Doug French: Last Week Tonight, you should watch that because it's all about student debt.
Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Okay.
Doug: And it's about the subcontracted companies that handle student debt and how inept they are and some of the policies that need to be overturned but won't because our Congress was recently dubbed the least productive in history. I think Congress passed 27 bills this term.
Magda: Wow.
Doug: And there's no function in that place. So nothing's going to change apart from an executive order that will eventually be struck down by this fucked up Supreme Court.
Magda: Wow.
Doug: There's a story in there that's going to just infuriate you. The whole idea of how this woman went into the military and had been paying on time for nine years on a 10-year plan, with the idea that after 10 years she'd be released from the military and her debt would be forgiven. But she said, no, there's this glitch in our software that says you paid one cent less than you were supposed to. And so that payment didn't count.
Magda: Oh, my God.
Doug: “So even though you've been paying for nine years, our records show you've been paying for one.”
Magda: Oh, my God.
Doug: As usual, everything in government is horribly underfunded and understaffed.
Magda: Right.
Doug: And you've got to keep track of this stuff in order for it to work. And the people who are keeping track are not doing the best job that we might want.
Magda: No.
Doug: Apparently.
Magda: Yeah, I just hate all those late night shows. I just, they irk me. Like the style and the...
Doug: Alright, let me get the irk list. Hang on, where's the irk list?
Why do they irk you?
Magda: I don't know. It's just like their style. And you love them and you always want to watch them, and I'm just like, I would never.
Doug: Well, no, but it's not a late night chat show. It's not guests talking about the movie they're pushing.
Magda: I don't like the comedic style of those late night shows. I don't like Jon Stewart. I don't like Trevor Whatshisname who took over?
Doug: Noah.
Magda: I don't like this John What's-His-Face guy. I just don't think they're funny. They kind of make me feel uncomfortable. So why would you watch something that made you feel uncomfortable?
Doug: Well, I mean, if you don't like the news...
Magda: It's not like these endless stories of people who got screwed by loans are anything new. Like, anybody who's ever taken out a loan is terrified of this exact thing happening, you know? So, like, I just don't need to watch the horror again and again and again. And I mean, this would be like, do I want to watch somebody else giving birth? No, I've done that.
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Doug: Good to see you. How was your week off?
Magda: It was fine. It didn't really feel like a week off. There was a lot going on.
Doug: Yes, we had a wayward child who made a wayward trek across the country, unbeknownst to both of us.
Magda: Yeah, I know. He's something, isn't he? I mean, he started four or five hours later than anyone would have started a 12-hour drive. But, you know, it's fine. He arrived.
Doug: He did all these things that you and I both know he didn't tell us about because we would have told him not to do them.
Magda: I have learned that telling him not to do something is not a good idea. So I wouldn't have told him not to do it.
Doug: All right. Well, I guess the next plan of attack is to encourage him to drive all night in a rainstorm.
Magda: Yeah. So he came to live with me out here in Massachusetts, and it's a 12-hour drive from where you live to where I am now, and a normal person would have started the drive at like 8 or 9 in the morning and driven through and stopped for food and gotten there at like 9 o'clock at night. Oh no, he decided he was going to start at noon, and then he actually started at 1:30, and then he stopped at my brother and sister's house in Cleveland on the way for, I don't know, an hour or two, something or other, to pick up his Christmas presents and just hang out. And then he kept driving and then he stopped in Erie, Pennsylvania, to take a picture of the Erie, Pennsylvania, sign because it reminded him of The Oneders in That Thing You Do. And then when he was driving past Buffalo, there was a huge, huge, huge rainstorm that almost made him pull off, but he's 18 years old, so he didn't. And then he was driving through this beautiful, he said, but slightly terrifying lightning storm across 90. And he finally arrived here at about 5:45 in the morning. And that was it. And I was in a daze the whole rest of the day because I had woken up a little before 4 thinking “he should be here by now.” And he wasn't.
Doug: Well, did you call him?
Magda: No, I thought that was pulling out the big guns and I was going to have some self-respect to not call.
Doug: Interesting.
Magda: I had called him earlier. I called him like, I don't know, 10:30 maybe.
Doug: Well, he has to understand that if he's six hours late to get somewhere, he needs to check in.
Magda: Well, he had when I called him at 10:30.
Doug: To say what?
Magda: To say, hey, where are you? What's going on? And he told me where he was. He was in the middle of a lightning storm. And, you know, but then I think he just didn't want to wake me up. It doesn't occur to him that I might be not sleeping so well.
Doug: Yeah, well, we had the Groundhog Day conversation. “You better leave now if you're going to stay ahead of the weather.”
Magda: And he did not, in fact, stay ahead of the weather at all.
Doug: And he got ahead of the weather and then dicked around until the weather caught back up with him.
