Silver Star. I remember that I was his run in mate. I was his run in partner.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: And he liked to in my in my house. My mother felt to me more dangerous.

Chris: He felt safe.

Mary Karr: He felt safe to me.

Chris: Safer or safe?

Mary Karr: Safe, yeah. Daddy never lost his temper. Daddy same world every day. Even when he hit somebody, he never lost his temper.

Chris: Even when he was being violent, he hadn't lost his temper.

Mary Karr: That is correct. It was just like the washing up. It had to be done to knock somebody out.

Chris: Did you release ever get afraid of him? Like seeing him whip somebody's ***?

Mary Karr: Never was afraid of him. He spanked me one time that I remember. He was holding on to me. I was running around in the circle, and then I stopped and I said, go ahead and hit me if it makes you feel like a man. Must have been about six. And he busted out laughing. He never thanked me again. He said, Pokey, I just don't have the heart. And when he and my mother split up, she had left him. We went on vacation. Of course, they got a divorce in the middle of the vacation. And Daddy went back to Texas. My mother bought a bar in a house and married the bartender. But when Daddy got ready to go, I zipped myself into his duffel bag. So when he went to put his last shirts in his duffel bags, he unzipped the duffel bag and I was laying in there and he said, get out of there, Pokey. You're going to break a fellow's heart. He had big tears in his eyes.

Chris: Oh, God.

Mary Karr: He was a real sweetheart. He was super sweet. So everybody daddy was a badass.

Chris: That's the reputation, right? The lore is that Pete Karr was the toughest son of a ***** in.

Mary Karr: East Texas when Daddy walked into bars. And David Harmon will tell you this, there were men who fled. You would hear the screen door slamming out the back doors. People ran away.

Chris: Is that like fearlessness? That kind of like, willingness to do violence? Is that just circumstances? Is that what happens when you grow up in 1910 in a logging camp? Or is there something different about him? I mean, not every guy who was of his generation and of that place was necessarily that badass.

Mary Karr: No, he was badass. The great story about him there are a couple of stories. I just heard from David Harmon when I was down in Texas last week, being inducted into the Gulf Coast Hall of Fame. The first one I had heard from Daddy. But David Harmon had heard the same story from Uncle Crook, who was there, my daddy's youngest brother on his deathbed. And apparently there was a guy came through at the county fair, some big guy from some big boxer. Wasn't Archie Moore or anything, but it was somebody whose name you would recognize. And if you could stay I think if you could stay three minutes in there with them, you get a dollar. Well, it was one dollars. Nobody would get in the ring. It was $2. Nobody get in the ring. When it got up to I think it was six or $7, which is what they made in a week. Crook. Karr said I heard Pete. Stand up. I heard those old brogan shoes hit the floorboards of the bleachers, and I heard him stand up. And he walked out. He walked into the climbed into the ring. He took his shirt off and hung it over the corner post. Daddy started dancing around, like, almost like a kangaroo or something, like jumping on his back legs and doing his fist in a circle and going around and around the guy. And the guy's just, like, looking at him. And the guy swings at Daddy and swipes at Daddy and swings at Daddy. And Daddy was super fast. And then he hit him like six or seven times, like Pete, what Crook says was the blood flew. He busted his mouth, he broke his nose, and he blacked both eyes and his chest. There were stripes of blood. He never landed punch on Daddy. So it gets to be three minutes and Daddy's standing there, he wants his $7. And the guy says, okay, you fought a good fight. I'm calling this a tie. The guy's bleeding and Daddy squares off at the ref. He goes, okay, okay. And he takes his hand and says, you won.

Chris: So why you, though? Why were you the running buddy and not your big sister?

Mary Karr: Well, we were losers. We were the losers in the house, me and Daddy. Mother was really beautiful and very smart and she worked for the newspaper and she drank and she was badass and.

Chris: Knew Picasso and lived in New York City.

Mary Karr: That's right. She didn't know Picasso, by the way, but she did know De Koonig. 

Chris: Stand corrected. 

Mary Karr: And she knew Pollock. So not nobody. And Daddy would say to me, Pokey, let you and me sneak off and get a cherry freeze. Now, I was about six years old before I realized nobody else wanted to come with us to the Farm Royal where the car hop would bring us cherry freezes and some onion rings. But I thought we were doing, like, this great thing.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: And when he took me to where those guys were drinking and gambling, where they had the big tanks full of minnows, their little black comma bodies all going this way and all going that way at the bait shop where they played dominoes or they went hunting or anything like that, I just thought that was magic. I felt safe there. I was never scared. I was never bored. They told these great stories, and it was understood that I was really spoiled. Like, there were no other children, no other women ever came in there, much less a girl. A little girl.

