RAD RERUN!!!! You Can't Always Get What You Want

0:00 Hey, guys, it's Joe. Good evening. I will say that I love all of the stories that we tell here and that you guys send in, but this one is This one's especially sweet. And we do say add anxiety addicts that good writing is meant to make you think, and this is the opposite. But this might make you think a little bit in a good way. I spend a lot of time looking at various blogs and books and podcasts telling me how to chill out and how to stop the spiraling. And one of the things that's repeated over and over is that a gratitude list is how you help yourself go to sleep at night. And I don't think a gratitude list and ten milligrams of ambient are on the same level. But I do think as part of a winding down habit, it's it doesn't hurt to list the things that you have in your life that you're really simply grateful for. This story made me think of those things. So I'm not telling you how to live your life or how to engage in your bedtime routine, but this is here for you.

1:12 To the restless, the insomniacs, the stressed out, the overwork the doom scrollers, the worried, and the board. This is for you. Good writing is meant to make you think. This is the opposite. Sure funny and unfortunately true stories that have mostly to do with nothing to help you turn off your brain and turn on your ram. All names have been changed to protect the guilty. These are anxiety addicts bedtime stories. Some lives just don't start out super exciting, especially when you're an Italian girl in a suburb of northern New Jersey.

2:02 But then maybe you get lucky. Maybe your mother's brother, uncle Philip, moves to town. This story is about Andrea and her quest to find a real life that could measure up to her dreams, and also about her uncle Philip. More on him in a moment. Andrea's mom and dad immigrated through Ellis Island from Sicily right after the Second World War. Her mother became the neighborhood's most sought after seamstress, at one point working in the most exclusive wedding dress shop on Madison Avenue. Her father worked as a welder, joined the Union, and managed to retire with a pension and nine fingers. In a lot of ways, it was the American dream, but it wasn't Andrea's. She tried to make every day more interesting in grade school. That landed her in the principal's office. In middle school, it was three days of suspension. By high school narrowly avoided booking charges only because well, she was really, really pretty. And that was nineteen sixty six, and that was when Uncle Philip, her mother's youngest brother, moved into the city. And that was when and how this whole thing started. From what Andrea was told, Philip enlisted in the navy and spent years in Europe. The way her parents discussed him, occasionally in hushed voices and then as a warning to their mischievous teenage daughter. Military service was not a great fit

3:35 for her uncle. She had heard once from a distant cousin at Thanksgiving that he had tried to throw the ship's captain overboard and was discharged due to mental health issues or whatever they called it back then. Instead of buying a home with a white picket fence upon his return to American soil, Uncle Philip used his gi bill money to study ballet with the late and very famous choreographer Jacques d'Amboise. Andrea was told, with genuine pride by a great aunt that her uncle had the highest leap of anyone in class. When she heard he was moving close by, Andrea was rightly convinced that this family member was going to be her ticket to a significantly more colorful life. Andrea became a regular fixture at her uncle's apartment because, for one thing, Andrea's downtown public high school was so overcrowded and understaffed that teachers mostly didn't bother with attendance. This was the second reason that Andrea stopped going.

4:46 The first is that she was a very bright girl, and thusly in those tightly packed classrooms a very bored one. Uncle Philip's apartment was one Marlborough cigarette breakaway. Andrea would arrive at the door of his third story walk up knock twice and then let herself in, as Philip had lost his key a week after he signed the lease and had never bothered to replace it. What are burglars gonna take? He'd ask Andrea, shrugging his broad shoulders and raising his dark unibrow, so he looked a bit like Ernie from Sesame Street. His pensiant for widely striped sweaters only furthered this illusion. Yet it was meant to be a rhetorical question, but not to Andrea. Uncle Philip allowed her to open all the drawers in his pantry and take what she wanted, and only one of them had cookies.

5:42 As far as she was concerned, there was a whole heck of a lot in Philip's apartment that a burglar might want to take. On his shelves, where there should have been jars of sugar and flour were instead lots of seventies drugs, weed and hash and valume and queludes. These were the kinds of treats she and other visitors would randomly uncover while foraging for a bag of potato chips. And he was generous with them, so very generous. And he was always game to roll a joint and light up in the middle of the afternoon while his niece should have been in the fourth row of Classroom Sea of Abraham Lincoln High School learning calculus. No matter how stone they got, Uncle Philip would insist that they sit down and do her homework together. She got to B plus it could have been an A, but her teacher noted her lack of class participation. Andrea began to bring her friends over to Philip's apartment, where everyone would get high and listen to war stories and vinyl records. This went on for a few years. During that time, Andrea memorized the Beatles catalog as well as the doors and sly in the family stone. She learned about the war and the Old Country, and met many many of Uncle Philip's friends and girlfriends, who all seemed to be comfortable pushing open his unlocked door at any time, day or night.

