Memento Stori

Jordan was a blossoming singer songwriter who died in a car accident when she was just a teenager. Filmmaker Dycee Wildman thought Jordan was the coolest person she’d ever met and recently found a homemade CD of Jordan’s music under her bed. On this episode, we listen to those songs and talk about the continuing impact of their friendship.

Official site: mementostori.show

Show Music: Ryan Breegle

Comedian Chris Crofton shares the story of his grandfather, former head of the New York Produce and Grain Exchange, Charles B. Crofton. Charles was a flashy, successful man who found it hard to connect to his children and left behind a confusing legacy full of questions.

Official site: mementostori.show

Show Music: Ryan Breegle

The first time Jamie and I hung out we were both in Massachusetts for the wedding of some mutual friends. She and several others had rented this big old house in Salem for the weekend and after the reception shut down, all the Nashvillians went back and partied there. While everybody else drank and played games in the other rooms, we spent most of the night in the kitchen bonding over Yankee Candle hauls on YouTube, the price of trailers in a local Pennysaver somebody had left behind, and our fucked up families.

Thereâ€s a kinship between people who have experienced loss. Thereâ€s even more of one between those of us who knew that loss would come but not exactly when. I knew from a fairly young age that my father didnâ€t have so much time. Jamie knew this about her mother. To live with death before itâ€s happened, that will cook into you a dark crust that has to be cut with something sweet. Or at least something palatable.

Jamie is funny. Like, really, really funny. The kind of funny that you just have to be born with. Itâ€s in the recipe of your genes. Even when discussing some really dark stuff, she has a sense of humor about it that makes you so at ease about what sheâ€s telling you, even if you havenâ€t lived it. In the early spring of last year, Jamie and I met for brunch, drank about a hundred Bloody Marys and talked about our dead mothers. Actually, we drank about a hundred Bloody Marys, talked about our dead mothers, and laughed hysterically. It was electrifying. Grief doesnâ€t have to be one thing or another.

A couple of years ago, Jamie did a stand up routine at Springwater for amateur night. Her set was brilliant. I mean, truly. And so much of it was just about her life, the sad parts, the unbelievable parts, about her dad who at that time was recently diagnosed with dementia. And it was so smart. Thatâ€s key. If youâ€re not smart, laughing or poking fun at the misfortune of your loved ones can come across as well, sociopathic. But this was more Tig Notaro than Jeffrey Dahmer.

Before this interview started, Jamie told me she wanted it to be serious, because thatâ€s not something sheâ€s ever really able to be when talking about her family. She didnâ€t want to trivialize the material. She wanted people to understand that some of her experiences have really affected her and itâ€s not funny, even if she makes it funny.

Thatâ€s harder to do than it sounds. Itâ€s hard to suddenly let down your guard when youâ€ve processed everything through the lens of gallows humor and self deprecation. If thatâ€s been the crutch thatâ€s kept you from falling apart. Sheâ€s never said this, but Iâ€m willing to bet that Jamie often feels like I do, which is profoundly alone. But loss and feeling alone, it might be the two most fundamental ingredients in the human condition; which is why you add vanilla extract to almost every baked good – to cover up the dry and bitter.

Loss, it happens to everyone. It happened to us, it will happen to you. So you might as well laugh about it.

Official site: mementostori.show

Show Music: Ryan Breegle

We donâ€t always get what we want.

Rachelâ€s grandmother never left the house without makeup. And she used to pull the credit card bills from the mail so her husband, Rachelâ€s grandfather, wouldnâ€t see how much sheâ€d spent on clothes that week. She loved dancing and would throw big parties at their house which had an actual dance floor and bar in the basement. She was the kind of woman that possibly could have only existed when she did.

Rachel is a very different kind of woman, and in many ways, also a woman of her time. I met her back when we were both angsty young high school freshmen and her outfit of choice at that time was a Bikini Kill t-shirt, combat boots, tiny plastic barettes in her hair and a padlock chain around her neck. She was a feminist who didnâ€t eat meat. She was cool with a smile that made her small features crinkle up beneath her bleached out pixie cut. Think of a young Renee Zellweger with the Enid Ghost World fashion treatment and that was her.

Rachel told me her grandmother would often let her know she did not find her heavy eyeliner, mohawk, or ripped tights at all fashionable, or at all flattering. Itâ€s fascinating, who and what we come from and what parts of them stick.

When Rachel was about 11 or 12, her grandmother took her and her cousin to Glamour Shots. For those who didnâ€t grow up with these in every shopping mall, think of them as a portrait studio where you went to get photos with filters before filters were a thing. They would tease out your hair, pile on the makeup, give you a rhinestone necklace and take as many blurry, soft focus pics as you could pay for. Rachel said she went back to look at those pictures and remembered how sheâ€d really loved doing them, no matter how corny they look now. During that session, sheâ€d felt as sophisticated and fancy and as grown up as her grandmother.

When Rachelâ€s grandmother passed, she got something that seemed to encompass all of the elegance she associated with her. Unfortunately, it was also something that she found grotesque and that went against her deeply held personal beliefs.

Official site: mementostori.show

Show Music: Ryan Breegle

Have you ever picked up a black shaker and turned it upside down over your food only for white salt to come out? Tristan Van had several distinctions – nurse, bicyclist, curmudgeon with a heart of gold, and the first transgender employee at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. His colleague and friend Neil Stinson remembers Tristan and the token from him he keeps. We can’t always know what’s inside a person or a pepper shaker.

If you are moved by this episode remembering the life of Tristan Van, we encourage you to make a donation to the Tennesee Equality Project in his memory. This page was set up by his friends and family as a way to honor his legacy.

Official site: mementostori.show

Show Music: Ryan Breegle

Love blossoming over a telephone switchboard, a mid-life nose job, and Downy fabric softener. Nashville based burlesque performer BeBe McQueen shares the life of her glamorous grandmother Gigi and the story of the portrait that was almost lost forever.

Official site: mementostori.show

Show Music: Ryan Breegle

If you’re lucky, you may have a few mementos, a few items, that belonged to someone who has died. That inherited stuff becomes proof of existence of a life, lived in all the ways a person lives; decently, dangerously, richly or strained and at odds. Depending on the relationship, that item could bring you great joy, longing, happiness, confusion, anger or just a general sense of obligation to tend to it as they would have.

It’s complicated how we feel about these tokes and trophies. You may feel the burden of caring for things that only you know the why and how of. Or, in the absence of any explanation or feelings, you may feel a willingness to fill in the blanks the best way you know how. Does the proof of a life extinguish and die without these stories?

There is meaning and importance and comfort in that which is left behind. On this podcast, Memento Stori, host Rebecca Delius will meet with people from all walks of life, some strangers and some childhood friends, who have all found themselves tasked, willingly or not, with guarding the relics of another one’s life.

Join us for the stories behind the stuff. Coming soon.

Show Music: Ryan Breegle