TUS01503-Podcast 01 2025 Hold My Beer

Marc Moss: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Tele Something podcast. I’m your host, Mark Moss, founder and executive director of Tell Us something. The next Tele something event is October 7th, 2025. The theme is. Walk on the wild side. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets@tellussomething.org. This week on the podcast,

Jeremy Keene: Willie was one of those people, you just kind of into his energy and his mischief, like moths to a flame.

Meco Correia: And I turn off of sixth Street onto a side street. And so I’m in the heart of Missoula and I look up on the horizon. And something catches my eye and my first thought is it’s a helicopter. And as I look at it, I say, that’s going too fast.

Marc Moss: Four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme.

Hold my beer,

Kali Neumeister: and we get an alert on our phones that says Severe storm warning. And [00:01:00] then the power goes out. I don’t know if you know where you were at on July 24th, 2024, but I was 38 weeks pregnant having contractions. Knowing what to do with my evening ’cause I’m not quite ready to go to the hospital.

Tom Attard: So I tell him, Tim, you are impossible to love. You are destroying yourself. Like, what is your problem? Do you hate yourself? Are you mad at God? Do you have some kind of bitterness or anger?

Marc Moss: Their stories were recorded. Live in person in front of a sold out crowd on January 13th, 2025 at the George and Jane Denison Theater in Missoula, Montana.

I do have to apologize for the quality of the recording. The gain was set too high on the recording device and there was a lot of his and background noise. I did what I could to remove it and a lot of that is gone. In the process of removing most of the hiss, all of the applause and ambient noise went away.

The hiss is still noticeable in places. [00:02:00] These stories are great though, and it has been too long that they’ve been sitting dusty on my hard drive. So let’s get to it. TE us, something acknowledges that we are gathered on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the Ponderer Salish and Kni peoples.

When te us something engages in land acknowledgements, we try to make them specific to the time of the year that the live event took place. Keeping that in mind, we know that traditionally storytelling is reserved for the winter months for many tribes. This was a practical choice given the fact that during the other seasons.

People were busy growing, gathering and hunting food when the stories on this episode were recorded. It was winter with long, dark evenings, the snow and wind blowing outside, and that is when telling stories is used to entertain and to teach the children. Another reason for winter storytelling is that many traditional stories [00:03:00] contain animal characters.

To be respectful. People wait until the winter when animals hibernate or become less active so they cannot hear themselves being talked about. We take this moment to honor the land and its native people and the stories that they share with us

tell us something. Stories sometimes have adult themes. Storytellers sometimes use adult language. Please take care of yourselves. In our first story, Jeremy Keen and his buddies embark on a cross country road trip with a big gulp, super glued to the roof of the car, right along with Jeremy to experience the hilarious reactions and unexpected encounters Everywhere they went, Jeremy calls his story Big Gulp.

Thanks for listening.

Jeremy Keene: So you, y’all know what a big gulp is, right? It’s that 32 inch. A cup that you get at seven 11 comes with a lid and a straw. Your favorite soft drink have [00:04:00] seven 11 around here. But you know what I’m talking about. All the, every convenience store has one of these things. Well, the best thing we ever did was alluded to the top of my brother’s car.

It was my friend Willie’s id. He found this tube of super glue in the glove box. And he was like a little kid at Christmas. He’s all looking around and smiling, like, we gotta glue something.

So Willie was actually my brother’s friend. We were all going to school together in Boulder, Colorado, and uh, we’d hang out. Willie was one of those people, you’re just kind of drawn to his energy and his mischief, like moths to a flame and. One of our favorite things to do is to go on road trips. My brother had this 1973 Volvo station wagon he got from our parents.

Bright yellow had [00:05:00] the four speed manual and way too many miles. We packed that thing full of sleeping bags and potato chips and beer, some extra oil. So the back end sagged, like it wouldn’t make it around the block. We but it, but it did. And we went places. Went to Newport Beach and went to Mexico to the Grand Canyon and uh, Willie would always go along.

It wasn’t like he didn’t have to ask him or anything, he’d just show up. He’d have his long underwear and his cutoff shorts, and his pillow in one hand is toothbrush in the other.