Magda: Yeah, I know.
Doug: But it's funny you mention that because in the aftermath of that, the dynamic here is now a whole new ballgame.
Magda: Because it's just one man and one cat.
Doug: And two guest bedrooms.
Magda: Right.
Doug: Yeah. And I thought I was used to this. You know, I mean, I've had neither kid with me.
Magda: For long stretches of time.
Doug: Yeah, for long stretches of time. Now, recently, that's been different. There's been someone living here almost all the time for the last two, three years.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: So I had to unlearn some of that stuff, but at the same time, even when the kids were gone, it was like, you know, they're just across town.
Magda: Right.
Doug: And I could see them whenever I want, and they'll be back sooner than later, whatever. And now, each of them is at least a thousand miles away.
Magda: Well, it's not a full thousand here.
Doug: Well, the way our kids drive, it is. The shortest distance between two points is the circuitous route through Erie, Pennsylvania.
Magda: Well, but I mean, some of that is just in your head, right? If you just thought of it as, “oh, they're temporarily away,” it maybe wouldn't hit so hard.
Doug: Oh, but it's all in the head. The head is all I have. It's going to work out, but it feels as though I just bought this new plot of land and I am rebuilding an entirely new existence. And I feel as though one of the things I need to do to kind of shut the door officially on living with a child is to just throw out half the stuff and rearrange the other half.
Magda: That makes sense. But what half are you going to throw away? It's not like your house is filled with toys.
Doug: Well, it is actually. I've got a bunch of toys I gotta find a home for. I've got a bunch of board games that I can find. I mean, you know, Goodwill will take a bunch of them. About a third of my books are goners.
Magda: Well, I had to unpack some boxes that I moved here to Mike's house to make room for Thomas in his new bedroom, which used to be my office. And since it was my office, that just meant it was the repository of all the boxes I had moved and not unpacked right away. And I found an entire box full of children's clothes from when they were like eight to ten years old. And some of your clothes.
Doug: Why would that be?
Magda: I think because maybe they had borrowed them.
Doug: I think “borrow”'s doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but go on.
Magda: Yeah, “borrow”'s doing a lot of heavy lifting, but it was stuff that looked like maybe, I don't know what it was. It was just like it was t-shirts that I was like, oh, this is Doug's t-shirt. Oh, this is Doug's t-shirt. So there's a whole pile for you that is either going to go back in a car at some point, a pair of cargo shorts, very dad-core.
Doug: Well, again, now that my hands-on dadhood is over, I officially do not need cargo shorts. But I appreciate the effort.
Magda: Yeah. Well, you know, my mom always talked about being an active duty mom and an inactive duty mom, right? She's like, I'm always a mother. Once you're a mother, you're always a mother. Same with being a father. But it's a difference between active duty and inactive duty. And you can be called up at any moment.
Doug: I'm in the National Reserves, right.
Magda: Exactly. Yeah.
Doug: One weekend a month in Fort Dix, whatever.
Magda: Exactly. You're just going on inactive duty.
Doug: But yeah, there's a lot of stuff here. I mean, I just got rid of half my kitchen. There's stuff that I never used. Nothing is on top of my cabinets now.
Magda: Oh, interesting. Are you going to put plants up there?
Doug: No, because then again, I got to go up and take care of them.
Magda: Oh, all right.
Doug: Maybe I'll get fake plants. I would love to get just decorative plants that I only have to dust.
Magda: That's actually kind of a funny idea.
Doug: In fact, I had a fake plant on top of my big bookcase here and I got tired of dusting it and I just trashed it.
Magda: I think what would be really good is–because you get reflected light up there. You don't get direct sunlight–because otherwise I would say, like, succulents that you only have to water legitimately once a month.
Doug: Well, see, that's the other issue, too. It's like investing in this property is one thing.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: You know, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be here, but I just am obsessed currently with the idea of I don't need this. I haven't used it. I haven't worn it. I haven't set eyes on it. Right. So out it goes. And so it's garbage day to day, and the two bins are overflowing. And I have to say, if you're feeling nostalgic, if you're feeling a bit that pit of like, oh, you know, if you're missing those days when you took your kids off to Cub Scouts and then you stumble upon your kid's neckerchief. I mean, is there any worse activity when you're feeling this pit of like missing your kid's youth than to surround yourself with the accouterments of that youth? You know, little jeans about two feet long.
Magda: I know, those tiny jeans, right? So the stuff I found, the kid stuff I found, I'm going to give away here on the Don't Buy Anything Natick group. Not to be confused with Buy Nothing. Buy Nothing apparently got very hostile and rule-based, so a splinter group came off called Don't Buy Anything.
Doug: Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea.
Magda: I know, exactly, exactly.