Chris: Little girl, like between the ages of 1234.

Mary Karr: When I got married, I had my girlfriends with me and Lecia was in the up where I was getting dressed and Mother was there still hungover from the night before. I'm sad to say I stepped into my wedding dress and all the women were horrified. You're supposed to pull a dress like that over your head. But Daddy dressed me when I was little. He didn't dress lace, so it was really weird. I just was given to him. I think it was that Mother was overwhelmed and I was the baby and I would have been more trouble or something like that. But he didn't see me as troublesome. He saw me as, like, amusing.

Chris: But that means that you knew a side of him that they didn't. You all had an intimacy that he didn't let Lecia or your mother they didn't come to the bait shop with him or see him around his friends like that.

Mary Karr: That's right. I've been talking to you about my sister. She was ashamed of Daddy. Daddy was corny. He was a hick.

Chris: But you liked all that stuff, all that Texas exotica, the fishing and hunting and the idioms and the storytelling.

Mary Karr: I love the language. I love the language. And I was just listening to a video of Doonie the other night at that party, one of those Christmas parties he gave that you went to so drunk and almost got yourselves killed in.

Chris: The 90s. In the 90s, we should stipulate. Clinton was still in office when this happened, which means I was a minor. But yeah, continue.

Mary Karr: Doonie saying, man, I shook so many hands tonight. My hands like an old fiddler crab. And then he says, I told so many lies tonight, I sent everybody in this hotel to hell. No. So I mean, just the language of it, the idiom of it. I'm sending everybody in this hotel to hell. But like two bulldogs in bed.

Chris: The attitude of it too. I mean, it's poetic, but it's an attitude. You can't say any of that unless you feel that way.

Mary Karr: There's a wonderful book you should read that I think explains both Doonie and My Daddy by Walter Benjamin. Aka Walter Benjamin. If you're an American speaker.

Chris: The Age of Mechanical Reproduction or something different.

Mary Karr: No, something different. The storyteller, it's about the nature of story, and it's about a certain kind of folk tale that is full of, like rogues and thieves and villains and badasses that has enchantment in it and has mystery. And often there's a trickster type character. The storyteller is often a trickster type character who there's a guy with a big badass guy comes to a small German town. He's got a big beard, and nobody will shave his beard because they're afraid they're going to hurt him, and then he'll fight him. And finally this little boy about ten years old says, I'll shave you. Gets his razor out. And the guy says, well, if you nick me, I'll kill you. And the boy says, if I nick you, I'll cut your throat and run away. So in a way, their tales all full of violence, but they have a moral side.

Chris: What's the moral of that one?

Mary Karr: Don't tell somebody what you're going to do. You're going to kill them in advance.

Chris: Keep your ******* mouth shut.

Mary Karr: Keep your mouth shut.

Chris: Instructions. These are instructions for survival.

Mary Karr: But all the stories are completely local. And often the stories I mean, I'll tell you a story Doonie, I just recorded of Doonie telling is a perfect example of this kind of story. Benjamin is talking about the difference between an epic and a novel and this kind of folk chronicle. It's a chronicle. It's a completely local set of episodes. It's not about history or journalism or information. It's about action. So I said to Doonie as we're driving down the beach road past Sabine Pass, didn't you all catch an alligator on this road here one night? He says, no, we didn't catch him. We lassoed him. I said, how did you all come to lasso an alligator? He says, well, the way it started was Frankie Crone decided to jump federal bond because he'd been arrested smuggling dope on a shrimp boat. Now, it wasn't his shrimp boat, but he was on the boat, and he was going to jail for like forever. And he said so he bailed out and decided to jump federal bond and called me and asked me if I would come to Galveston and get it. So I did. I said, isn't Frankie Chrome still a fugitive? And then he goes, Maybe we better leave that part out. And then he says, so me and Joey head pick up Frankie Crome. We're driving back down the beach road, and there's this great big alligator stretched across the road. I said, what do you mean, great big? He says, 14ft. He said that asphalt at night retains heat, and the alligators like to lay on it to get warm. The alligator. He says, I pull my truck right up beside the alligator. The alligator doesn't move. The alligator doesn't slither off or anything. So I get out, and I'm looking at him. Joey head and Frankie. Get out. They're looking at him. And I remember I've got a rope in the truck, and I make a lasso, and I hand it to Joey. I said, Why don't you all lasso this alligator? So they throw this lasso over the alligator's head, and they get his knot up right under his neck. And he says the minute they get a hold to him, that alligator rears his tail back and hits the side of my truck so hard, he did about $5,000 worth of body work. He said he hit the way. Now the door of a truck will pooch out. He says he goes completely indented with one strike. Like, boom. Just wham, he says. Then he goes into his death roll like they do when they kill something. And he rolls under my truck, and he knocks the tailpipes he knocks the muffler out, and he's, like, switching around. I say let him go. Let him go. That rope. Drop that rope. So they drop the rope, and he says, the alligator slithers out. Looks around and he says, it looks like he's got a necktie on because he's got a knot under his neck and this long thing hanging down. And he goes up on his tiptoes, and he looks at us, and he goes and hisses at us like, you freaking losers. Like, I'm going to kill all of you all. And then he says he walks off, like, on his tiptoes, like, **** you all. What makes that this kind of chronicle story is that it deals completely in the moment in that place in time. There's no information. Yeah, minus Frankie Crone bailing out of jail.

