257: What I Should’ve Said

Ira Glass

About a year and a half ago, when my mom was dying, I had this experience that I bring up here because I think it's so common.

She and I were in different cities, and I would go see her most weekends when she got sick. It was pretty clear she didn't have a lot of time left. And I kept thinking, we should be having these really big conversations. And I don't even know what it is that I wanted to talk about. It just seemed like anything that we needed to say to each other, we'd better say now before it was too late. But truthfully, it wasn't like we had big issues that needed to be resolving or anything like that. All that stuff had been done years ago.

And so I would go. And mostly what she wanted was just company. So we'd watch old movies, and we'd watch TV, and we'd play a little cards and chat about whatever small thing would come up. And at one level, this was fine. It was completely fine. It was fine. And like I say, it was what she wanted.

But at another level, I would sit there intermittently and secretly very anxious that I was wasting this time. That in 6 months or 2 years or 10 years, I was going to look back, and I was going to feel sorry that we had never talked about-- you know what? I didn't even know what we hadn't talked about. I don't know. Like who was her best friend in junior high school, or what her house was like when she was a little girl.

I have a friend whose father died not too long ago who told me, well, if nothing else, I should use this time to just ask all the questions about all those little stories that I think I might want to know some day. And we did talk about some of that stuff. There were some old stories that I never really had straight that now I know.

And there were a couple of times sitting on the couch in the middle of some long afternoon where I asked my mom, is there anything that you want to talk about? Is anything that we need to talk about? Anything we need to have resolved or that we need to discuss? And she asked me, why, in my 20s, pretty much through my entire 20s, I was so distant from the family. And I asked her about all the years that she and my dad completely disapproved of my career in public radio. And we talked about these things, we talked about them, I would say, for like, I want to say a total of, I don't know, three minutes. And that pretty much exhausted it as subjects. And then we moved onto the next thing, and that was that.

Since she died, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. I keep waiting for the day that I'm going to be talking to somebody or reading something or watching TV, and suddenly I realize something that I want to ask my mom about. That suddenly I realize what we should have talked about during that stretch of all those weeks, what I should have said back then. I know it's going to happen, and the only question is, is it going to be tomorrow? Or is it going to be the next day? Or is it going to be next month? Or is it going to be next year?

I know that people have this kind of feeling about the living also. You know what I mean? They have this feeling about their living friends and relatives, that they wish that they could go back and have do-overs and say something better or say the thing that it took them a really long time to figure out needed to be said. And in my experience-- maybe I'm unusual-- but in my experience, people almost never go back to do that. Even when the people are alive. They never go back and straighten it out and say it.

Well, today on our radio program, we have stories about what it would mean to actually go back. What it would mean to finally say everything that you should have said at the time, but that most people never, ever do. We make an unscientific inquiry into that question.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in four time-traveling acts. Act One, Freeze Frame, in which Mr. Jonathan Goldstein, for once in his life, gets to suspend time itself, freeze the hands of time, and finally come up with the right thing to say in some situation.

Act Two, In The Bush Leagues. We hear the true story of a 20-something activist who heckled the President of the United States, years ago, and failed horribly. President Bush completely bested this guy, leaving him mulling it over late at night for years. Act Three, A Can of Worms. David Sedaris wishes that he could take back a wish in an act. Act Four, Life Sentence, in which the president of the Maryland State Senate, a veteran politician, talks about the off-the-cuff remark that many people say changed his life forever.

Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Freeze Frame.

This is the sort of story that I think it's best to introduce the way that you would do a movie trailer. Ladies and gentlemen, if regret has a name-- a name, that is, besides regret-- that name is Jonathan Goldstein. Here he is, with some thoughts and a big plan to change things.

Jonathan Goldstein

Let me start by saying I have pretty much regretted every single thing that's ever come out of my mouth, from my bar mitzvah speech with its inordinate use of the word cherished, to the manner in which I recently responded to my dental hygienist when asked whether the office radio was on too loud. I said, no, it wasn't too loud. "In fact," I said, "it was totally cool." Lord knows where that came from. But once words are out there, they are out there, and there's nothing you can do about it.