Doug: And that's exactly, that ties into why I got involved with Bicycle Washtenaw because I went to this bike summit and there's like 18 different organizations trying to advocate for bikes and they don't talk to each other. They're the most disorganized bunch. They don't dislike each other, but they don't, they all work independently and they all have their own calendars and their own events.
Magda: Well, and if all those little kid clothes were t-shirts or if they were all kind of similar, you could have them made into a quilt, right? People do that all the time with their...
Doug: Oh, come on. Don't be so female. Really?
Magda: Masculine people I know sleep underneath quilts.
Doug: And you know I'm the least gendered person that you probably know in many ways.
Magda: That is not true at all.
Doug: But damn it. A bunch of dudes. Dudes don't think about, oh, we could make a quilt out of this. Really?
Magda: You're radically less gendered than the average American man. I will grant you that. But, I mean, come on. I went to a women's college, right? So...
Doug: Whoa, that card came out early.
Magda: As I was saying it, I was like, oh God, why do I talk about this every time? It's like the Windex of the world for me.
Doug: But... What, the Windex? What is that?
Magda: Oh, remember in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where they thought Windex would fix everything?
Doug: So, you know, I've never seen that movie.
Magda: The first one is very, very cute. It's very heartwarming.
Doug: Yeah, I would bet. Which is why they made two more. But I think I equate it to like when Chris Rock did a whole bit about how Robitussin fixes everything.
Magda: Oh, yeah.
Doug: I know. Windex, Robitussin, and duct tape.
Magda: Yeah. So, no, I'm giving away the little kids' clothes. Some people sometimes who identify as female like to make them into quilts.
Doug: Right. I mean, but that's the thing. I actually have like way too many blankets that I need. I'm going to. Both of their old closets, you know, they didn't have bureaus here. They had their own closets with shelves and they would just stack all their clothes in there. And now they're just full of blankets I'll never use unless I have guests. And UVA made the NCAA tournament very unexpectedly. And they were assigned to the Detroit Regional because we've known for a while now that the Midwest Regional is going to be held at Little Caesars Arena. So in the very unlikely chance, so, guys, if you're listening to this, you're welcome at my place. You can crash here.
Magda: So, as a, I would say, mid-level consumer of March Madness, you know, basketball is not my favorite sport. I would say I'm like a level four and a half to five fan of March Madness. I really enjoy the brackets, right? Like the brackets aspect is great, but the actual watching of the basketball, and then every once in a while, like some kid breaks their leg right in the middle of the game and that just kills me.
Doug: That doesn't happen very often, to be fair.
Magda: No, but once is enough. Like, I saw that happen once and it has scarred me because, you know, I watch all these college sports and I'm like, these children, like, yes, they're six foot five, right? But they're children the ages of my children. And so it's kind of terrifying. But how do you get tickets for these games? Like, if they don't know who's going to be playing which game when, like? So let's say UVA comes to the Arena Arena. How soon would you know and would you be able to buy tickets or is it the kind of thing where people are on the internet having 45 browser windows open trying to click in and get tickets?
Doug: It's obviously all touch and go because you never know who's going to win, who's going to lose. And so there's usually a vibrant secondary market.
Magda: Oh, okay.
Doug: It's a very tiny part of me that wants to drive to Dayton, but I probably won't do it.
Magda: Why not? You don't have a kid in your house.
Doug: Because I never know which team is going to show up. I'm not driving five hours to... I mean, sometimes they're great and sometimes I want to pull my eyes out.
Magda: Oh, yeah. Well, it's true. When I was at your house last month and we had to watch that game, I was like, this is not... I feel bad.
Doug: Watching that team is only enjoyable to people who attended that fine university. And even most of us are like, ugh. Detroit might be a bigger sell, although I don't know if Detroit in March is going to be that big a draw, frankly. I bet you I could get in for a song if I wanted to.
Magda: Right.
Doug: But I'm really glad we're talking about grief cleaning here just because I've been talking to a lot of people, people who are lined up to be guests on the show and people we're still talking to about it who are having a real tough time separating and finding interesting ways to cope.
Magda: Separating from being an active duty parent or separating from the stuff?
Doug: Well, all of the above. I think it's the parenthood stuff. There are parents who can't bear to look at the stuff they have to get rid of because it reminds them too painfully of what their life was like before. And it's just change, right? It's just our willingness to cope with change that defines us at this stage, right? Because now we're all old enough to know
that changes aren't permanent, but change is. Thank you, Rush. And we're defined by how well we cope with that.
Magda: Yeah, it's true.
Doug: I should tell you, by the way, I had a roommate in my first-year dorm who wrote his senior thesis on “change is not permanent, but change is.” Got an A.
Magda: His senior thesis?
Doug: Yeah.
Magda: How do you get an entire senior thesis out of “change is not permanent, but change is”? Was it a physics thesis? Did he actually prove it?