Chris: The backstory of the character who's so.

Mary Karr: Highly specific, there's no data about anybody.

Chris: There's this articulateness at the exact right time. That a storyteller like Doonie. And I'll bet my car also had right to know that you have to specify that that asphalt retains heat.

Mary Karr: That's right.

Chris: That's funnier than the punchline of the story, because of how it sits in there as this moment of articulateness amongst all this redneck ****, all this wild action and ridiculous behavior.

Mary Karr: Then the other thing is that often what happens in these stories, the trickster is often bringing medicine or something magic and healing to somebody who's wounded. So in this case, the alligator is this kind of and I said so y'all, let me get this straight. Did you all lasso that alligator because you were afraid he was going to get hit by a car? So, see, I'm trying to make, like, a moral story out of it.

Chris: Yeah. Or at least find logic to it.

Mary Karr: Exactly. And Doonie says, no, we lassoed him because he was so ******* fine. That's why we lassoed him. Like *****. He was so ******* fine, we just had to lasso him.

Chris: I mean, that's a good looking gator. What did you expect us to do is keep on driving?

Mary Karr: Yeah, exactly. He was so ******* fine. There's something so beautiful about that story, isn't there?

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: That's how Daddy talked. That is how Daddy talked. Cold in that box car. I'll tell you how cold. It was like a razor blade come inching up between them floor blades.

Chris: How could you not be a writer?

Mary Karr: How could I not be a writer?

Chris: And you center that right. The Liars Club as it's the set piece. It's the framing device for the whole memoir of your childhood. But it's also the place, right? It's the community. It's the society of your father's friends.

Mary Karr: It's the society I grew up in which I'm still trying to puzzle out. And my sister in it. My sister is a product.

Chris: It's a trickster society, but it's masculine. That's a closed male society that you.

Mary Karr: Got to it's not really that I don't remember it being closed. My mother did all kinds of **** that she wasn't supposed to do. People frowned on it.

Chris: The idea of the Liars Club itself, right? Your daddy and his circle of friends. In that time, in that place, there were all men. Yeah, all men drinking drinking Lone Star beer in the back of the bait shop. But there's little Mary Karr at five years old who gets to be there with them.

Mary Karr: Who gets to be there and listen to them. That's right.

Chris: So how does it change then, when you get older? I mean, your relationship with your dad. I mean, you go through puberty. I assume you're not coming up. You're not showing up to the bait shop anymore.

Mary Karr: No, I was buying dope and bagging dope and trying to get the blotter acid salt so we could get money to for who tickets.

Chris: I was enterprising doing the important work of that time in that place.

Mary Karr: I know, right? Yeah. I think that was it. But I also think I was reading books and trying to figure out how to get the hell out of there because I knew I was not suited to stay there, even though I was of that place. Yeah, I knew it was not my horizons were limited by that place.

Chris: And you weren't looking for a fella like that for you of that world.

Mary Karr: He was born in 1910. There's a great line I just heard Joel Cohen say, quoting what's his name purvis, who wrote True Grit, all the big Shaggies are gone now. Those guys were the big Shaggies.

Chris: I mean, they were like another legendary generation.

Mary Karr: Yeah. I mean, you think about how tough they were. You think about how tough Daddy was. When Daddy would go out to work. I remember him going out in the middle of Hurricane Carla, the worst hurricane that that town ever saw, including year to day. He went out in a jean jacket and 150 miles an hour wind with it raining sideways. I mean, tough, physically tough.