7:09 In retrospect, Andrea learned more on those smoky afternoons about history and the world than she ever would have in a classroom. And even though she managed to pull her grades together her senior year and then get into an Ivy League school, the one in Pennsylvania, she still looked to Philip to fill that void of excitement, a feeling that would creep up and overtake her no matter how much she tried to shut it out. When she was married and divorced with two children in her twenties, hold up in a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side where she worked on her dissertation, Easter rolled around sneaking up on the young mom. She was exhausted, broke, frazzled, and newly single. It was too much, and it could have been a breaking point. The moment she realized that she hadn't bought chocolate or eggs or confetti was when her phone rang. It was, of course, Uncle Philip. No sooner had she tearfully explained her situation when she heard the words that she hadn't known how badly she needed to hear. Don't you worry, sweetheart, I'll be right there.

8:23 And right there he was, but in true Uncle Philip's style, he was not alone. Yes, there was a woman on his elbow, dressed in head to toe daytime sequence, but there was also a large box, and the large box was wiggling. Inside were nineteen baby chicks, yeah, nineteen, and in his arms a bunny, Yeah, a bunny. Before Andrea could protest at the sight of farm animals in her New York City one bedroom apartment, her girls were at the door, shrieking in absolute joy. Andrew was outnumbered, and she knew she couldn't turn away her uncle or his chicks or the bunny. As she closed the door behind the menagerie, she simultaneously cursed and thanked Philip because even now with her totally chaotic life, Andrea still craved excitement.

9:16 A few years later, he invited her and her girls and her new boyfriend to his new home on Long Island. Andrea was grateful for the break in the day to day life of work and studying and raising children. At his invitation, she looked forward to something different to do on a Saturday night and an excuse to get out of the city. When they arrived, Uncle Philip gave them a tour of his new digs. On the phone, Andrea had noticed her uncle becoming increasingly eccentric, but she hadn't understood the extent of it until she stepped foot in his living room. Everything everything was covered in tinfoil, every surface, every sofa, every lamp, every table. Only the shag carpet under her white boots had been spined. The girls thought it looked like a palace. Andrew was terrified. The new boyfriend tried unsuccessfully to run out the back door. What's going on here? Andrea tried to keep her voice, even it was a challenge. Uncle Philip gestured with a huge smile to his magnetic seating area. Isn't she lovely? I did it all myself. Andrea hadn't actually considered whether he might have hired an interior decorator to design the metal covered mess. She didn't know whether or not to be concerned.

10:31 She'd relied on this man for a decade and a half to bring the drama and fun into her world. Isn't that exactly what he was doing? Was he going off the deep end? Possibly? Quite possibly, but maybe he was genuinely flexing his interior design muscles. Still, all that crinkling when she sat down on the couch was hard to ignore. It was only a year or so after that visit when Andrea got the news that her uncle was diagnosed with cancer. We'll have a big Christmas, declared Andrea, hanging up the phone with her sister, and she immediately invited Philip. When she'd put her mind to something, nothing was going to get in her way. She spent the next five weeks scouring the city for the most over the top Christmas decorations that she could find. She invited family from all over the Tri state area. She prepped and chopped, cooked and baked. When people walked through the door of her new three bedroom apartment, there were lights and sweets and tinsel. She had to pause before that purchase, since it reminded her of his apartment and candle overload.

11:35 Everyone was wowed, especially Uncle Philip and the new woman in Purple who trailed him from room to room. Even in his last season of life, Philip still had it. The wine flowed freely in the room. Other things flowed from Philip's pockets. Andrea felt herself turning into a child, continually glancing at the stacks of presents underneath the tree. She knew that this was most likely the last Christmas with her chin irished uncle, and she couldn't wait to see what he'd concocted for what he probably understood too might be his parting gift to her. She sunk into a velvet chair, a newly acquired piece purchased on layaway that she'd shop specifically for this night. She took in the noise and chatter and smells and chaos of her cozy new home, filled with people she both loved and tolerated.

