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< Back Bob's Story 00:00 / 04:23 Did you have any moments in high school that changed the way you saw yourself and or how others saw you? Yeah. I sure did. And, that's one of the reasons I feel like we, you know, we found a, you know, a beginning of a shared, you know, experience in our relationship. So, I'll do a little bit like what you did, a little history. Yeah. So around 13, you know, so a little bit before high school, I always tell people the same image. I felt like a brown burlap sack was pulled over my head. You know? Like, the world became fuzzy, and there was a little bit of light, but it wasn't clear. It was really hard and confusing for me, and my experience in high school is very similar. I saw myself as incredibly shy. I was very, very anxious. I didn't go through a period of not going to school because my parents would let me do that, period. I was getting up, and I was going to school, and that's all there was to it. I I was very alone in school. I could probably pick out one or two names from my high school experience that were became friends, but I didn't have real friends. Then I didn't socialize. I didn't date. I didn't hang out with people. I didn't go to parties at school. I also had an eating disorder at that time. So, you know, when I was, I couldn't even eat in front of other people. I'd go to the cafeteria because they need me. It wasn't till I think I think junior or senior year, they allowed us to stay in our class or our homeroom during lunch. We didn't have to go. The way I saw myself is someone that was very anxious, very alone, really confused about that whole thing about the burlap bag. Just didn't I couldn't interreact react interact with people in a way that I would like to. I mean, I did some stuff. I was, you know, got on the high school newspaper, but that was very cerebral. You know, if you've gotten to know me, I'm a people person, but I sure wasn't then. And then I was lucky enough. What happened to me, the experience that began to change that for me was in the first semester of my junior year. We were required in my high school to take public speaking. It was a required class. The assignment was a humorous speech. I guess I saw myself in my head as funny. I don't know if I am funny, but and so I really dug. This project somehow spoke to me. I got up. We were allowed to hold the material. It wasn't memorized. Somewhere early in the speech, I began to notice this amazing thing was happening was that people the the other kids in the audience, the other students were laughing like crazy. I mean, they were falling on the floor, and the teacher was laughing. And it gave me this incredible sense of power. I'm really, I think that's the right word. This incredible sense that I had something in me that, I didn't really realize, that I could be really funny, that I could entertain other people, that this person that was super quiet and hiding in the corner all of the time and not even eating in front of other people could begin to change that. Right? And, it really did have this profound effect on me. This same teacher directed a a play the second semester called the Thurber Carnival, and it worked. She said, why don't you come try out? You're really funny, and it would be great. So I came and I tried it out, and she cast me. And, so here I am up in front of an audience of, you know, 800 or a thousand people, all of a sudden, this super shy person. And all of a sudden, I had this whole experience around the arts, which actually became my passion late in life. But what was important about it was it gave me the sense of myself in a different way. So, it was a beginning. It wasn't the end. Like you said, you had a long way to go Yeah. After that And for me, I had a long way to go too. I was still super shocked. And I also I guess I discovered that being you know, you didn't touch on this as much, but on your family, but being away from my crazy family allowed me to really grow more. I came to UMass like you did. And when I came back for the first break at intersession, my parents didn't know who I was. They said, what happened? I had grown into this other person. For me, the high school that that experience of that classroom began to change my whole life, my inner sense of who I was and what I was capable of. Previous Next

< Back Ngozi's Story Ngozi Okeke talks to Tamar Shadur about traveling to Nigeria, dad's special pancakes, and how she would like to be remembered. 00:00 / 02:15 Previous Next

< Back Mary's Story Mary Young describes, in an interview with Hellen Muma, the cast-off treasures she discovered as a kid—and how those experiences turned her into a life-long collector. She shares a lesson learned from Louis Armstrong’s white handkerchief and remembers a great-aunt who influenced her with the gift of a corrugated gift box. 00:00 / 02:19 So, I know you have a lot of collections, and you keep creating new ones. What are some examples and what made you become a collector? I remember really clearly we lived in a sorta like actually my father taught in a boys boarding school so we lived in a dorm and you would take ethe trash all the way down to the basement to put it in these bins and I was old enough to take the trash down I guess for my mother So i as taking the trash down I went down to the trash room and I saw all this stuff and there was an older couple who worked was on the faculty and they were downsizing and they had piles of stuff and I was immediately really interested in it that was my earliest memory of finding extraordinary things in the trash and I’ve never stopped ever since When I was going through my paternal grandmothers stuff Among all the other stuff I found was a box of buttons I mean some of them were really old some go back to the 19th century and some buttons from when my grandmother during world war 2 was a part of the red cross ambulance driver corps ya know outside of Boston she didn't drive ambulances really but for some reason these women trained for that there were just and there were buttons they came from all different types of people now just women but mostly women the family and ya know from generations of all different people and I think I was already collecting antique buttons and I kind of dumped everything together and I would come up with some buttons from my mother and I’d put those in there and to me it's like this ocean of family history particularly for me of women history and it just is like it all flowed together into this soup and i just love that ya know I have made some things with the buttons like I've decorated some pillows with them I was thinking of framing some maybe I'll do it maybe I won't It's such an immediate connection to generations of women and its different as if I just got something from a tag sale cause this actually had to do something with people in my family who knows what but that's one example of potentially thousands I can tell. Previous Next