Chris: Even when you were younger, you saw the beauty in that. And there's something about that that you kind of revered that this is a great way for a man to be.

Mary Karr: I saw that stoicism, and I saw and you got to also understand, Daddy was also a mystery. I mean, just because of the place and time he was born and who he was. And you also have to remember he was in that war.

Chris: So who the hell knows what happened over there?

Mary Karr: Who the hell knows who he was before that? I know that. I've read I've got all his letters, and in 1944, in the Arden Forest, he wrote, I'm I'm too old to start a family now, I guess, but I had my day. He was 34 years old.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: I'm too old to start a family now. And we were born over ten years after that.

Chris: Yeah. I'm just thinking about your dad. And then you going off to graduate.

Chris: School and living in New England, living.

Chris: In Boston, being around poets and writers and artists and people who went to Yale. Just a totally different kind of different archetypes of men that becomes your world, too.

Mary Karr: Oh, yeah.

Chris: And yet you carry with you all this stuff from Texas.

Mary Karr: Right.

Chris: And the one version of this is what a good man looks like. This is what a good man can be. So does that ever create, like, tension?

Mary Karr: Well, you can imagine how many of these guys look like *******.

Chris: That's kind of what I'm getting at, Mary. Come on.

Mary Karr: Single. Just sort of like, don't bring me this. What, are you going to get out your OED and settle this up with me? I was the sissy, though. I was not a tough girl. I was mouthy, but I was not a hard ***. I was the one reading Shakespeare.

Chris: Yeah, but in New England, you're kind of a hard ***.

Mary Karr: Oh, no. I mean, I look scary in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Yeah. At Harvard College. I look really spooky. Yeah. I look like a tough girl and in the right environment. Yeah.

Chris: Well, okay. Well, let's talk about then you as a parent. What is it like raising a boy, more or less as a single mom, right? Yes.

Mary Karr: He was five years old. Sure.

Chris: And obviously, Pete had passed away before Dev was born, correct?

Mary Karr: Right.

Chris: So he doesn't know his grandpa, but you're telling him stories about him. You're telling him the lore, right?

Mary Karr: Yeah, but it wasn't socially acceptable. Even when he went to Radcliffe Daycare when he was a baby, you couldn't hit people. You couldn't let kids, little boys, fight and hit each other.

Chris: Yeah, but you wouldn't have wanted him to, even if he could. Like you weren't trying to raise a little badass outlaw of a kid.

Mary Karr: My goal as a parent was un-incarcerated.

Chris: For you and him.

Mary Karr: Yeah. HIV negative, un-incarcerated. We're both searching for that big double win. Yeah. I mean, I didn't want I was not a tough girl. But you have to also understand the other thing about my daddy is that he married my mother, and he loved her. He thought she was something. She was tough, too. He liked that. She was smart. It's funny. I just got off the phone with my sister's high school boyfriend, Belton Williams. Belton told that great story about Lecia shooting the raccoon at the top of that old loblolly pine. And he said I said, did you ever meet anybody else like Lecia? He says, nobody like Lecia. I wish I'd married her. Nobody could shoot like that. Nobody could hunt like that. Nobody could fish like that. Nothing she couldn't do, he said, but she was scary. And that's the thing about Mother, too. Mother was a little bit scary.

Chris: I mean, you and your sister are both single moms in the 1980s. I'm just thinking about the different ways that you and her chose to think about shaping your sons.

Mary Karr: Yes.

Chris: Right. Dev does not walk around talking about the legend of Pete Karr the way Case does. Right. Case is a sort of ambassador for the Car lore. He tells all those stories. He wants to sort of feel that inheritance as part of his personality.

Mary Karr: And Daddy was a legend.

Chris: Yeah, but Lecia, she intentionally she cultivated that.

Mary Karr: She had him go out that first hog he shot. Feral hog he shot who? David Harmon called him after they were divorced and said, well, Cases just shot his first hog, and I'd like to take him down here and get him taxidermy so you can hang him in his room. Lecia said, I don't care if he shot Kim Basinger out there. You're not hanging her head in my house. Lecia had her limits, too. She didn't want any dead critters on her wall. But Daddy didn't have any dead critters in it. Daddy was an odd duck. He was also emotional. He was mostly very stoic. But he cried when the flag went up at the Little League baseball game. He cried at Memorial Day parades. He cried at funerals. He was very emotional. He was not and super warm to me. I've got letters from him. They all begin to my heartbeat.