12:23 She took a brief trip down memory lane, listing all the incredible gifts that she'd received from him. There were, of course, the joints and the music, the concert t shirts, and the impromptu trips to Atlantic city. There was the jewelry of unclear origins, and once a red convertible that he had to take back after a month. This man and his presence were, as far as Andrea was concerned, the stuff of legends. She felt like a little kid when her cousin herded the family to the tree after dinner for the gift giving part of the night. She scanned the big and little boxes for her name scribbled and Philip's shockingly perfect script. She tried to wait patiently as the kids opened their dolls and remote control cars and new blue jeans. She reminded herself that she was an adult. The presents were silly. She chastised the butterflies swimming around her stomach as she watched her uncle a hand out shiny boxes wrapped with ribbon. She held her breath when he approached her with a shoe box and a shit eating grin. Andrew took her time on wrapping it, savoring the moment. She felt him hover over her shoulder as she gingerly slid her finger through the paper, her palm becoming just the tiniest bit sweaty. The plaid, iridescent paper fell to the carpeted floor. Inside was a box that had once contained mouse traps. Somehow that made the possibility of the contents even more intriguing. She looked up at the man who had done so much for her, who had saved her for more than he would ever know.

13:57 She glanced at her daughters, who also gazed at him, at clearly also anticipating a gift for their mother. Andrew moved slowly, drawing out the moment as much as she could, feeling surrounded by love and warmth and that special holiday feeling. She lifted off the top of the cardboard mouse trap box and allowed her eyes to look inside, where there was a very very large rubber band ball. Yeah, a ball of rubber vands. There could have been thousands, but the plummeting of Andrew's heart took all her attention, and she didn't bother to count or estimate the number. She looked to her uncle. His smile was one of pure joy.

14:43 There wasn't even a glimmer of a prank. Thank you was all that she could muster. The fumes of her disappointment gathered in her heart and condensed in her eyes. It wasn't that she was expecting the hope diamond in the mouse trap box. It was that Uncle Philip's magic was something she'd been counting on for weeks and dreading losing forever. The heavy, oversized rubber band ball sat like a dead weight in her laugh. She watched as the younger kids ripped open their trainsets and barbie dolls. She smelled the pie her aunt had just pulled out of the oven, and listened to a few of the teenagers bang on the old piano. One of those senses pushed her to cry to fawn sob and that's the great thing about a great family. No one asked Andrew what was the matter, or seemed put off by her tears.

15:33 They just put their arms around her and let her let it all out. She glanced up at Philip, feeling his eyes on her as she melted into a puddle on the new velvet cushions. So I'm for me to go doll face. He pulled her up from the chair, his frame feeling smaller and more fragile than she remembered. He wrapped her in a hug that she knew she wouldn't forget, and he put his hands on her shoulder and looked her right in the face, and with total sincerity, asked, so pretty great, huh. For years following Andre would keep the rubber band ball in the kitchen, needing it for various projects with the kids. She absent mindedly moved it to her office, using it to hold together large pieces of mail and folders. It moved with her out to the suburbs after her daughters left for college. It traveled in her briefcase to the summer home she was able to buy her family on the shore. It took a long time, seriously, decades for the ball to run out.

16:28 A band here to hold together the broken doorknob, another there to hold together the potato chip bag, many many used for holding together roles of the architectural plans that had become her business. You never know how badly you need a bunch of rubber bands until you need a bunch of rubber bands. And Andrea finally got her moment, a stop in your tracks, the wind knocked out of you second she got it. She finally got it. She wished she'd had it earlier, years earlier, but it wasn't until she was down to her last size solitary rubber band that she froze. The band in her palm when she realized what Uncle Philip had really done for her. Sure, he'd given her so many fabulous material gifts, but what he truly gifted were the memories of him and all he had taught her about history and life and friends and people and memories and choices and love. Those lessons that she could count on for the rest of her life.

17:24 And then, through a freakin rubber band ball, he'd managed to stay in hers stay close to her for another seventeen years. Yeah, Philip made life more exciting, but it was all because he taught her where to find meaning and that on this dark, insomniac night, is what it's all about, Sweet dreams. Thanks for listening. If you still can't sleep, why not do some shopping on the small business link at anxiety Addicts bedtime stories dot com and support some really cool people, and don't forget to subscribe and to send us your stories.

18:09 Sweet Dreams,