Magda: I didn't read the paper, clearly. But I know he was a smart dude and I knew he was a Rush fan, so...
Magda: You know, if people started undergrad at the age of 50, we would actually read each other's senior theses.
Doug: Oh, absolutely.
Magda: It's just that when you go when you're 18, like, you don't care. Oh my God, by the time I finished my senior thesis, I did not even care about it. It turned out that I had bitten off more than I could chew and was unable to prove my hypothesis.
Doug: Did you have an advisor who kind of was able to nip that in the bud?
Magda: Well, I was trying to compare two books. So I was trying to compare literature of Gen X, which was a trick because I was writing this in 1994. So there was no like, real look-back on this.
Doug: It's like, there's Bret Easton Ellis.
Magda: Yeah. And so I was comparing this Canadian novel, Douglas Copeland’s Gen X with this Chilean novel called Mala Onda that I had heard all about, but had not been able to get a copy of. And you know, Pinochet like decimated the whole library system in Chile while he was down there in addition to murdering tons of people. So it took me months and months and months. This was also pre retail internet, you know what I mean? Like there was, the libraries and stuff had the ability to send stuff. So I end up getting like a grainy photocopy of this Chilean book like three weeks before my thesis was due and I read it and I'm like, “Oh no, this book is nothing like I thought it was going to be.” And so I basically had to write an entire thesis about how there was no similarity at all between the two books that I was comparing. And my poor advisor, he himself was actually Chilean, but he had also never read the book. And so he couldn't say to me, “danger, danger, danger, you're about to go off a cliff,” because what if I wasn't about to go off a cliff? And you know, I was so cocky. I was like, oh, ho, ho, ho, you know, like, comparative literature major.
Doug: Is there value in proving that two things are completely unrelated?
Magda: There was enough value for me to receive, I think, a B minus on the thesis.
Doug: Wow, that must have been traumatic.
Magda: It was. It was the lowest grade of my college career, although I had had an episode in which I had taken a final exam in a class. I adored the professor and I was really interested in the topic, but I liked the classes so much because of the professor that I sort of forgot to go back home and study. And so I got into the exam and it was a blue book exam, which we all know what the blue books were. But if anybody's listening to this who's under the age of 30, I don't know if they still exist. They're just like photocopied sheets of paper with like a light blue cover. So they're kind of empty and you would just handwrite your exam in this proctored situation. And I remember I got my exam back in the blue book and there was one question this professor had scrawled across the top that read, “What the hell are you thinking?” It's the best thing that ever happened to me academically. It's just so funny.
Doug: Imagine the mood he must have been in while he was reading this. Especially speaking as someone who has been on the other side of that.
Magda: Mm-hmm.
Doug: And read stuff with complete incredulity. Like, why?
Yeah.
Magda: Well, and this was like, whatever the first level of econ is, macro econ, right? And I was a literature major, but I certainly understand the concept of slopes and graphs and stuff like that. I just, my basic problem is that I don't believe the first two principles of economics. I do not believe that a free market exists. And I also do not believe that humans engage in rational behavior. So like, if you don't believe those two things, it's kind of tough. And I couldn't just put my mind into a fantasy world of
where these things are true, I would ask these questions in class that indicated that I was in fact paying attention. So it wasn't like he just got this person who was genuinely stupid or hadn't been paying any attention at all. It was somebody he knew who was paying attention who had just gone completely off the grid of anything that made sense.
Doug: So you're buying more into the whole it's just fear and greed and it's rigged for the elites.
Magda: Kind of, yeah. Well, I just don't, okay, I don't think a free market can exist because there's like two ways of looking at a free market, right? One way is that the people who are stronger are going to prevail, but then that's not actually a free market because everybody doesn't start out with the same resources. So then if you level things, then you could have a free market. But the act of leveling things means it's not a free market. So to me, it's a tautology. Free market is a tautological argument and can't exist.
Doug: And I think whenever we have conversations that we're recording, I feel it's my job to attempt to bring things back on track to what we were initially talking about. So what do you think the free market would be for all the stuff I'm trying to get rid of in my grief?
Magda: Well, okay. So I think there are a couple of things that would affect that. One is you live in a college town. So there are definitely cycles about when people are getting rid of stuff.
Doug: Yeah.
Magda: And I think you're ahead of the curve because I think the end of class at Michigan is like mid-August or mid-August, mid-April.
Doug: And if there's one thing college kids crave, it's a pair of size six soccer cleats.
Magda: Oh, I found my soccer cleats! I have not played soccer in a decade.
Doug: Did you play soccer when we moved here?
Magda: Yeah. I don't know if you remember this. I was playing in a women's rec league. We were over on some field. God, I can't remember where the field was.