There are moments where I have misspoken or somehow failed to live up to the occasion that I am capable of replaying in my mind, searching for what I should have said, even years later. These moments have attached themselves to my brain like frightened cats that resist prying. And my capacity for regretting them sometimes feels like the deepest, most enduring part of my personality.

Case in point: about 15 years ago, I was riding a train to Toronto with my girlfriend at the time, when she asked me if I could catch the porter's eye and ask him for a glass of 7UP. I didn't like the idea of bothering the train workers. As a group, they put forth a fair bit of gruff, and I did not like receiving the stuff. In fact, even a tiny little bit of gruff would be enough to ruin my weekend.

Still, she was my girlfriend, and they had just handed out salted peanuts, and a drink seemed like a pretty good idea. I would probably even end up taking a sip off of hers.

"Why don't you ask him," I said, offering a compromise. And by compromise, I meant I'd sit beside her pretending to be engrossed in a copy of Rolling Stone while she got yelled at.

"You should," she said. "You're the man."

She was right about that. I was the man. An 18-year-old man who was spending his first weekend out of town with a woman. When the porter, who must have easily been at least 75, came moseying by, I craned my head into the aisle and said, just like this, "E-- excuse me, but d-- do you think that maybe I could get a 7UP, please, when you get a chance, if that-- if that's possible?"

"I already gave you a drink," he said. "There is no second 7UP."

"No, no, you did," I said. "But that was before the peanuts. Now I need another. Peanuts will do that to a person. Ma-- make them thirsty. I'm-- I'm sorry."

People turned around and looked at me.

"There should be a drink before and after the peanuts," I said. "That would be so great. Don't you think that-- that might be a good idea, maybe?"

All the while as I spoke, my girlfriend sat beside me, falling slowly and imperceptibly more and more out of love with me.

When he placed the plastic cup of 7UP down on my tray, he told me hoped it would help me, "wash my nuts down."

That night in bed, I realized what I should have replied. "My nuts are washed, old timer. Don't worry about me." Several months later, daydreaming in class, I thought of this. I could have lifted up the cup in a toast and said, "To clean nuts." But at the time, all I could think to do was to look down at the tiny, effervescent world within my cup and say thanks. Within the month, my girlfriend and I would be history.

If I could stop time, I would not rob the Bank of England, nor would I spend probably more than an afternoon or two studying the hummingbird in mid-flight. I would use my power to freeze time just before I was about to open my mouth to speak. I would get up from wherever I was and pace. I would pace back and forth and perhaps drink a glass of cold water. And once I had crafted the perfect response and steadied my nerves, I would unfreeze time and continue.

Of course, one cannot stop time, but one can stop tape. As an exercise in getting things right, I decided to go through one entire day tape-recording all of my interactions. That way, when the day was over, I would be able to go back over all of my conversations. And by stopping the tape and inserting the right words, I would be able to make everything, finally and for once, perfect. Lord knows saying the right words to people's faces would be far too frightening, but right here, behind their backs on the radio, that would be just right.

So in the morning, I had to go by to my friend Mary's house to babysit her kids. Helen is four, and Katie is two.

Jonathan Goldstein

This is what the kids do every time they see me. They start chanting. They chant, "Silly Johnny." For them, that is my name. It is what they call me. Silly Johnny.

Jonathan Goldstein

OK, hold it right here. There they stand, frozen like porcelain figurines, their mouths frozen wide open, their heads thrown back in cruel delight. And this is what I should have said. I am not the silly one, baby Katie. I could sit down to watch Apocalypse Now with a plate of spicy chicken wings and beer without getting all scarred for life. And I do not have to wear diapers, unless, of course, I choose to. And Helen, can you walk out the door anytime you want, go to an ATM machine, and put a down payment on a leather couch? I don't think so. So who's really silly?

Instead, I said this.

Jonathan Goldstein

As you could hear, I said nothing.

Jonathan Goldstein

Mary runs a profitable fancy soap shop, and she's been looking for a part-time employee for months. And every time she starts in about how hard it is to find good help these days, I always tell her how I'd be available to work in the store a few afternoons a week. And then Mary will suddenly remember something she left in the oven. Or she'll change the subject by complimenting me on the sporty-looking jersey I'm wearing, which, truthfully, is not sporty at all or for that matter, even a jersey, unless an undershirt can be called a jersey.