< Back Owen's Story, 2022 Owen discusses how he went to college during the Vietnam War and what he learned from not only the education and the professors but also the people he attended the university with. 00:00 / 03:11 When I was 19, approximately, there was something going on called the Vietnam War and you probably studied it in ancient history or something like that, but for those of us who didn't really want to get out there and get shot at we had to find ways to not do that. And we also didn’t believe that war was necessary. So I was a part of a group of people, there were many many of us, who said no this was not a good idea, and the only way I could stay out was to go to college. So I went to college. Another thing that was big in my life is when I went into college was meeting different people from different parts of the world and more so different parts of the country but I did meet a few people from outside the US. And some people have big influences on you, some people have small influences on you and some people you just dont understand. Part of the not understanding is you just have to learn to accept people as they are. I would say the majority of kids that I was in classes with were white from middle class suburban cities around, middle class suburbs from large cities around the country. I went to school in St. Louis and I came from a suburb around Washington DC. There were so many people from so many other places that were similar to me, then I got to meet people who were different to me. I remember, one young woman came from Hawaii and she was native Hawaiian and that was cool. I had never met anyone from Hawaii before. One day it snowed, and she ran outside and she went absolutely berzerc running in between the snowflakes because she had read about it, seen it in movies, but she had never experienced snow before. And I thought, “Okay, this is cool.” You know, just trying to understand someone's frame of mind, especially when you grow up with snow. You know its like what's this snow. And this is like a life changing event for her. And I thought Okay, that’s cool. It is to be able to do that and not to judge someone based on things like that. And I grew up in a society where alot of people were not accepted as they were. Alot of minorities were looked down upon and legally discriminated against. You know that sort of has gone away but not entirely. There was no such thing as people who were openly gay, that just didn’t happen during that period of time. People did not date interracially. You know you never saw a white woman with ablack guy. It just didnt happen. So when you start meeting people that are different and meeting people that are a little outside your realm of experience you learn about them and learn to accept them. That was a huge thing for me. To transition from living with stereotypes which are reinforced by things like TV shows to getting to know people and understanding who the people were. And understanding a person as a person, not just put into a category- a stereotype. Part of going to school was that piece of education. Previous Next

< Back Dennis' Story, Fall 2022 After the Vietnam War and having to put his future plans on pause, Dennis found himself in the city of Boston, not New York, working in education, not pursuing his studies at law school and gaining confidence all along the way. 00:00 / 03:35 Well to set the stage. I was in college from 1967 to 1971, and those were very tumultuous times in this country, much of it having to do with the US fighting an ultimately disastrous war in Vietnam and the growing resistance to that war effort. But I was going through a process of trying to figure out what I thought about all this, and I concluded that I was just morally and conscientiously opposed, that I did not want to participate in this war, and there's a process of becoming a conscientious objector. And I went through that process, and my draft board said, okay, we find that you are a conscientious objector. So that meant that if my draft number came up, I wouldn't be put into the military and sent off to fight the war, but I would be asked to do some form of alternative service. At that point, I had been admitted to law school. I was going to be going to NYU in Greenwich Village in New York, was all excited about heading to New York, pursuing the law. I made the estimation that my number would come up so that even if I started law school, I would have to stop law school in order to go do my alternative service of some sort. So I made the decision to just defer and to instead take a job that would qualify as alternative service if my number came up. And I was very interested in urban education, so I decided I would be a daycare teacher on a Head Start program in Boston. So I took that job. It turns out that my number didn't come up, so I could have, in retrospect, gone to law school and just stayed there and moved in that direction. But instead I wound up teaching. And though I discovered that teaching itself wasn't necessarily my cup of tea, but I got involved in other aspects of urban education issues. I became the director of a community school, and then I became involved in other organizing efforts around education in Boston neighborhoods, and I became involved in a variety of youth services and the funding of youth services. So I wound up getting just totally fascinated with the life of neighborhood organizations in different Boston neighborhoods, particularly Jamaica Plain where I lived for 20 years. And there were a few years where I thought about, am I going to go back to law school or not? And at some point that just kind of faded, and I wound up headed in different directions, following my curiosities, following my interests. As I look back on those years, I realized that I developed a sense of confidence that I could change directions and still land on my feet. And that sense of confidence, that sense of agency, has served me well ever since. And as I look back on it, though, I would like to say, oh, it's because of my ingenuity and my smarts, and that may have a little something to do with it. I recognize that so much of this was the privilege that I had, the wonderful education that was made possible for me by my parents. I had a financial backstop. But knowing that there was a very good chance I would land on my feet. Those early years helped give me the confidence to be able to make changes like that knowing how fortunate I was to be able to bring that attitude to things. Many, many people were not and do not now have the kind of background handed to them and the privilege and access handed to them that makes that possible. Previous Next