Going on road trips with your buddies is a little bit different than road trips with your parents. This is the same car we used to take family road trips in, but when you go with your buddies, you see life through lens and Willie’s lens was like a carnival.

So the last road trip we ever did with Willie was we went to Mardi Gras [00:06:00] and we were around the backyard waiting for my brother to get outta class or something like that. And, um, fixing things on the car, which was basically Willie scraping the bugs off of. The windshield that the spatula

Tom Attard: found

Jeremy Keene: made, the cards fixed.

So that’s when he found the super glue and then he spotted the big gulp in the console between the seats. And, uh, I wasn’t, didn’t think it was a good idea. Glue up to my brother’s car because, you know, it’s a piece of shit. It’s his car. He’s gonna be pissed that we ruined the paint. But Willie thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever thought of, and he was determined.

He glued that thing right above the passenger side door where he might set it and get. Then I remember there’s this picture of Willie standing on the running board with his arm on the door and he is got his mouth on the straw thing, stayed on for 1500 miles.[00:07:00]

I’d be surprised. The lengths that people go to to tell you, you’ve left your big gulp on top of the car. They would run after us as we were pulling outta the gas station. There was this whole group of church kids in a van and it was like a slalom course driving through ’em as they tried to save the big gulp

where people would catch up to us on the freeway going 70 miles an hour and honk and point and. And we just smile, like had no idea what they were talking about.

Willie uh, Willie liked to do this thing. He called Newton’s. He put the, he put the car in neutral and put both feet on the floor and let it start rolling down the hill. So, if you remember, um, Newton’s law of motion is force equals mass times acceleration, where force is measured in Newton’s. And this is a 1973 Volvo station [00:08:00] wagon and acceleration is gravity, 19.8 meters per second going down the hill.

We’d all hang on and we’d watch the speedometer. 75 80, 85, 95. People trying to save the goal would give up. Fall behind.

Willie also used to love to get kicked outta things. He would get us kicked out of everything at at Mardi Gras. We waited in the rain to get into this restaurant for like an hour and by the time we got in there all hungry and wet and they put us at this little table in the middle of the whole restaurant and I could tell it wasn’t gonna work.

Willie’s, he can’t sit still. He is running. And talking to everybody, slapping people on the back, buying drinks, yelling at the waitress, and the, the manager finally comes over, guy named Michael. He is got Michael on his name tag and [00:09:00] he’s real polite, says, Hey, you know, we just, we just need your friend to come sit down and, you know, stop cussing so much.

So we call Willie over and Hey, Willie, come. And, and he, he just says. More money and he disappears out the door into the rain to get find an ATM machine. We don’t see him again for like 30 minutes, and we do, Michael’s got him by the arm and he says, look, your friend just has to sit down and stop swearing.

And Willie immediately says, shit, Michael, your pants are too fucking tight. You should relax more often.

Now I didn’t eating anything all day and I ordered this one of these Cajun burgers with all the fixings and puppies on the side, and I can see back in the open kitchen, they’re just about to bring our food out. I looked at Willie and I looked at my brother, [00:10:00] my friend Jeff,

and then my brother stands up and says, well, if he goes, we all go.

I took one last look at my burger. I knew that was gonna be a good burger. And then when I followed my friends out the door side, Willy’s standing on the sidewalk looking, sorry. He’s got bare feet cut off shorts. He’s wearing Hawaiian shirt that’s only got two buttons left. He’s got Mardi Gras beads down to his waist.

His curly hair is all wet, hanging in his face. I just looked at him. I said, Willie, man, where the fuck are your shoes? And then Michael comes back and tosses, Willie’s shoes out onto the sidewalk, and he sits down on the curb and kind of Dejectedly puts them and looks at us and says They were wet, explained everything.[00:11:00]

Then he got up and looked at the people still waiting in line to get in and said, y’all don’t eat there. Food sucks. If we’re going down to the corner where there’s a hot dog stand, they’ve got hurricanes now. Hurricanes are these rum and fruit drinks that they serve at Mardi Gras and they come in a big plastic cup with lid and a straw.