Having most of the morning to watch the kids and brood, I decided that when Mary got back, I was going to broach the subject straight on.

Jonathan Goldstein

Now, you see, most people would just drop the subject right here. But I am not most people.

Jonathan Goldstein

OK, stop the tape right here.

Jonathan Goldstein

Later in the afternoon, I had to drop by the bookstore and pick up, for reasons I won't go into right here, a book on patent law. So when I get to the bookstore, this guy I know, Billy, is there. He doesn't work at the store, but he's there pretty much every time I go in, leaning against the counter and recommending The Master and Margarita to anyone who will listen.

Anyway, in the back of the store, Billy and I get into this discussion about Lord of The Rings. I'm not even sure how we got onto the subject. Billy is one of those guys who in high school used to hang up maps of Middle-earth in his locker. The kind of guy who could sing songs by Simon & Garfunkel in Elvish.

I start telling him about how I had just seen the movie, and how Frodo struck me as a little overly emotional about carrying the ring. Sure, the ring tempted people with acts of evil, but so does combining Jack Daniels, insomnia, and the Google search engine. I said I didn't think it would be such a huge deal to carry the ring, at least for a little while. Now, admittedly, our whole argument was ridiculous, but as ridiculous as it was, I was still losing.

Jonathan Goldstein

Now, if I could have just paused things right here, right at this very moment, paced around a bit, shadow-boxed myself towards the right state of mind, I might have found the gumption to say that I didn't even want the stinking ring because all it does is turn you into a pretentious diva anyway. Everyone who holds it becomes Zsa Zsa Gabor. I would have said that even thinking about this ring stuff was for 14-year-old black-hooded Goth kids who strap suede pouches of 20-sided dice from their belts as fashion accessories.

Instead, I answered this way.

To which Billy replied:

Jonathan Goldstein

Then I started to backpedal, saying that he was probably right, that I was ill-equipped to hold the ring. I was weak-willed and had little sense of community. I then said that he, Billy, was probably better suited to the task of ring bearer. To which Billy responded:

Jonathan Goldstein

OK, stop right here.

No, Billy, you don't have that kind of heartiness. You wear yellow sweatpants, and your hands are as smooth as peeled tangerines. You possess the unearthly habit of pulling jaw breakers out of your mouth every five seconds to check what color they are. And whenever you burp, you're compelled to simultaneously speak the word, "Ralph."

But if you're standing there with Billy, looking into his eyes, frozen or not, of course, you don't say anything so mean, despite the fact that you want to. We all carry the ring around inside of us, and that ring is our capacity for wrongdoing. And both he and I, in some way, wish that this capacity could be removed from within us and pounded out into a shiny ring that could be passed around from person to person, allowing us to ease the burden of our urges. Such urges, say, as wanting to voice the really mean things we really think, but in the end, that would be appalling.

And rather than voicing any of this, I said, instead:

Silly Johnny. Silly Johnny.

In the evening, I had dinner with my parents. I was going to be leaving to New York in a couple of days. And all evening, my father kept bringing up this bottle of vodka he wanted me to buy for him. And all evening, my mother kept cutting him off and yelling at him, louder and angrier as the night wore on. She told him it was impossible for me to get him the bottle, simply impossible. Why she thought it was impossible, I have no idea.

But anyway, eventually, my father dropped the subject. But then, after dinner was finished, he started once more.

Jonathan Goldstein

OK, let's just stop right here. What do you say to that? Even after days of rumination, I still got nothing.

After dinner, my mother drove me to the bus stop. And in the car along the way, she spoke of how her job was going. My mother works at a daycare, and she really, really loves the kids. She was telling me about how her favorite thing is when the children let her hug them.

Jonathan Goldstein

I realize now that it must have been difficult to have a child who never let you touch them. In old photographs, you could see me inching away uncomfortably from her hands on my shoulders. At my grade six prom, at the beginning of the mother-son dance, which I still remember as Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson's "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," I refused to dance with her. The whole notion of dancing with your mother in, of all places, your school's gymnasium struck me as unwholesome.