Doug: I think I know where it is. It's up by the hospital.
Magda: Oh, man. Yeah, it was by the hospital. It was an ankle-breaker. There were holes in that field that were pernicious. And I finally stopped playing–that was when I was running all the time, and I realized that I was in so much danger of twisting my ankle every time I played soccer.
Doug: Well, your ankles are made out of balsa wood, to be fair.
Magda: They are! And do you know that that’s because I have ADHD? I discovered this, and it’s a thing. People who have ADHD have problems when they sprain their ankles all the time. I had no idea.
Doug: And once again, the conversation is way off the rails once again, but that's fine. I love that part. I'm enjoying noticing it.
Magda: Yeah. So anyway, I haven't played soccer in 10 years and yet here I have my soccer cleats with me in Massachusetts, just in case.
Doug: Well, see, I think my situation here has invested me with a brand new intolerance for, “well, maybe I could use that someday.” Now I can really, in the cold light of day, say, no, I don't need that. I haven't seen it. There's no way I'd ever use this ever again. It's gone.
Magda: And I think that this is a little bit generational and a little bit fueled by the internet because when I get stuck in a loop of, “oh, but what if I do need it?” I realize that I can obtain almost exactly the same item very easily for free or low cost because of these buy-nothing groups and marketplace and stuff like that. It really is okay for me to let something go because I can probably obtain an almost identical object just given to somebody else by their mother instead of given to me by my mother, that probably has the same amount of wear on it.
Doug: There's probably a generational thing, too, in terms of just the value of possession, the value of acquisition, the artificial high you get when you purchase something.
Magda: Right.
Doug: The artificial dopamine that you get when you acquire something that you've told yourself that you like or you want. I have never had that problem. I don't buy anything, as you know.
Magda: Right.
Doug: But I also am very aware of, I mean, I told you the story about my aunt. Who, when she passed away, they found a whole room full of stuff she had bought and never opened.
Magda: Oh, wow. Well, so, I mean, here's something that's going to sound like it's completely off base, but it's not. Talking about the value of objects. Yesterday, Thomas and I were watching TV and I put on The Price is Right. And I like to watch The Price is Right Channel, which has all episodes from 1983 to 1986.
Doug: This is something that Thomas is going to have to adjust to. There's a whole different breed of television going on in the household.
Magda: Oh, he was fine with it. We watched one episode.
Doug: I know. Right?
Magda: He was fine with it.
Doug: But it's funny. It's just the way, even when we publish Friday Flames and we talk about what I'm watching versus what you're watching and it's...
Magda: I know. I know.
Doug: You know, there's only so much Project Runway before you're watching Project Re-Runway.
Magda: So we were looking at the prices of things and I said, “Yeah but that was worth so much more to them because minimum wage back then was probably like three or four dollars,” and Thomas was like “What are you talking about?” I said, “I think this is 1984” and he said, “It had to be higher than that back then,” and I said, “No, I know it wasn't higher than that because I was making $6 an hour working for my dad's company in the summer of 1989, and that was an astronomical amount of money.”
Magda: You were rolling in it.
Magda: I know. So, you know, I went, you can look up what the minimum wage was, and the minimum wage went up to $3.55 an hour in 1981 and stayed there until it went up again in 1990. And so we were looking at some of these things like the price of a TV. You could buy a really fancy TV back then for like $500. And now you can buy essentially that same TV because what's fancy has changed, you know, so back then, a 36-inch television was like astronomically big. And now 36-inch television is just like, oh, you want a little television, right?
Doug: Put that on the kitchen counter.
Magda: Yeah, you can buy a 36-inch television now for $500, but $500...
Doug: $500? That much? Don't they give those away when you open a new bank account?
Magda: Exactly. I think so. Well, there are some things that are priced much less now. I had observed when I was watching The Price is Right, “obsessively” is kind of too big of a word. I would say just “consistently.” I had it on in the background to track time.
Doug: Somewhere between there. Somewhere between consistent and obsessively. I think there's just over-earnestly.
Magda: Over-earnestly, probably, yeah. Well, to me, it's like this big slice of Americana. Like, you could get an entire dissertation on, like, American Studies out of just watching these Price is Right episodes from 40 years ago.
Doug: Yeah, there's your econ treatment right there. There's your Econ 101, just watching the hiker fall over the edge.
Magda: Yodel-a-lo, lull-a-lo, lull-a-lo. And then he falls off.
Doug: All right. I should have bet somebody I could make you yodel during this episode because I was sure that the next thing out of your mouth was going to be a yodel. I was like, she's going to, right as soon as I mentioned that, she's going to yodel.
Magda: That was only a fake yodel. It wasn't a real yodel.
Doug: You know, all yodeling, yes.