Chris: Yeah, that radiates from the pages of Liars Club. His warmth toward you, the sweetness, the way that he dealt with you, the way he handled you. Thinking back to when Dev was little, did you ever sort of have that moment where you go, oh, I'm doing my dad right now, doing something that my dad would have done or said. I'm channeling him as a parent every oh, wow.

Mary Karr: I think the love that I got in that house that was most solid was from Daddy.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: I think Mother probably had an attachment disorder. And Lecia, for whatever reason, chose Mother or Mother chose her, and me and Daddy were the losers in the deal. But when I look back on it and I think about my life, I think we were very there's only one time he ever scared me. I mean, he scared me drinking and driving. He never drew a sober breath. And he drove all the time, like everybody down there when I was growing up. But I remember saying to him after Mother was right before Mother, they took Mother capital A away to the Mental Marriott. I told him, I remember we were going to pick berries for mayhaw jelly, and we had a bunch of what is that? It's a kind of berry that grows on a tree that's kind of sour, like a persimmon, but you put a lot of sugar and it makes a nice jelly. We were picking mayhaw berries and he said I said, Daddy, I don't want to stay with Mother. I don't like to stay with Mother when you go to work. And he said, what are you talking about? And I said, I think Mother's crazy. And I was little, maybe big enough to be in school probably six or seven, right before she had her nervous breakthrough. And I remember he pulled his truck over, he had a big green Ford pickup truck, and he looked at me and he didn't touch me or anything. He said, if you keep talking about your mother that way, I will slap you into next week. Now, I knew he wasn't going to slap me. I wasn't afraid he would slap me, but it was scary for him to talk to me that way.

Chris: Because he didn't threaten you?

Mary Karr: Never. If I walked out of school. I once walked out of school, like in the 7th grade. I just went home. It wasn't that far, it was a couple of blocks. And I got in a fight with my biology teacher. And I think that was when I went to the principal and I told a guy I wanted to be a poet. And he said, if you persist in this delusion that you'll be a poet, you'll wind up no more than a common prostitute.

Chris: Wow.

Mary Karr: I was in the 7th grade. I was like twelve years old. So I just went home. I walked out of the office instead of going back to my class. I went home and I walked in, and Daddy had been working, and I woke him up when I came in. He says, Pokey, aren't you supposed to be in school? And I said, I had a fight with my biology teacher. I got sent to the principal and I told him what I told the guy, and he said, well, tell him to kiss your Texas ***. **** that guy.

Chris: It's us against them here.

Mary Karr: It's us against them. That seemed normal to him for me to tell somebody to kiss my text.

Chris: And you're in no danger of getting booted out of this thing, right? You're here, you're ours, you're secure.

Mary Karr: Exactly. That's right.

Chris: So pretty good to have a guy like that who's always on your side.

Mary Karr: That's right.

Chris: And did you feel like you consciously tried to provide that to your son?

Mary Karr: Yes. I remember Devs had a beautiful thing the other night. It was one of the great nights of my life. We had Terrence Hayes here for dinner, made a big pot of gumbo. And a girlfriend of mine who's from Iran, grew up in Paris, has met Deb, but doesn't really know him. And she said, what was your mother like? She must have been really strange. She must have been different than the other mothers. And he said, oh, yeah, she's the loudest person in every room, for one thing. Yeah, she was. She was. She was really different, he said, but I always knew that she loved me more than other people's mothers love them. I knew that she was more on my side, and what I wanted to do was okay with her.

Chris: Yeah.

Mary Karr: And that is not a gift from Charlie Karr. That is a gift from Daddy. Mother didn't take much responsibility for correcting us. She wasn't that interested. So she had this detachment. Look, I'm not disparaging my mother. She gave me books, and she was there more than Daddy. I mean, drunk as she was, he worked every day. And she wouldn't say suey if the hogs were eating her. She was lazy, so she was at home most of the time. Mother gave me everything in the way of books. Music, philosophy, poetry, intellectual conversation, theater, symphony, opera.

Chris: The life of the mind.

Mary Karr: The life of the mind. But Daddy was a poet after a fashion. Just like a lot of people down there.

Chris: Rainin' like a cow ******* on a flat rock.

Mary Karr: Nothing better than that.

Chris: Mary Karr, thank you so much for being here.

Mary Karr: Thank you for having me. I'm so proud to be on PODRE.

Chris: You're going to teach me how to make gumbo?

