Thanks for watching Welcome back to tell me what
happened the podcast that features folks from
all walks of life Telling us one childhood experience
and how that event has impacted who they are
today I'm your host Jay rehack and like you I've
had my share of childhood experiences some of
them great some kind of painful But I'd like
to think that everything that happened to me
has helped make me who I am today. Tell me what
happened is sponsored by Sideline Ink Publishing,
publishers of quality books, including Susan
Salador's classic, I've Got Peace in My Fingers,
available worldwide on amazon .com or wherever
quality books are sold. Tell me what happened
is also sponsored by laughsaver .com. Visit laughsaver
.com and record your laughter. We'll keep it
for you now and forever. It's free and your children
and your grandchildren and your great -grandchildren
will appreciate it. Visit LaughSaver .com today
and add your laughter to the world's largest
repository of laughter in the world. That's LaughSaver
.com. Alright, today I have as my guest Thomas
Liebert. Thomas is a graduate of McAllister College,
similar to my daughter actually, it's where I
met him. And he's an old family friend. Welcome
to the show, Thomas. Hey, thanks for having me
on, Jay. Thomas, are you ready to tell your story?
I think so. All right. Well, listen, Thomas,
I'm just going to get out of the way. But at
the end, I'm going to ask you one question. And
that one question is this. How do you think that
experience, that childhood experience impacted
who you are today? You ready? I'm ready. All
right. Take it away, Thomas. So I spent. very
little of the summer after fourth grade living
in reality. Fantasy and imagination were not
really an escape from anything in particular
going on in my life, but it just seemed to make
everything more exciting. And it was a pretty
great time if this was your interest. The first
Lord of the Rings movie had like come out a year
before. It was sort of the beginning of a bumper
crop of epic, you know, young adult fantasy series.
And we had just moved to a suburb of Albany about
a year or two earlier. So in the back of this
house, there was a ravine, a small creek, really
more of a, you know, an indent with a swamp.
Now there were houses on either side, but no
one had really fenced it in, it was kind of unruly.
And it was here that one of the main places that
he and the boys from around the neighborhood
were exploring and were playing in. So we lived
in upstate New York, but somebody years earlier
had planted some decorative bamboo in the back
of their yard. And it turns out it's sort of
an invasive species and turned the entire swath
of the ravine behind our house into a small forest
of bamboo. Now it's not the thick bamboo that
you see sometimes, sort of like the size of maybe
a medium branch and when it dried you could break
it off at the root and it made a perfect sword.
sturdy enough to sort of whack away and sword
fight, but not enough weight to put any real
force on it. If you hit somebody over the head
with it, you know, it was going to sting a little
bit, but you weren't going to cock anybody too
bad. So the six of us or so would divide up.
Some people would take the dugout fort across
the street, the log reinforced pit that we had
built the previous summer. And some people would
sit in my backyard in the forest and we would
run back and forth having these fantasy battles
where we were fighting, taking over, capturing
the flag and coming back. Eventually, we were
told by the local drivers that we had to pick
one side of the street because we would dart
out from behind the cars. And that's what I spent
a lot of that summer doing. Now, the other half
of that is that if I was not outside playing,
I was reading pretty much whatever I could get
my hands on. The Redwall series was a big part
of that, where you have these anthropomorphic
mice and badgers and squirrels, one of the good
guys, and they have these battles around Redwall
Castle with the evil stoats and weasels. They
go after ancient treasure. But the hook of all
of these books was always a secret. Some map
hidden in a tapestry, a sword, a pendant stashed
away somewhere, and I could not get enough of
that. So in this backyard, our house was built
around the 30s. They used to throw all of this
trash. And one time when we were playing out
there, I found a glass bottle, which I was sure
was some priceless treasure. that I was going
to be able to give to the museum that they were
going to be able to put in their collection.
So this was sort of the mindset I was in. I also
in this time, somebody gave my parents the Da
Vinci Code or one of those books. And it was
like a little bit, that was a little bit too
young for the the masked Illuminati orgies to
be of that much interest to me. But the codexes,
the ancient orders, the cryptexes hidden in a
box revealed by the Fibonacci sequence hidden
in a cross and the chapel. That was what I was
all about. So the sort of the rediscovery of
some power of the past leaving a trail of breadcrumbs
for the right person to follow. So it was this
summer that we also took a trip to see our relatives.
in Scotland with a stop for a few days in London.
We went to art museums, we went to the Tower
of London. I don't remember if we went to Buckingham
Palace, but it seemed sort of silly to see. I
remember seeing some of those guards and that
it was kind of silly to have these people from
the modern day still pretending like it was two
or 300 years ago. But in between all these trips,
wherever we were going, I had my nose in a book.