Magda: But a thing I noticed was that they started having KitchenAid mixers, but they called them like “KitchenAid food prep stations” or something like that. But it was a KitchenAid mixer. It was your basic KitchenAid mixer with the three different paddle attachments and you can lift the head up and stuff like that, right? So in 1985 or whenever it premiered on the show, it was valued at $400. You can go out today and buy a regular KitchenAid mixer with the three paddle attachments and, you know, bowl and whatnot for $400. And it's amazing to me that the price has stayed exactly the same for 40 years.
Doug: But did they have it in teal?
Magda: Well, I mean, yeah, that's true. Like, when they came on originally, they were in white and I think almond, something like that. But, you know, the one we were watching yesterday.
Doug: It didn't have a sausage grinder attachment, probably.
Magda: The episode we were watching yesterday, they had a washer-dryer combo in one of the prizes, and it was that weird sort of muted mustard yellow color. And Thomas was like, what? And I said, oh, this was like a hot color. This was considered a fashion color.
Doug: And he should know that from That Thing You Do, because in that appliance store, Guy is selling basic white, avocado. Avocado was very big.
Magda: Avocado was very big. I have an avocado hand mixer that my mother-in-law gave me, that she was given as a wedding gift in 1968. But she was given two hand mixers and she opened the other one and used that one, so she gave me the avocado one which was new in box from 1968. And I love that thing. I used that thing all the time. And then we registered for a fancier hand mixer for our wedding and we got it and Mike won't let me use the avocado one anymore. He's like, “why do you need two hand mixers?”
Doug: Why, indeed. But you gotta use the avocado one. That's the far more interesting personality of the two.
Magda: I know. Mike and I have different definitions of “need.” He wanted to get rid of it, and I was like, no, so I took it, and he doesn't know where it is, and maybe I'll use it in an art installation or something about, you know, the nature of changing womanhood.
Doug: Well, the true health of a marriage relies on subterfuge.
Magda: Yeah, exactly. Hiding appliances. Hiding small appliances.
Doug: Oh, that would be cool, though, if you were to put that into an art project. That would be amazing. And that's actually, again, coming back to the kids and all the stuff here that I'm getting rid of and winnowing. There's so much here that I can't bear to get rid of just because it's what the kids did when they were eight. They've both done so much drawing. We spent so many weekends, the three of us, on corners of a huge sheet of paper just drawing stuff and riffing off each other. And I have all of those.
Magda: You still have those big snakes that we carried through the subway in New York.
Doug: Because I know what it took to get them here. I still have the banner of Robert as a baby that hung out of Elizabeth Seton.
Magda: Oh, wow. Really?
Doug: Yeah. How do you part with that?
Magda: I didn't know you had that.
Doug: I do. Wow. And I'm keeping it.
Magda: Wow.
Doug: Because it has no value to anyone but me and you. And we're not going to be Solomonic about it and slice it in half, so maybe we'll switch it off.
Magda: I put up some photos that I had framed. I brought them along and put them up here in Mike's house and they're just mixed in with his photos of his kids. And Thomas got here and he walked through the living room after he'd been here for a few hours, and he picked up a photo and he looked at it and he said, “Oh, that's me and Robert.” Just put it down again. Like, yeah, that's you and Robert.
Doug: Has that helped at all? Kind of make the place feel more like yours at least? A little bit?
Magda: Yeah, a little bit.
Doug: Yeah. I know that's a challenge for you and I get it. I'm looking forward to when the two of you can have your own new place together.
Magda: Yes, a house that is both of us instead of me living in Mike's house.
Doug: Right.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And I think when I look at this house too, I really think I need, I almost want to take it down to the studs stuff-wise. I want to move my bed into a different bedroom. You know, I want to turn one room into a library for no other reason as I can.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: It's kind of like, remember we talked about the sympathy move?
Magda: Uh-huh.
Doug: The whole idea, like when you had to move all the time, I don't know how many times you've moved since we've left New York City, but that really accelerates the whole death cleaning thing. I'm doing my own death cleaning just because when people come to clean this place out, and again, let's be clear, during this time when I live alone, I could just die. And it's not like we live in New York.
Magda: Well, you could just die.
Doug: Yeah. And it's not like, I mean, New York, the smell would eventually arouse the neighbors. Right. But here I'm in a house. I got room. I could be here for weeks.
Magda: Harry would figure out how to get out and he would go tell somebody something.
Doug: Harry would figure out how to open the front door. Yeah, for sure. But that is another weird feeling when you live alone at my age and alone alone. Yeah. You know, it's like, should I get a life alert bracelet?
Magda: I used to have those fears a lot when the kids would be at your house. I was like, I could die and who would know?
Doug: Well, we made it this far, so. But it's like, it seems paradoxical to think you're going to get over that fear when, since you felt that way, your body's gotten empirically worse.