Mary Karr: Hell to the yes. Come on up here.

Chris: I'm coming down. I'm going to come on down.

Mary Karr: Come on down to the big city. I've got a black skillet. We'll get some cast iron. Is that what you cast iron. Hail to the yes. Get some crisco going.

Chris: Okay. Is that lard? Are we cooking with lard.

Mary Karr: I've got the lard for you, honey.

Nico: Hi.

Chris: Who are you?

Nico: Nico.

Chris: You're Nico. What do you want to say to the audience?

Nico: I don't know.

Chris: You don't know?

Nico: I like waffle so much.

Chris: We're coming to the end of our program, and that means it's time for the not a Terrible Father in this One Instance award, where we recognize one particular father who did something that wasn't terrible. This week's winner is someone really special. In keeping with this episode's exploration of the theme of mentorship, the prize is going to a man named John Harvey. I first met John in 2001 when I was a skinny, chain smoking freshman at the University of Houston. And he was a youngish professor, wild haired poet, playwright of the macabre and avant garde, impresario and father. He had two mostly grown kids. They were about my own age back in Michigan. But he married the wonderful writer in person, Gabriela Maya, while I was still his student, and they soon had young Demien. John and I became better and better friends over the years. And after I finished grad school, he helped me get my first big job back there with him in my alma mater, the University of Houston Honors College. And for a few really sweet years. We got to be colleagues. And he got to be there when I became a father. Eventually, John and Gabriela moved their family to Sweden and they've been there ever since. But John and I still talk on just about every Saturday morning. And like we've been doing for more than 20 years now. We compare notes, we make each other laugh. He helps me make sense of this surreal and sometimes macabre world. He told me the story recently that though it's an old one, more than merits recognition. With a NATFITOIA award. Yeah, spell it out. We're doing the acronym. Anyway, let's give him a call before it gets too late in Stockholm.

John Harvey: Chris, how you doing?

Chris: Why, John Harvey, I presume.

John Harvey: Oh, my. Is that a Foghorn Leghorn? I take it. It's light where you are. I'm in the midst of Swedish darkness. Let the darkness engulf you while you eat some herring.

Chris: Do you know what Julian said to me yesterday on the walk home from school? He goes, we were walking around the corner and there was a pile of trash because we live in the city. And in the pile of trash was a book, like a paperback book that had been, like, torn in half. And there were a few loose pages on the ground. And he stopped and he kind of read it, but he looked at it really quickly. And then we kept walking. And he goes, you know what that book said? And I said, what? And he goes, People who eat darkness... will die from darkness. I go, Are you ******* serious? Like, did it really say that? And he goes, no, I just made that up.

John Harvey: That came from inside Julian. That came from inside Julian. And we all eat darkness. It's like we're eating darkness every day now. I think I'm eating a little bit more darkness here of the what's in the sky sense. But, yeah, that's good. He can handle.

Chris: Did Damien talk like that as a seven year old?

John Harvey: Damien would have bursts of fantastic wisdom. Yeah, just observations about existence.

Chris: Did he speak like a French existentialist?

John Harvey: Well, no, it was more like a conjuring alchemist, because early on he moved into Pokemon and Magic, and so he'd be wandering through the house pondering on the combinations of fire and forests and stone and water. So, yeah, it was like living with a Druid that's maybe discovered Carl Jung and is trying some **** out.

Chris: Well, speaking of Demien, John, he's a great kid, he always has been. He was great with my kids when they were born and they were little.

Speaker C: Right.

Chris: So he's basically off to college, right, or he's on the threat.

John Harvey: Well, he's finishing high school this year, and then he's going to take a gap year to learn Swedish and then most likely go to a Swedish university. You only need a certain level of Swedish to get in, and he can attain that level in a year because most of the classes are going to be in English, because really, certainly around Stockholm and southern Sweden, it's an English speaking country. This might end up getting my Swedish citizenship revoked, but it really is something.

Chris: Will eventually wouldn't hold your breath, john, I've called you for a particular reason, and of course, here we are on PODRE. And as you and really everyone at this point is well aware, PODRE has the honor of bestowing once an episode, the not a Terrible Father in this One Instance Award. On one particular father. You know, Sweden's got the Nobel, but we have this. It may come as a surprise to you, but you are this week's recipient of the not a Terrible Father in this One Instance Award.

John Harvey: I'm so honored.

Chris: Go ahead, take a minute.

John Harvey: Yeah, I'm just so honored.