< Back Meredith's Story 00:00 / 05:26 My name is Meredith Young. And when I was 12 years old, my father gave me a Polaroid camera and told me just get out and explore. And, and we didn't have a TV. A lot of other children thought that's really weird. You're missing out on all these, you know, really cool, you know, get smart TV shows. But my father took us once a week to the movie theater. So, for college, I went off to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where I majored in molecular biology. And, by end of freshman year, I, heard about of course, I could take sophomore year, there'd be a visiting filmmaker in Baltimore who under the sponsorship of, the head of the humanities department. And I did a brief interview with doctor. Maxey and I got accepted into this filmmaking workshop and I would get course, of course credit and help out this filmmaker who was filming in Baltimore. And yes, this filmmaker, there were classes during the week where you learned filmmaking techniques. You know, he taught us about directing and being a cinematographer versus a director and roles and all that. And as part of the course, every Saturday for the whole semester and you knew this going in, and they only, it was a very like only like 12 students in, in this course. Every Saturday I'd hop a bus from Johns Hopkins to Downtown Baltimore and go to a different part of Downtown Baltimore. We would be filming one scene of this film for that Saturday. And as a student participant, they paired us up with a union electrician. I was gaffer number two and was responsible for the lighting from one particular angle and the other students would, would be in different parts of the space, the recording space. And I was young, but I missed out on traditional college girl stuff of, you know, but I didn't care. I was, I was psyched. I met creative people. The director of, this film saw that, you know, that I was really dedicated, that I was, you know, that I was showing up. And he said, you know, you should join the Maryland filmmakers association. And I said, I always, as a child, I always thought that being a filmmaker meant being the director or the cinematographer. And I'm like, I'm just doing the lighting. And he said, the director said, when people see this film, they're gonna see the light reflected off the actors faces in its light that you shown on those faces. He says, you are a filmmaker. Eventually, I found a regular full time job, out here in Western Massachusetts that was looking for somebody with my educational background. And, and another thing to help, I found out after they hired me on my resume, I mostly played up, you know, what I, but I've mentioned at the bottom that I was a member of the Maryland filmmakers association and had been a judge on the Baltimore international film festival, which all still exists. And the president of the company saw that, and he had ambitions of creating a media department within, the building. So that kind of sealed the deal when he brought me in. So, you and I have talked a lot about, how it's important to be in touch with both your more artistic side even as, like a STEM oriented academic person. Do you wanna talk any more about how, about how, addressing both sides of of, like, your needs have, kind of ended up in positivity in your own life? Oh, it's totally, both in high school and in college and in at every stage. My unconscious brain knew that I needed to do both. I knew I needed to earn a living, which is where having the stem in the finance background helps pays the rent. But the other, you know, a lot of me knew that to keep my sanity, you know, that what really pumped me up wasn't making money. It was paying the bills and then going out at night and just getting involved in the whole art scene, in, in North Hampton. There were students like me who really need that other, that other part of your life. It's something that really gets you psyched up, you know, like, okay, I need to be a responsible person and earn income and live an independent life. Previous Next