If there had been a pause button on the dashboard, and I could stop time, stop the flow of traffic entirely so that all the cars beside us on the road became these blurry Monet lily pads, and I could open the passenger door and step out to pace around among them, if I could have sat down on the hood of the car and stared at my mother's face, then maybe I might then have been able to say something better than what I did say, which was this:

Even as I was saying it, I knew there was a better, more difficult thing to say, namely, I am sorry for never hugging you. Although what I did say wasn't exactly right, at that moment, it felt like the least wrong.

Life isn't about saying the right thing anyway. And it is certainly not about tape-recording everything so that you have to endure it more than once. Life is about failing. It is about letting the tape play. It is about eating the pineapple you are being force-fed, and, to the best of your ability, enjoying it.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Goldstein, author of the novel Lenny Bruce is Dead and host of the CBC radio program Wiretap.

[MUSIC - "FLY LIKE AN EAGLE" BY THE STEVE MILLER BAND]

Ira Glass

Act Two, In The Bush Leagues. When he was in his early 20's, barely out of school, at the very first political event of his life, Charles Monroe-Kane got into a shouting match with the leader of the free world. And he pretty much lost that one. This was in the early 1990s. He just left the religious school where he had been studying to be a minister. And he moved to Amsterdam, where he fell in with a bunch of anarchists. He edited an environmental newspaper called the Green Tree News.

Ira Glass

Charles Monroe-Kane. He's a producer for the public radio program To The Best of Our Knowledge. Coming up, David Sedaris and When You Wish Upon A Pie. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, What I Should've Said. Stories where people go back in time, rethink the moments that have vexed them. We have arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, A Can Of Worms. David Sedaris told this next story before a live audience.

David Sedaris

Hugh wanted hamburgers. So he, his friend Anne, and I went to a place called The Apple Pan. This was in Los Angeles. I thought The Apple Pan would be a restaurant, but it was more like a diner. No tables, just stools arranged along a u-shaped counter.

We ordered our hamburgers from a man in a paper hat. And while waiting for them to arrive, Anne pulled out some pictures of her bull terrier. She's a professional photographer, and so they were portraits rather than snapshots. Here was the dog peeking out from behind a curtain. Here was the dog sitting human style in an easy chair, a paw resting on the paunch of his stomach.

When she's not taking pictures of her dog, Anne flies around the country on assignment from various magazines. A day earlier, she'd returned from Boston where she photographed the fire commissioner, whose last name is Bastardo. "That's bastard with an O on the end," she said. "Don't you think that's funny?" Hugh told her about some neighbors in Normandy whose last name translates to hot ass. But unless you speak French, it's hard to get the joke.

"Is that hyphenated," Anne asked. "I mean, did Miss Hot marry Mr. Ass, or is it all one word?"

I thought the conversation would rest here for a while, and so I prepared myself to contribute, wary of how easy it is to fall into a game of one-upsmanship. If you knew a Candy Dick, the other person is bound to have known a Harry Dick or a Dick Eater. I'd recently learned of the race car driver Dick Trickle. But for the time being, we were operating on a higher plane.

Anne's last name is Fishbein, and she hates it. She and Hugh met in college, and when our hamburgers arrived, they reminisced about some of the people they had gone to school with. "What was that guy's name? I think he was in the art department. Mike maybe, or Mark? He used to go out with Karen, I think her name was. Or Kimberly. You know who I mean?" Talk like this can go on for a while. And while you do have to accept it, you don't have to actually pay attention.

I stared straight ahead, watching a broken-nosed cook top a hamburger with cheese. And then I turned slightly to my left and began listening to the two men seated on the other side of me. The man beside me wore a t-shirt endorsing the state of Florida. And as if the weather were completely different on the other side of the ketchup bottle, the man beside him wore a thick wool sweater and heavy corduroy pants. A coat rested in his lap, and before him on the counter sat a newspaper and an empty cup of coffee.

"Did you read about those worms," he asked? He was referring to the can of nematodes, tiny worms recently discovered on the Texas plains. They'd been sent up with the doomed space shuttle and had somehow managed to survive the explosion, the cause of which was still a mystery. The man in the sweater massaged his chin and stared into space.