Chris: Well, you and I were talking recently, and we were talking, of course, about our boys, and you told me a story that really hit home for me and really kind of rang some familiar chords. And I wonder if I'm talking about the story that you told me about Damien when he was little, just the other day, and if you would just kind of tell that story again.

John Harvey: Wow, okay, well, again, thank you. Thank you very much. It's great to be on PODRE and to receive this distinction. Damien, when he was young and we're living in Houston, Gabriela and I take him to the parks. There are plenty of sticks, wood chips, dirt, sometimes syringes, but we try to push those out of the way and Demien loved to play with sticks and stones and dirt and create various assemblages, as if he's being moved in some ritualistic fashion by the old gods. And he would place them in a certain array, and pretty regularly, he'd want us to take a picture of them, and sometimes that would suffice, but more often than not, he wanted to take them home with him. All the sticks, all the dirt, all the stones.

Chris: Dirty, sharp pine cones and pine cones.

John Harvey: And worms are there somewhere and stuff.

Chris: Muddy little rocks. Just little ******* rocks.

Speaker A: Yeah.

John Harvey: And bits of grass. Old desiccated leaves. And at first, it's like, oh, sure, okay. Right. At a certain point, the backseat floor of my car and Gabriela's car is piled with sticks and stones and dirt and leaves and grass. Sometimes it's just on the back car seat because he'd like to sit there and look at it like this is his world and to touch it. But at a certain point, I was raised in the Midwest by parents of German ancestry who kept things clean. They might be at one another's throats, but things were clean.

Speaker C: Yeah.

John Harvey: I mean, that definitely coming through my mother and my grandmother, whose voices are always with me. Death is not the end. And so there's kind of this inner judge within me that's going to mean, this is horrible. People are going to think we're trolls.

Chris: And of course, how can you live like this? There's sticks and mud and dirt on surfaces where people are supposed to sit down.

John Harvey: Right. And as with many things, a conversation with Gabriela brings me to insight. And I guess finally the insight was I think she kind of dropped the word play. And I remember thinking, yeah, the playfulness of mess. And all of a sudden, like, the inner kid in me somewhere back there rose up and threw off the shackles of cleanliness and said, yes, Damien needs his playful mess. And so at that point, I was like, it wasn't just fine. It's like, okay. And so playing with him in the dirt and making sure it was gathered in and that the mounds grew higher. And sometimes when a friend would need a ride, like home from U of H or something and they were about to get in the car and they looked in the backseat and could see the detritus of the world strewn there and they were like, what is this? Don't you clean out your car? And the voice came out of me going, that is Damien's sacred sticks and stones and dirt, and it will stay there, and you can go ******* take the bus.

Chris: Yeah, take the ******* bus.

John Harvey: Which if you've lived in Houston, you know that's really you don't want to take.

Chris: That's a huge threat.

John Harvey: So I think that is the moment, because it was like this connection of the kid in me with the kid that Damien was and raising the fist. For sacred mess, sacred dirt.

Chris: I love that. Also the way that it's almost a synthesis, because you described kind of getting sort of kneeling down to his level and imagining, like, being a three or four or five year old boy and how just this sort of lights up his imagination, and that requires the sort of imaginative leap into his point of view.

Speaker C: Right.

Chris: And that's the first part of it. But the second part of it is very grown up. It's very adult John, who likes to think about the relationship of the sacred to the human, the sacred to the natural world, all of the things that you write and teach and have been talking about and thinking about for your whole adult life. And there's a beautiful way that both of those kind of merge in one action of grace, right? Of like, this is okay. This is okay.

John Harvey: Yeah.

Chris: Well, that's the word beautiful. So it's well deserving of this highly sought after and prestigious and mysterious award, I would say.

John Harvey: Yeah, well, I will have it. That really is all that's needed on my tombstone. Not that I'm going to have a tombstone that will be with me when I am pushed out in the bark into the Baltic for me to travel.

Chris: To your whole body or your ashes. Because I always thought I would have at least, like a thimbleful of you to kind of wear in a locket.

John Harvey: Oh, that's interesting.

Chris: I don't know, a limb, something just like a little bit of john yeah. If you're planning on doing a kind of burial at sea, then I don't know, I guess that's your prerogative. Give me, like, one of your old pairs of shoes or something. I don't know.

John Harvey: Right. Or maybe before they push me out, like borrow mirror from Fellowship of the Rings, they could hack off maybe a finger. I don't know.