Janet gives voice to her late older brother Jay and recalls the significant impact he has had on her early life and professional career despite struggling in his adolescence and growing up in a time where it was unlawful to be self assured about your homosexuality. This is a story about love and loss but touching upon hope in freedom of self expression in culture today. Janet's Story Janet gives voice to her late older brother Jay and recalls the significant impact he has had on her early life and professional career despite struggling in his adolescence and growing up in a time where it was unlawful to be self assured about your homosexuality. This is a story about love and loss but touching upon hope in freedom of self expression in culture today. Janet's Story 00:00 / 03:57 I was born in 1943. Yes, I'm going to be 80 years old. A middle child and a working class post World War II family near Flushing, New York. My older brother named after my Father William Henry Ruloff Nelson Jr was a quiet, deeply sensitive and highly intelligent boy. During those years the 1940s and the 1950s baseball. Mom's at home waiting to put supper on the table for their working husbands was part of the American dream and I lived in a little area in Queens where people's families were very very much devoted to fulfilling that post World War II American Dream. My Brother Jay as we called him did not fit in. He wrote poetry, read deeply and spent a great deal of time alone. Even as a very girl I knew Jay, four years older was different. As he and I grew to adolescence he began to be teased by the other boys on the Block. As we played baseball, Jay kind of withdrew into his room quietly. In his early teens I knew there was trouble my parents talking behind closed doors. Those were years when words like homosexuality were never spoken out loud it was illegal and immoral. With all that he was struggling with as an adolescent, Jay had time and made time but to always be my big brother. In a family overwhelmed by illness, financial issues, and emotional stress, he introduced me to poetry and to literature. As he grew, his friendships of bright enthusiastic gay boys I became a focus of their energy. Surrounded by them I went to my first opera. When my brother moved out when I was 16, his apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan became my second home arrested from my own. His life was not easy despite his high intelligence and a full scholarship to Princeton University, he dropped out of college unable to reconcile the emotional stress that marked those years. My course was different. At each juncture of my growing professional life, it was my brother who championed my success and kept me motivated when I questioned my own abilities. My doctoral dissertation was dedicated to him. In 1982, Jay showed the early signs of AIDS. The years ahead were marked with anxiety and fear. We talked honestly and after 4 years we knew he was dying. I saw him 36 hours before he died at the age of 46. I read a favorite poem of his, Edna St. Vincent Millay at my younger son's wedding. A piece of it is “love in the open hand, no thing but that; ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt.” Like my brother it's a poem about the freedom and the trappings of love. My son's daughter's middle name is Jay, named after him. Over these past decades, I've watched with amazement and joy at the changes in our culture. I often find myself smiling as I think about how Jay’s life would have been had he had such freedom and affirmation. Previous Next

Roberta Liebman shares with Alisson Aleman the remarkable role that neighborhood organizations have played in some of the most significant moments of her life. They have provided her and her family with support and companionship through some of the most challenging moments. Bert's Story Roberta Liebman shares with Alisson Aleman the remarkable role that neighborhood organizations have played in some of the most significant moments of her life. They have provided her and her family with support and companionship through some of the most challenging moments. Scroll to listen Bert's Story 00:00 / 04:15 I think my story began about fifteen years ago, my son and his wife who lived in California, they both by a bizarre coincidence were diagnosed with brain tumors. They were different types but they were serious. And my son Jamie recognized that they were going to be in big trouble. They didn’t have a lot of resources to help them and they were both needing brain surgery. So Jamie spoke to some friends and said we’re gonna need help and the friends said, okay, we’ll do it. And they made sure that whenever food was needed, whenever a ride was needed to the doctor someone was there to help them. Someone was even there to help them sort through the pile of mail. And all of that was incredibly helpful to a family that was in terrible shape. It was this neighborhood that took care of them. When it was over, we were struck by how extraordinary it was that people just rallied around to help and lend support. And about that time, some of our neighbors began saying you know we can have an organization and we would help eachother, are you interested? And we had just had this extraordinary demonstration of how effective it could be so we said of course, yes we would. And my husband Ernie was on the board and he helped deal with some of the finances. I helped with a number of volunteer things, I had been a volunteer in many other situations and it was beautiful. And then the organization grew, people began really recognizing what a fine thing this was. Unfortunately, Ernie’s health was not great and our house was not safe so we had to move. We moved here to Northampton, our son and daughter in-law made us comfortable, they were living upstairs. But people here began saying you know have you heard of this village-to-village network maybe we should have something like Northampton Neighbors. Well, we had already seen this was a really good idea. So, of course we said yes. And we both prepared to be volunteers, except Ernie wasn’t doing very well and I fell down. I had to say I need some help. My arm is broken, I can’t drive to therapy. And boom, Northampton Neighbors was there and it turned out to be the nicest possible way to meet people in my community as well as to receive the help I desperately needed. I think it’s very easy to offer help, it’s really fun to be a volunteer. The thing that's hard are to learn to accept is to ask for help, we’re expected to be independent and to take care of ourselves. And to recognize that it is okay to say I need help. You know there is a certain level of isolation that older people experience, and making it possible for people to join a group where there all kind of social activities, there’s physical activities, there’s even a group called, I think it’s called FIG for food information group. But, I think it broadens the whole sense of how we all work together and how we all need each other.