We probably should have glued one of those to the car. I don’t know. When we lost the big Gulp, when Mardi Gras was over, we drove to Pensacola so we could save Florida. Sat on the beach all day and filmed a Kung Fu movie. Willie and my brother fighting the waves as they came into shore.

Uh, and then, you know, when the sun went down, we got in the car and started driving home, and it was probably somewhere in the middle of the night, three in the morning I stopped take a piss, and standing there in the headlights, I saw the big gulp, was all it was [00:12:00] left was this ring of super glue.

A couple years after that, Willie was gone. My brother called me and said he’d crashed his hang glider into the side of, I’d never known anybody that died before, at least nobody my age. And for a long time I just kept thinking we’d find him again. Like all those times that Willie would get lost. You could be standing there talking to Willie one minute, and the next minute he’d be gone.

And then you wouldn’t see him again for like three hours and we’d go looking for him. ’cause you know what? If something happened, but we could never find him, and then he’d just turn up later at the hotel sleeping in front of the door. I,

I think some people just burn so bright. They’re only here for a flash, a shooting star or a bolt of lightning. And afterwards, you’re never quite [00:13:00] sure what you saw. That’s how it was with Willie. I think we all know somebody like that. If he’d lived, he’d be in his fifties today, have a hard time imagining what he’d be like.

I like remembering when he was 20. It reminds me that not everyone gets to stay here for very long, and it reminds me, I’m glad I’m still here. I’m glad I get to stay a little longer, and I know Willie’s not lost. He knows where he is. We just can’t find him. Right. Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Jeremy. Jeremy Keene graduated from the University of Colorado in 1994 and landed a three month temp job in Missoula and never left.

He met his wife Heather, and they raised two talented daughters who are now flung far and wide in the world after a long career, engineering streets and highways, Jeremy became the city Public Works [00:14:00] director in 2019. When he is not sailing on Flathead Lake, you might find him riding mountain bikes in the hills around Missoula or playing beer league hockey at the Glacier Ice rink.

In our next story, Miko Correa is a former PACU nurse with a heightened awareness of horizons and the lingering echoes of trauma. Discover how a unique self-care practice involving Japanese rope art provides grounding and connection, setting the stage for an extraordinary encounter with the unknown. On a quiet Missoula Street, Miko calls her story eye on the sky.

Thanks for listening.

Meco Correia: From 1998 to 2000. I worked in a local hospital in the post anesthesia care unit, also known as the recovery room, and several times a month I had to carry a [00:15:00] pager and be on call. For those of you that are not from pre-cellphone error, that’s a way that somebody could get in touch with you.

And believe it or not, I was told I needed to explain that. Uh,

so, um, as the, my day off technically, but I was an on-call day off, and if my pager buzzed I well prior to my pager buzzing, I became very acutely aware of the horizon. Um, where the helicopters would be coming in and the helicopters usually meant that somebody had something really awful happen to them where they made a bad decision and now they were life fighting in.

So I became aware of watching [00:16:00] the horizon. Um. Not just when I was carrying a pager, but it became a heightened sense that I noticed things in the sky. And when I would feel, what I would feel is my heart would start racing, my stomach would clench, my hands would get sweaty, and it really helped me to tune into that sense of embodiment, like how things felt for me.

And this segues into, I am from those experiences of recognizing that people carry a lot, a lot of, a lot of traumas. In both my career I used the opportunity to, to connect and touch people, to help ground them. So that kind of segued into. I am a [00:17:00] whole creator in a community here in Missoula, built on helping people to ground an essential way to heal their collective traumas.

And so it’s a very supportive, very loving environment and it’s pretty powerful. So part of that is also finding different ways that help me to feel grounded and uh, one of those ways was. On the afternoon of October 13th, it was a Sunday in 2024, so three months ago, and I was spending an afternoon doing, um, a sari session.

ChAARI is the Japanese art of rope tying or rope bondage, and in a session, if I have ropes. Um, when they’re tied on me, they’re not tight, [00:18:00] but it allows a compression that releases an incredible amount of endorphins, so your natural opiates and that helps relieve and, uh, my autoimmune issues where I carry a lot of inflammatory side effect, but it also helps me really ground into a deep space of connection and.