Chris: Like banshees avengers. Have you watched the Banshees movie? The Martin McDonough, the newest one?

John Harvey: I have not.

Chris: I don't want to give anything away. Then we'll we'll leave that aside. But let me ask you this. Do you still have any keepsake from that kind of period of Damien's life where he was the gatherer and the collector?

John Harvey: Do you think he still I mean, I would say that this epiphany of mess, that occurred to me, that should have always occurred to me, given don't judge yourself. Don't judge someone. You be a friend. Okay. Be a friend of myself. But this has kind of continued. So like Damien's room, we do keep the house clean. Right? You always have to dust your bookshelves, Chris. Just remember that things are fine if you dust your bookshelves. But Damien's room is off limits. It is in the state of what it's going to be when his girlfriend comes over. We try to encourage him to clean it up a bit, but I would not be surprised if somewhere back in there, there's a stick.

Chris: Julian is seven. And every now and then I will find I'm going through his pockets when I'm doing the laundry, and I'm like, okay, we're still doing this a little bit. It's not like it was when he was three, four or five, when there'd be a pile of it on the doorstep or in the car or in the car seat. But every now and then I'm like, Kid, we got a rock. A rock is in his pocket.

Speaker C: Do you want to keep this? Can I give this back to you?

John Harvey: And I brought this up to him recently. Do you remember this? It's a fun thing to play with. Your children he's about to turn 18. Your older children, do you remember when you did this or you did that? And such part of their identity for you, and the belief that well, they're always that really. They're always that. And he had a dim recollection of it, but he smiled. It was like it gave him joy. Oh, yeah.

Chris: He was smiling because he still connects with that experience, or that because he sees what it means to you, and he's smiling at your sort of fatherly love and affection for him.

John Harvey: Yeah. It's glee. It's like it's just the kind of yeah, I think both and that my bringing up and Gabriella bringing it up, kind of reconnects him to that past as well, because it's interesting. Like, what slips away, right, as a parent.

Chris: It's interesting and sad and bizarre, frankly, how much of childhood just goes by for the child with no permanence right, in their actual memory, whereas we are documentarians as their parents, right. We remember all of it, and we can still see it. We can still see them collecting those sticks in the dirt, and they're like, what are you talking about?

John Harvey: Well, consciousness is devilry, and it really shouldn't have happened. But memories, how little time we often spend in the present of wherever we are and how much of it and maybe as we get older, even more is spent in this remember time. And the remembered time can actually become our idea of who our child is. We can just hang on to it. No. This is who you are. And it's that difficulty of realizing, well, not so much, really, and who he is now, we don't have the same access to. He is to have his own private thoughts and meditations, and he's kind of gone on and this with Nicholas and Kelsey as well, this holding on to, but this is who you were. And of course, as time goes, it shifts and it reforms and it becomes this very precious thing that we have. But its status of reality is questionable. And maybe it's more this sign of.

Chris: or closer to a work of art's reality right? No. Than that of a living, breathing human being who's right next to you and has agency and can change in the moment yeah. There's a real beauty to that. But it's also just a bittersweet one, right?

John Harvey: It's bittersweet. It's the Ode on a Grecian Urn. I mean, yes, to have forever, right? Of course, with Keat's poem, the two lovers who are about to kiss but never kiss, but they're always there, they're always lovers. Or to have the thing that's real but will alter. And I guess the idea of having both, that you can you see your your child growing up and and you marvel at it and he becomes, in some sense, a stranger, but at the same time, you have this memory. And so, yeah, you kind of shape something that you hope doesn't distort them and you too much, but that you kind of want to set your mark on and said, there was this moment, there was this time.

Chris: John Harvey, you were a good father and a good man and a good friend. Thank you for coming on, PODRE.

John Harvey: Well, all those back at you, sir. I first met you when you were I think you were only 18, right, when you were in my human sick class. And from the very moment, and possibly this is where Julian gets it, you were out to make your mark, and you would be heard and you would be seen, and you are. And that is a very good thing in the world.

Chris: Thanks, John. We'll talk to you soon. Okay.

Chris: That'S all for our show today. Join us next time when PODRE gets dark. We're going to eat some darkness together, and it's going to be delicious. I'm going to tell some stories that I probably shouldn't tell. And novelist Daniel Magariel, my dear Danny Boy is coming on the pod. You don't want to miss it's.

Chris: PODRE is created and produced by me, Chris Brunt. Original artwork for the show is by David Wojo. Special thanks to Brad Franco and Julian and Nico Benz-Brunt.