Radio and Memories
Susan Jordan, This American Life
Radio and Memories
Even on the radio I could tell: She was a nice person.
I recently listened to the podcast This American Life where
they re-aired a piece originally from 2001—the theme was A Return to Childhood,
where Alex Blumberg went in search of his old babysitter, Susan Jordan, in “Ich...
Bin... Ein... Mophead.”
It was as much about how we remember and misremember than
about how Alex eventually tracked down Susan using a private investigator.
--That was 17 years ago. She must be about my age or a
little younger.
I could tell just by the sound of her voice that she was a
nice person. It wasn’t said but I could tell as much: Alex had been secretly in
love with his fearless babysitter. She was his champion. She would have beaten
up a motorcyclist to defend her young charge, whom she felt a bit sorry for.
Alex, she hesitated to mention, was a bit bookish and obsessed with stuff
beyond his years. She was compelled to “play” with Alex and his sister.
But Susan had her own story, as we learn. Because of family
dysfunction she’d moved out of her house or—and it was not clarified—her family
had left her. She was a freshman in college, trying to make it on her own on a
babysitter salary. The kids she watched came to be stand-ins for her younger
siblings whom she missed.
At the end of the call, at the end of the piece she finally
confessed. She was afraid Alex had called her because of something she’d done
or said. She remembered that time period as not one of her best. She was lost,
abandoned, struggling. She was afraid somehow she had messed him up.
1) How sweet and
2) How many times have I thought the same thing. –What a
horrible person I was (the unsaid thought is that I still am) The thoughtless, horrible things I’ve said to others,
That smug, self-righteous persona I give off=all this will come home to roost
someday.
The whole piece is immersed in humanity. In longing. Our
desires to change and go back, readjust the dial of memory. It was melancholy
and immutable. Frozen in time.
Susan of the 70s, a listening ear to young Alex, Susan of
the grocery store, a young newlywed, still the older woman to Alex, and then
years later, where the age gap makes them more or less peers—they still cannot
bridge the difference. His life went one way and hers another. We cannot plot
the course of our lives on a vertical and horizontal graph.
This was a magnificent piece of journalism reflecting
memories and our own perceptions of reality.
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| Alex Blumberg, as an adult |
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