I would participate in family activities, but
I also definitely remember being told to pay
attention to where we actually were and to get,
you know, my face out of this book. And I think
it was about halfway through this trip that I
finished whatever I was reading and needed a
refresh. So we went into some local bookstore
there and I picked up a book on Mary Queen of
Scots. Now, in my mind, when I was thinking about
this, I remember it being historical fiction
and sort of geared towards young adults, but
I could not find anything when I was Googling
that would have fit that description. So I think
it must have just been a sort of sympathetic
biography. So Mary Queen of Scots became the
Queen of Scotland when she was six days old and
her father died. She was at five, sent to France
to marry the heir apparent of the French throne.
She was this larger than life, smart, witty,
beautiful person in the French court. At 18,
her husband died, her French husband, who was
the king. And she went back to Scotland and had
to maneuver politically as a Catholic in a Protestant
country. As a result of some of this intrigue,
her husband's house was bombed, he was killed.
She eventually remarried one of the suspected
assassins. She had to raise an army at one point
to oppose some local lords. So even though this
was a true story, this was her biography, it
could have read like one of these other books
that I was reading. And one of the days when
we were in Edinburgh, where my aunt's family
lived, I was told in the morning that we were
taking a trip, that we got in the car, you know,
a foggy Scottish morning. We drive about an hour
north of the city and get on a ferry that was
going to drive us out to see a castle. It was
Scottish weather. It was early and I didn't really
want to engage that much. So I posted up in the
little cabin of this ferry boat and took out
my book. Now at this point in the book in Mary's
life, the feuding among the Scottish nobility
had led to a series of battles accusations that
she was a murderer and she was eventually kidnapped
and imprisoned in a castle on an island called
Loch Levin, a lock about 20 miles north of Edinburgh,
and then we were there. I don't remember exactly
when it was that we realized But we had arrived
on the same island of this character, this person
whose life I had been imagining in my head. We
were at a place that she had really been in rooms
that she had really slept in, that she had really
plotted in. And it felt like magic. It felt like
I had cracked some mystery or discovered something
special, even though the whole point of this
tourist area was that it was where she had been.
That was the point. But I remember feeling that
if I looked carefully, I would find something,
some loose stone that nobody in 400 years had
happened to notice that was concealing a wax
scroll with some long lost intrigue, some letter
that would change what everybody knew about this
event, this person who had lived three and four
hundred years ago. And I also remember it was
surprising. Like if you'd asked me to describe
before we went what it was really going to look
like, I could have come up with a reasonable
guess. But because I was in this fantasy space,
I had built in my head a huge dark tower surrounded
by 50 foot walls and guard towers and chains
and fire. when we got there, it was pretty much
just a damp rock. So while I remember that sort
of giddiness at those two worlds coming together,
I also remembered, not disappointment that it
didn't match that, but a little bit of sadness,
a little bit of melancholy that this was sort
of the reality that it was. all of these things
that had happened to her happened to a real person
that had actually happened to somebody. And it
wasn't just this story that somebody made up.
It had been a real person with real pain and
a real experience. And that's my story. All right.
Well, that's very vivid. I picked up on I know
that feeling of a little boy who wants to find
something. that nobody else has seen I know that
feeling I remember that when I go to various
places it's like looking for something that you
know maybe somebody else has missed or whatever
so as you look back on that experience Thomas
and sort of that convergence of being a worth
greater with a great imagination and a great
reader and then realizing that sometimes what
you read is fiction and sometimes it's actually
based on Real people and real pain and real experiences.
How do you think that's impacted who you are
today? I Think it means that you don't I don't
think of needing to have some big gesture in
a place for it to be an important time like a
lot of this stuff all of these big historic events
just happen in mundane places and I feel like
that stuck with me like you're gonna be I don't
wait for it to look like something significant
is happening or for there to be some sort of
sign that the events that we're going through
are big. It's just reminds me that it's like
it is as much as you want to build up the story
in your head. It is people living in a place
and that is how everything happens. When you
circle back a little bit to going back to the
the area that you lived in the backyard, the
place in the backyard, whatever. Did you find
the things that you found an old bottle or whatever?
Did you did you sort of ascribe some sort of
a history to it when you were when you were looking
at it? Or you just feel like, oh, yeah, they
were they were flasks of one sort or another.
They had some. You know, we knew that they basically,
everyone just threw their trash out the back
window, but you never know. And this area, particularly
down below, you know, it was probably bottles
that somebody, some teenagers in the eighties
had thrown down there after a party, but the
labels were gone. So we didn't know what it was
there. Was it someone had taken some prohibition
liquor and buried it there with something else.
So any the thinnest of pretenses can just could
have become that that whole thing. And you got
to you didn't have to be in the place I would
be now where I'm say it's probably a little bottle.
Probably not. I got to I got to imagine the entirety
of what this little thing I found could be. Yeah.