Magda: Yeah. Like, I think about the fact that I was afraid of that at like 38 or whatever and now it's like, really?
Doug: Well, I swung a golf club for the first time this spring and it was like my body had forgotten how to do it. I'm so tight everywhere.
Magda: Really?
Doug: Yeah. The whole mechanics are screwed up because I need to take yoga or something. There's a gym across town that specializes in flexibility for people of a certain age.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And I think I might just have to plunk down some cash and do that just to get out of the house and have a regimen where someone far younger than I can say, do this now, grab that, bend over, touch these. Because I've never felt my age in my life. And I'm starting to feel that way.
Magda: You've never acted your age in your life.
Doug: No, exactly. And I think they're connected.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: I think so, too. Not like demand curves and supply curves, but I think there is a way if you can act like a dummy in many ways that does kind of work towards your body and vice versa especially since you know getting on a treadmill releases all that dopamine and makes you feel a little better, but I have work to do. It's not just doing a little cardio and shooting some hoops and playing golf. I got to work on my core. I got to stretch.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: Have you ever taken yoga? I can show some kind of stretching. I'm just really upset by the threat of farting.
Magda: That you would or that somebody else would?
Doug: That anyone would. Yeah, they all do. I mean, you're meant not to be self-conscious about what your body looks like or its output.
Magda: Right.
Doug: And sometimes it can't be helped. Plenty of people have told me that their yoga classes are full of farting and it's just one of those things you adjust to because it's one of the byproducts.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: But I think it would benefit me because it took me about 45 minutes to sink a jump shot. I played basketball for the first time in six months and I had lost what the goal of the game was.
Magda: Yeah, you used to golf and play basketball and all kinds of stuff just sort of casually all the time.
Doug: Right, and I need to get back to it now, but I need to go at it with intention. Because it's meant for a much more glorious purpose and not just because I had a heart event 11 years ago.
Magda: Right, “a heart event.”
Doug: Yeah, that's the euphemism we go with.
Magda: I don't know, you were ahead of the curve on that, right? Like most people don't have a heart event at the age of 47.
Doug: It feels good. It feels good to have endured that. Well, it feels good to go through cardiac therapy with a bunch of 70-year-olds.
Magda: It feels good to have endured it, I think, like to have made it through, not necessarily to have been an early adapter.
Doug: Well, especially when you meet guys who are 78 who are, you know, working off their fourth.
Magda: That's no good.
Doug: That's no good at all. They have more stents than blood vessels at this point.
Magda: Yeah. Well, but I mean, okay, it's been, what, 11 years for you? And you haven't had any recurring heart issues. Your heart's probably in better condition now than it was 11 and a half years ago.
Doug: Well, that's what they said would happen, but I haven't had a stress test in a while. And I have to say, the last stress test I had been working out a lot, I could maintain on a treadmill. I could go six miles an hour, seven miles an hour, because for those stress tests, they work you.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: And so I'm at this point now where it's like, okay, I know I need to get physicals. But I also know I want to be in better shape for them when I get there. So I have to get in shape first. That's like cleaning up before the housekeeper comes. Back when I could afford a housekeeper.
Magda: Exactly. I think...
Doug: So that's what I'm doing now. I'm cleaning up the house before I invite the physician over to look at it and say,
Magda: Well, you know, I mean, I live with like, Mr. Fitness and he's not even doing it because of fitness. He doesn't believe that he's doing any kind of athletic activity, but he still walks like three miles every day. And he went for like a four mile strenuous hike on Saturday and then he went out dancing last night and all this kind of stuff.
Doug: And so he's very fit and that's great because he genuinely enjoys that. He doesn't do it because he feels obligated. I think this is actually what this podcast has been. This has been a therapy session for me just to kind of unload a few things that have been, you know, bouncing around the attic since Thomas left. Because even though I knew this reality was coming, it has been an interesting experience to finally fully confront it because I'm living it now. I'm not just anticipating it.
Magda: Well, and I also think it's not the same as if he had just gone off to college a couple months ago.
Doug: He basically has because he's not going to come back here. It's true. He basically has. I'm going to see him in fits and starts, but he's never going to live here full time again, God willing.
Magda: But there's cultural space for “my kid went away to college. He's my last kid at home. I'm sad.” And there isn't so much of “my kid moved to the other parent's house for some unknown number of months until he goes to a college that he hasn't chosen yet because we haven't gotten all the acceptances back yet.” It's harder to say where he is, you know, instead of just like, oh, he went off to such and such school.
Doug: But that doesn't matter. It's not a question of where he is. It's a question of where he's not. You know what I mean? It's like he could be... Because we have another son who's off, you know, pretending to be Lewis and Clark, which is awesome.
Magda: Yes.
