Tuning into the American symphony

On Tuesday, I did the kind of radio show episode that is sometimes frowned upon in public radio, where I work.

My plan was to have almost no plan. I would give out a phone number and let people call in. They would tell me what they wanted to talk about.

This intention had been brewing for about a week, but when Tuesday dawned, there had been more than two days of wall-towall news coverage about Afghanistan.

On the one hand, it seemed possible that people, having been deluged with Afghanistan coverage, would want to get their own thoughts and feelings off their chests.

It also seemed possible that the opposite thing could happen. Which it did.

I opened the show by acknowledging that Afghanistan was on everybody’s mind. I said I had spent the morning preparing to talk intelligently about it but that I was no expert.

The first call was about climate change, from a very conscientious woman named Mary who wanted to make a difference by eating locally grown organic and serving on watershed committees.

I promised her we would being doing a show in the very new future about other microsolutions. I’ve been trying to learn about moss, which is arguably more efficient at carbon reduction than trees.

Cities in Europe have been setting up City Trees, which are 4-meter-high vertical gardens of moss which supposedly do the work of 275 trees in a tiny fraction of the space.

The next caller wanted to talk about how horrible AM talk radio has become. He’s retired. He got an Echo Dot smart speaker that allows him to listen to AM radio from all over the nation. It’s so different from what he grew up with: not merely conservative but tilted toward expressions of radical right views.

I was happy to chat about that, having hosted on commercial AM radio for 16 years.

Then came a call expressing frustration at the American obsession with “monolithic” patches of lawn with artificially green grass achieved by applications of petrochemicals.

The next caller wanted to talk about UFOs, which have been rebranded as UAPs (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena). With the recent revelations that the U.S. government has been keeping much more detailed records of these things, “where am I supposed to stand?” he asked.

Do not stand, I told him, on top of a skyscraper while holding signs welcoming space aliens. People do this in the movie “Independence Day” and are promptly atomized.

But it mostly seems unlikely that aliens who had figured out how to travel 25 trillion miles (minimum!) to get here would then be nothing more than minor aerial nuisances when they arrived.

And then another guy called. He used to live in an apartment building where people stood out on the balconies and smoked cigarettes every night. (I’m not sure why that was an important detail.) One night, when those people were indoors, he was bringing out the garbage and looked up to see an enormous UFO with features reminiscent of the car on “Knight Rider” moving “nonchalantly” across the heavens.

How do you know they were nonchalant, I asked. They may have been panicking in there. “We are not supposed to be this close! Look, there’s that guy Matt with his garbage. He can see us!”

Then Pete. He lives in Middletown on a property that groans with the nuts and berries of tress he planted. And he does have a moss garden and two Japanese maples that he grew from seedlings. He worries about climate changes and does not mow his lawn; and he claims to have amassed more than $40,000 in unpaid fines from the city for the way he keeps his property.

We talked for quite a long time. Pete is the type of person you talk to for quite a long time.

The board was bristling with calls. We talked about a diner that posted aggressive anti-masking signs and about “Lord of the Rings.” After 43 minutes, we took one Afghanistan call.

When the show ended, my producer and I were happy. Look, we have terrible problems in our nation and the world, and there can be no shirking them.

But life is motley, whimsical, parti-colored, comic, tragic, profound, shallow, grand, trivial, universal and personal. To me, one of the sweetest sounds is the American symphony of people telling us what’s on their minds.

Their thoughts are often so idiosyncratic and yet also so generally applicable.

I think I’ll do one of these shows again next week. I’m sure Pete will have remembered a few things he forgot to mention.

When the show ended, my producer and I were happy. Look, we have terrible problems in our nation and the world, and there can be no shirking them. But life is motley, whimsical, parti-colored, comic, tragic, profound, shallow, grand, trivial, universal and personal.