High Anxiety

A Jewish girl in seminary, teenage heartbreak, and what rhymes with sneezes?

Also included: sexy names of the 1930s (acc. to Grandma).

hard to hear, but here's grandma talking about (lack of) will to live, and then: a shift! i was always amazed by her strength, especially as someone not always so willful. sorry the audio is so shit. (sorry for a lot of things lol.)

love,

a

In the last installment of the age/regret/choices sitdown from 2014, we talk about "best possible". (I talk too much.)  

Competition and opportunity and validation and the Catskills. A clear grandma head on creating (professional) needs. Muddled grandson. (Bonus points for spotting unhealthy thought patterns!)

These descriptions are hard to write. The book Grandma mentions wanting from me did come out in 2017, quoting a dream of hers on page 64. She'd typed up a few words from a dream she'd had and pasted them over the computer where she used to write: "Do something. Do something! DO SOMETHING!"

It's a feeling we both knew well, handled differently or not at all. Could use some more grandma now, that's for sure.

Love you all. Thanks for giving the spark of Grams more place to spark.

Grandma sings the blues.

Neither one of us were real born smokers but we did our best to learn. Happy 4/20 everyone, from me and grandma and the ash in the cracks of the Casio keyboard.

It has been more years than there are pages in Grandma's first book, Elisabeth the Bird Watcher, from 1963. How did she become a writer?

Picking up mid-cookie from last time: we talk about lives lived and unlived, and the idea of looking forward to looking back. Is it possible to regret the future?

Also on menu: choices and avoidance, wartime and diamonds in the rough, doors and (garden?) paths. Who here likes yardwork?

The first installment in a long chat about aging and living (and dying) and life choices and regrets.  Toward the end, Grandma puts up with some real incoherence from her grandson, and then has a cookie. 

we improv'd this song at some point, for you of course.

the idea was that any time we got really off track, lost the thread, we could splice in a Change The Subject song and get a hold of ourselves again. in the end, it's really just one twentysomething singing about birdf**king with his grandma before she turns 100.

i'm sorry everyone.

Our very first sitdown pipeside in San Diego.

Grandma: is partly metal, harsh-but-fair, and tells a story you might've heard.

Adam: gets told what kind of baby he was. (Leave any jokes about bluntness & blunts after the tone.)

Music by the AI Chairman of the Board courtesy of Mel Brooks. Thank y'all tons for listening.

Talking through one of grandma's (1920s) childhood fears. Recorded way back when Grams was a spry af 95: the movies, broken bones, grandpa the could-be killer, and the importance of holding hands.

Featuring:

Thanks so much for listening. More soon.

Ten years ago my grandma and I started recording a podcast. She was an author of children's and young adult books and poetry — absolutely natural storyteller and all around queen from Queens, New York, and the thought was: shouldn't the world hear more from its 100 year-olds? Answer is obviously yes, but trying to edit and put things together... the short of it is I got too anxious about doing it the "right" way to do it at any way at all. 

So... this intro here is a bit of a potpourri — maybe that's the wrong word, smorgasbord? buffet? — of a few clips from our early sessions.  There's a lot of tape.

I just wanted to know what you'd think of this. More? Less? Different?

- Adam (and Grandma)