< Back Sally's Story Sally talks with Mia about her role in creating the first public library in the township where she lived and the impact it has had on her life. "Libraries always remind me that there are good things in this world." - Lauren Ward 00:00 / 01:19 What am I most proud of? I think the fact that I was very instrumental in establishing a public library and little township where we lived this township that we moved to had five little village. Just collections of houses, 30 miles outside of Philadelphia. And there was no center of town really, except the elementary school and then the library right next door. And then the township building across the street. So we were in the center of town and we felt that role strongly so that we tried to have community events there, sector and so forth, immediate community projects. Up until 1958. And we moved there in 1960. There had just been five little one-room schools in the township. And in 1958, they put a consolidated elementary school in, but they say they sold off for the one room schoolhouses, but saved one, hoping that somebody day that would be a library. I had never lived where there wasn't a good library and it really bothered me that there was no library. And so I got involved right away and ended up being the librarian there for 20 years. Once I started having children at that age, those days, you didn't work. As soon as my youngest child was Liz in preschool, then I was working in the library pretty much full. It made for quite a very involving job. Certainly, the thing that comes to mind fastest was the day I was training a volunteer because we always had a volunteer on the desk and this little one-room library had no running water. I unlocked locked the door and we went in and the first thing we discovered was a mouse that had gotten trapped in the wastebasket. And we had to dispose of that. And then a little boy came in with his mother and threw up all over the children's corner and with no running water and quite to the school, getting, finding the janitor to get a bucket mop and clean it all up. And I have to say that volunteer never came back when you were in a small, rural library, anything can happen. And so it's been fun to watch it now grow. Previous Next

< Back Talia's Story Talia talks to Charlie about her experience of studying abroad in Florence, Italy. She speaks about how she chose Florence as her host city. She tells us how studying abroad in Florence changed her and furthered her desire to travel the world. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 02:22 What makes you want to travel? Well, I have spent, I spent that last 6 months abroad and so that was really amazing. I got to go through school. I lived in Florence. And that was one of the the best experiences of my life I think and because of that I feel like I learned a lot about different cultures and I was able to learn a lot about myself as well and I reallized that the environment that I am living in and the people I am surrounded by really can make my life better and I think that a lot of people would feel the same way and so I think that traveling is something that will always be important to me in those aspects. What took you to Italy? So I originally was thinking of going to Greece and so I wanted to go somewhere that was warm, somewhere with beaches. I thought that would be amazing then I realized that I have my ancestry is all from Italy and so I thought that it would be really interesting to learn more about where I came from and the culture that I’m from and so that was really important to me. That was part of my decision. I also have heard of how beautiful Italy is and Florence that was and I knew that it was a smaller city it was something that could feel more homey than other cities I think. I think that was something I was looking for especially if I was going to be living there for an extended amount of time. I wanted somewhere that I felt comfortable with I also had my two roommates going with me and we all kind of decided that the food would be the best in Italy and that was something that we really wanted yeah just a bunch of different things led me to go there Previous Next