I hear it, I sense it, I feel this experience
of a couple of different things. Like I said,
it's a child just looking around and finding
things, artifacts, and then also going to a historic
place and saying, these people actually live,
and they suffered, and they hopefully had joy
too. But that feeling of, oh, these people are
not just stories. They're actual flesh and blood
who've experience life or whatever and I guess
Mary Queen of the Scots or whatever you think
about her in some grandiose terms and then you
go see a rock that she's just there and that's
it. Yeah and she had the right like and she had
to eat somewhere and she was bored or she had
to walk around and the island wasn't big enough
and it wasn't when you read it elsewhere you're
only getting the the highlights the battles the
whatever it's not the day to day. She woke up
late, she ate, drank coffee, whatever. And you
can only and you remember that once you're there
and you're doing the same things like we were
in Edinburgh. So I assume we brought a fish and
chips, a chippy with us to this island. And 400
years later, we're eating the same type of fish
that someone had fished out of the lock or the
whatever sea is there in Edinburgh. And it's
basically the same thing. Did you study history
or what was your what was your major? I was an
English major Okay, I could have been a history
major, but both of my parents were and so I needed
a little It's something else Well as the was
the experience in England or in Scotland did
that impact your view of traveling etc I mean
it did diminish it or heighten it or it have
any impact at all in terms of that in terms of
your life yeah, I Well, when you when I read
this, the email talking about what you were looking
for, it was one of the first things that I thought
of because it just it it just. I have felt since
then, I love I love going to the place. There's
just something that you're not. Some. Ambient
sense of the place lingering from whatever it
is that. you're gonna pick up on. And there's
no real way, at least for me, to shortcut that.
Now, I like that just walking around Chicago.
I live down the street from a beautiful Art Deco
building. You can do the same thing walking through
any part of Chicago, which is why, part of the
reason I love it. But to me, there's something
that you're going to pick up. Being in the place
that you just have to you're going to have to
go there to get it Yeah, I like it I again this
it resonates with me because I do feel that You
know a lot of different context I don't they
say that if you dig three feet down in Chicago
You're gonna find the garbage from the 19th century
and stuff because everybody has to bury their
garbage So I've done backyard digs and found
old you know artifacts etc and it feels feels
like a little bit like an archaeological dig
and then you do get that sense of oh wait a minute
this there's a long line of people who've lived
on this planet before me you know and and just
the whole feeling of that that's all i mean i
i don't want to get into any more than that i
think you've sort of articulated the idea that
as a creative person as a big reader you You
imagine realities and then on the other hand,
you go, you know, get a deeper sense in a historical
context. But we all, any object, any building,
anything you look at, you can sort of take a
minute, take a deep breath. You can sort of come
up with a storyline and it's a human experience.
Yeah. All right. Well, Thank you for being on
the show, Thomas. I really appreciate it. Appreciate
you telling me your story. Thanks for having
me on. This is great. Thanks for putting these
together. I love it. I learn something every
time I do these podcasts. And I'm always intrigued
by what people remember as young people that
sort of sticks with them. And like I said, from
this podcast, from talking with you, what resonates
with me is I remember as a child being... in
various places. We used to go to the farms that
used to surround where I was. I grew up in a
suburb but it was basically farmland first and
we would go to the old burned down farms and
look for artifacts and we'd find different things,
you know, old rusty tools or bottles as you said
or whatever and you'd sort of come up with a
history form where you'd think you found something
that nobody else has ever seen and it was very
exciting to do that. sort of an exploratory thing
or an exploration, being an explorer. I had that
feeling it kind of came back when you're telling
that story. So yeah, so thank you for that. Well,
I hadn't thought about it so specifically in
a long time and I got I got a chance to sit down
and actually figure out what it was about that
moment. I remember I remember being on this boat
holding this book. I can still see the cover
of the book. Wow. All right. Well, that's our
show. Again, thank you Thomas Liebert for being
on the show. I'd also like to thank my sponsors
Sidelining publishing publishers of quality books
and laughsaver .com visit laughsaver .com and
record your laughter It's free and we'll keep
it for you and everybody in your family will
appreciate it All right, so I'm gonna end the
show with Susan salad ores. I've got peace in
my fingers I'm recording this at a time of some
historic difficulties in terms of the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, and so I'm going to end
the show with I've got peace in my fingers So
until next time this is J rehack Asking you all
to please stay safe out there and try not to
hurt anybody I've got peace peace peace in my
fingers watch what I can do I've got peace peace
peace in my fingers. I'm gonna shake hands with
you Peace, peace in my fingers. Watch what I
can do. I've got peace, peace, peace in my fingers.
I'm gonna shake hands with you. I've got words,
words, words in my head. Watch what I can do.
I've got words, words, words in my head. I'm
gonna talk things over with you. I've got words,
words, words in my head Watch what I can do I've
got words, words, words in my head I'm gonna
talk things over with you I've got love, love,
love in my heart Watch what I can do I've got
love, love, love in my heart I'm gonna give some
to you I've got love, love, love in my heart.
Watch what I can do. I've got love, love, love
in my heart. I'm gonna give song to you. I've
got peace, peace, peace in my fingers. Words,
words, words in my head. I've got love, love,
love in my heart. I'm gonna give song to you.