"I've been thinking we could solve this problem in no time," he said, "if only, if only we could get the damn things to talk." It sounded crazy, but I remember thinking the exact same thing about the Akita in the O.J. Simpson case.

"Put it on the stand. Let's hear what it's got to say." It was one of those ideas that just for a split second seemed entirely logical, the one solution that nobody had thought of. The man in the t-shirt considered the possibility.

"Well," he said, "even if the worms could talk, it wouldn't do much good. They was in that can, remember?"

"I guess you're right."

The men stood to pay their bills. And before they reached the door, their stools were taken by two people who did not know one another. One was a man dressed in a fine suit, and the other, a young woman who sat down and immediately started reading what looked to be a script. Over on my right, Hugh had decided that rather than Karen or Kimberly, the classmate had been named Katherine.

While I'd been listening to my neighbors, he had ordered me a piece of pie. And as I picked up my fork, Anne told me that I was supposed to eat it backwards, starting with the outer crust and working my way inward.

"Your last bite should be the point, and you're supposed to make a wish on it," she said. "Hasn't anyone ever told you that?"

"Come again?"

Anne looked at me the way you might at someone who regularly tosses money into the fire. The senselessness, the waste.

"Well, better late than never," she said. And she repositioned my plate.

As she and Hugh resumed their conversation, I thought of all the pie I had eaten during the course of my life, and I wondered how different things might be if only I had wished upon the points. To begin with, I would not be seated at The Apple Pan. That much was certain. Had I gotten my wish at the age of eight, I would still be rounding up mummies in Egypt, luring them from their tombs and trapping them in heavy iron cages. All subsequent wishes would have been based upon the life I had already established. A new set of boots. A finer whip. Greater command of the mummy language.

That's the problem with wishes. They ensnare you. In fairy tales, they're nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted. One's best bet, and the moral to all those stories, is to be unselfish and make your wish for the benefit of others, trusting that their happiness will make you happy as well. That'll be the day.

Since we'd entered, The Apple Pan had grown progressively busier. All the seats were now taken. And people leaned against the wall, their eyes moving from stool to stool, determining which customers should pay up and get out. Looking around, I saw that we were the likeliest candidates. The man in the hat had removed our hamburger wrappers, and all that remained was a single plate supporting the tip of my pie. I wished that the people against the wall would stop staring at us, and then quickly, but not quick enough, I tried to take it back.

"I guess we should get going," Hugh said, and he and Anne pulled out their wallets. There was a little struggle over who would pay. "It's my treat." "No, it's mine." But I stayed out of it, thinking instead of what might have been had I not wasted my wish. A laboratory filled with sensitive equipment. Men in white coats trembling with hope and wonder as they leaned forward, catching the sound of one small voice. "Come to think of it," the worm says, "I do remember seeing something suspicious."

Ira Glass

David Sedaris. This story appears in his most recent book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

[MUSIC - "THE GLOW WORM" BY THE MILLS BROTHERS]

Ira Glass

Act Four, Life Sentence. In 1989, a politician named Mike Miller, president of the Maryland State Senate, the kind of political veteran who does not slip up, made a comment to a reporter-- just a few sentences off the cuff-- that many political observers say put the kibosh on his chances to become governor.

The day this happened actually happened to be the day of a big political coming-out party for Miller, his first statewide fundraiser, to be held over in Baltimore. Miller comes from a district near DC. He'd sold over 2,000 tickets. Both US senators would be there, and the governor, and the mayor of Baltimore. But also, the same day, one of his law partners died at a desk in their law offices. So a lot was on his mind.

And with all this happening, he gets a call from a TV reporter who was doing a story about a local gun control issue.

Ira Glass

Mike Miller. He never did run for governor or for any other statewide office. He's a state senator, and now the longest sitting president of the Maryland State Senate in that body's history.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Starlee Kine and myself with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Jane Feltes, and Sarah Koenig. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Elizabeth Meister runs our website. Production help from Todd Bachmann and Kelsey Dilts. Special thanks today to Luke Burbank and William Eville. You can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, best-selling books, even The New York Times, all at audible.com. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who has a message for you, a very important message. And he wants you to listen very, very carefully. Are you ready?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI. Public Radio International.