< Back Abby's Story Abby talks about her adventures while traveling. She talks about her experience studying abroad and traveling as a young kid and how that shaped her into the person she is. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 04:02 Basically, growing up, traveling was a really big part of my life, one special one that I remember was when I was going into my junior year in high school, they took us to Peru for 3 weeks. For 2 of the weeks we were living on a boat on the Amazon River which was really really cool. We were kind of like helping college students who were doing their thesis or dissertations. We were basically going in and out of the Amazon Rainforest and helping them collect data. It was an awesome experience. It made me look at my life differently, it was my first time traveling without my family. But also while we were there we were able to go to a little village for the day and the villagers just showed us around their homes but we were hanging out with all the little kids and we brought them school supplies and gifts but it was just awesome to see, it was like Christmas day for them when we came they were so excited and that really put a lot of things into perspective because coming from America we just have a lot more things than other countries do, so it was just a really awesome experience and it really shows me a lot about life and how materialistic things like that doesn’t really matter. From that traveling really became my passion, I knew I loved going to new places and experiencing new cultures and seeing different cultures. So, I knew when I came to college, I was going to study abroad no matter what. I went abroad in Fall 2021, and I went to Verona, Italy. It was one of the best experiences of my life. It was my favorite semester in college so far. I was able to travel a ton, I met a lot of new people, I learned so much about myself, I grew as a person. You kind of learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable if that makes sense, you just are kind of thrown into situations that you usually wouldn’t be in and you kind of just got to figure it out. Like it's been an experience that pushed me so far out of my comfort zone, but it was amazing and so worth it. You just kind of got to learn to just go with the flow and stuff won’t always go the way you planned and that’s okay. My first trip was to Lake Como in Italy. It was one of my favorite trips on that I went on there, it was beautiful and so fun but I think what made it one of my favorite trips was the people I was with and we were just hanging out and having fun and getting to know each other because we were only 3 weeks in so it wasn’t like we knew each other super well. My last trip was to London, basically to London we were just being the biggest tourists you could be. We were doing all the touristy things, we went and saw the London Eye, we saw Great Ben, we saw the Parliament, we saw Buckingham Palace, everything that was stereotypical and touristy about London, we did it. My current job right now which I love is at our study abroad office at UMass. I basically just encourage kids to go abroad and tell them that they can do it, I know it's scary, but you got it. I am working for Teach for America when I graduate, before this year I've always known about it but never thought I'd be able to get in. Previous Next

< Back Miriam's Story Miriam describes her experience studying the Hutterite community. She reflects on their sense of community and how it has been shown in her own life. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 05:21 When I graduated from college, which is just where you are, I was able to know about and to actually, in that summer afterwards, go to study the Hutterites. The Hutterites and live communally. But what it means to live communally is that you're not really looking at what a lot of psychology looks at, which is sort of an individual lifespan, or tradition or whatever, of self, self, self. But these are people who live in a rural area, in a farming in the Midwest or in Canada, who came from east from Europe, decades go. This is a an agrarian farm thing. And these people learned from childhood there were a few people who moved into these communities but they've had plenty of children an average of 10 to 12 children, per family. Yeah. And I was amazed by how the world can be so different if you're living in a situation where you don't have money. Nobody has things. No, you don't own a house. This there's a car. But that's because the man who was in charge of the the farming things, he has to go to town and buy some equipment that can't be made, but the shoemaker lived there, and the people who made their clothes lived there. And there was a use of health care that people thought it was necessary. Nobody lived in individual house, nobody had their own fancy kitchens, everybody ate, breakfast, lunch, dinner together. Everybody went to school, but not outside, of course, they had their own teachers, they had their own churches, and they had their own process. Everybody went to church. Everybody wore the shoes that were made there. And everybody saw themselves as very much like the others. There were, there was a family or a couple who belong to the community, and they left. And that was a terrible thing for that community. Wow. Nobody ever left these communities. Right. Right. 2:49 Do you think it helped them in a way to have this really, really intense sense of community? Or did it almost become like a, like a total lack of individualism? 3:01 That's a very difficult question. Right. Right. I think that is the basic question. 3:07 In the United States, there's been sort of this push for, like, sort of extreme individualism, and it's sort of like, you rely on yourself, you get your toes, and that's, that's kinda like, where the line is drawn. We lost a sense of community in a lot of places, I think. So I wonder how we can find that happy medium, sort of where it's like, you still like feel like your own person, and you have this autonomy, but to still feel grounded in your community, you know what I mean? 3:34 In fact, have a probably 30/40 years ago now, there were villages where older people were able to sort of join together and support each other. Because they were they really want to live in a nursing home. There's nothing about a nursing home that is desirable. And they've started it here five years ago, called Northampton neighbors, but it was for older people who and that's how come I happen to be sitting here with you. 4:10 Yes, yeah, exactly. 4:13 Could join together in some ways, but have the kind of autonomy and world of their very special interests, and biases and skills and so forth. And it has worked. Right? Right has worked amazingly well. So anybody could call and say, Ah, is it possible that somebody could get me to the doctor, you know, supposed to snow on Wednesday, and there'll be somebody who would volunteer to take the person. Previous Next