Doug: I sent him a package the other day full of things he forgot because I wasn't here to help him pack. Man, I'm sick and tired of being right. And it took a week for the package to get there.
Magda: Oh, I sent him just a letter in a business-sized envelope. It took nine days to get to him.
Doug: Wait, what?
Magda: Nine days.
Doug: And I sent him a big box full of hiking boots and shirts and a birthday gift. You'd be so proud of me, by the way. I actually sent him a wrapped birthday gift.
Magda: Wow.
Doug: I know. Making changes.
Magda: Good job.
Doug: That's the part, too, because it's one thing if you were in college, like your daughter-in-law is coming home from college in a month or so, yeah?
Magda: Stepdaughter, yeah. My stepdaughter is coming home. She was home for spring break last week.
Doug: And that's the thing, too. It's like… It's one thing to know that they're away and in some level of structure.
Magda: Yes.
Doug: And if we were still a united household, I would know that, you know, they were coming back here. But not only are we not a united household, we don't live near each other anymore. And so when our kids come back to visit, they're going to have to make a choice.
Magda: Right.
Doug: So that's hard. I mean, what's going to end up happening is we're going to switch places. I'm going to end up heading to the East Coast and you're going to head back here and it'll be the same goddamn problem.
Magda: I know.
Doug: I have a very persistent weird cough and it's not going away and it bothers me.
Magda: Are you taking Zyrtec?
Doug: Do you think it's allergies?
Magda: I think 100% it's allergies. I think if you're taking bee pollen and Zyrtec, you would be fine.
Doug: Okay, I'll try it. I have both, as I found out when I cleaned out my medicine cabinet. Does bee pollen go bad?
Magda: After like 500 years, yeah.
Doug: Okay, because I have a jar in the fridge that I've had there forever.
Magda: Yeah, but I mean, forever is like four years, right? No, it's fine.
Doug: Okay, good. So I think the main thing I've learned about this, I was thinking about Elizabeth Mosier's episode about when you're grief cleaning for your parents and how it helps to kind of look at it like you're an anthropologist and you're discovering new things.
Magda: An archaeologist, really.
Doug: Or both, yeah. I think any kind of ologist. You're an apologist. You're a geologist given the sediment that's built up in the closet over the years. Ornithologist? There is a lot of layers of sediment that I'm digging up to get things out. But it's a whole different experience when you're the one who left those articles in the first place. It's not discovery, it's nostalgia. It's like picking at a scab almost.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: So I think the bad news is this is hitting me harder than I thought it would.
Magda: Okay.
Doug: Even though I knew it was coming. And again, I'm really glad I didn't spend the entire time obsessing about when that was coming. You can look forward to something and then spend the entire time worrying about how it's going to eventually end and ruin the whole experience. So it's hit me harder than I thought, but I feel better equipped to deal with it than I thought I'd be in terms of staring it in the face.
Magda: Well, it's sort of ongoing, you know?
Doug: Yeah. That is the exact way to put it.
Magda: Yeah, I mean, every time I go there, I get rid of some more stuff. I'm just sort of getting rid of stuff all the time. But I mean, don't forget that I have been getting rid of stuff since I was getting rid of stuff from my uncle's house in 2016. And then trying to get rid of stuff from my parents house in Toledo. And then, you know, like, I've been getting rid of stuff for the better part of eight years, even when it wasn't my stuff. So I think it's not hitting me as hard because it's just like, oh, more stuff to get rid of.
Doug: Yeah, but I think it's different. Cleaning out after your kids have left is very different from cleaning up after your uncle's passed or your parents have skipped town.
Magda: Yeah, well, and that's the thing that's different for me is that I'm cleaning up in the aftermath of me having left. Like, it's different. I think it's less sad, but it's more guilt.
Doug: Ooh.
Magda: So, yeah.
Doug: That's a whole other podcast. Yeah. As is the podcast we're going to have because since you've done this, regardless of whom you're cleaning out, stuff is stuff.
Magda: Mm-hmm.
Doug: I live in a town where it's illegal to throw away anything, so I will consult you. Let's talk more about the different homes I could find for the Settlers of Catan.
Magda: Yeah. Alright, I gotta go. I gotta get ready for Hungarian.
Doug: You have 45 minutes to get ready for Hungarian.
Magda: I know, but I haven't done any of my homework for it. “Hazi feladat” means homework.
Doug: Yeah, what's Hungarian for “abject procrastination”? Look that up.
Magda: Yeah.
Doug: IM me that text and I'll put it in the show notes. Well, thank you for listening to this extended therapy session for me. This has been Episode 38 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been this huge pit of nostalgia living in my throat and heart. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our newsletter Friday Flames every Friday. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review. We'll be back next week with Episode 39. Until then, I will have far less stuff in the house when that happens and we'll see you then. Bye-bye.