Wholeness. So on that afternoon, after that, um, session, I was out running some errands and I had just, as I was out running the errands, I was listening to have Chorus Sing. It’s a, it’s a song, but it’s a mantra, a Hindu mantra called, oh. Potty m and all is [00:19:00] considered by the Hindus as the sound of the universe, universal sound, and in that sentence of M potty M, it’s a mantra to all in relief from suffering.

For each of us, it’s like a global prayer to help relieve our suffering. And it’s a beautiful, uh, choir that’s singing this. So my car is just reverberating with this gentle praise music, and I turn off of sixth Street onto a side street. And so I’m in the heart of Missoula and I look up on the horizon and something catches my eye and my first thought.

Is it’s a helicopter, which after all these years I’m still, I still have a bit of a [00:20:00] response to them, and as I look at it, I say, that’s going too fast. And it is literally in less than a blink of an eye, it traveled across that half of the valley and I stopped in the middle of the road. No, no cars. It’s a side street.

Not a lot of traffic. But I stop and I look at this, and in this microsecond observation, I say, what the hell? And there above me, it’s not a helicopter. It’s bigger than a helicopter, but smaller than an airplane. It’s kind of lowy. Metal. So it’s got its own radiance. There are no lights, no reflectors, no propellers, no [00:21:00] gen engines, no turbo boosters or thrusters.

There is no, uh, chem trail that cross the sky. It’s dusk. Um, I looked at my, my. A clock on my dashboard and it was 5:09 PM and I like super fast, took in these details that it’s silver. It had kind of a dry type shape front, and the body had what I would say would be wings, except they were tipped up and they were shaped like flattened, uh, triangles.

And on the one wing there was an arch of red with, or it was an arch, but had red symbols and it was like, like an arch. And then there was another arch below it that [00:22:00] had red symbols and they were just out of focus where I couldn’t make out what they were. But this spacecraft was just above the tree line.

And there was no seams, honest crap and no windows. And immediately I have this sense of incredible love, like grounded in love. I didn’t the sweaty hands, I didn’t like the clenched stomach. I didn’t have that visceral response. It was just the opposite. It was beautiful. And as I’m looking at this spacecrafts, I wanna say spaceship, I, I mean, I said all it’s, you know, I said in my head, no words in my head [00:23:00] because I had such an incredible sense of love.

If you are a UFO, you could totally take me. And by golly, that. That craft slid over to the left and turned slightly toward me, and I realized at that point we were communicating and I got a download that without words, there were no words. It was just this sense of knowing that my mission is to love myself abundantly.

Uh, and to let that spread out to others and to teach them about self-love and connection and let that ripple out through our planet. And I was recognizing that the sense and the feeling that I had from this experience was [00:24:00] equal to the sense that I had when I had the ropes. Very grounded, very loving, very reassuring.

And so I don’t know what you would do if you saw a UFO, but this is what I did. I said thank you, and then I drove away.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Miko Miko. Correa is a believer that a nourishing meal cooked and shared in love will advance soul healing on this planet. She’s a co-creator in a sensual healing touch community, a culinary artist, a watercolor dabbler, a gypsy gardener, and an RN that has touched many lives and bodies in this community for over 25 years coming up after the break.

Tom Attard: So I tell him, Tim, you are impossible to love. You are destroying yourself. Like, what is your problem? Do you hate yourself? Are you mad at [00:25:00] God? Do you have some kind of bitterness or anger?

Kali Neumeister: And we get an alert on our phones that says severe storm warning, and then the power goes out. I don’t know if you know where you were at on July 24th, 2024, but I was 38 weeks pregnant, having contractions, knowing what to do with my evening ’cause I’m not quite ready to go to the hospital.

Marc Moss: Stay with us. Remember that The next tell us something event is October 7th. The theme is Walk on the Wild Side. You can pitch your story by calling 4 0 6 2 0 3 4 6 8 3. You can learn about how to pitch your story and get tickets at, tell us something. DOT org. Thank you to our story sponsor who helped us pay our storytellers the Good Food Store for more than 50 years, the Good Food Store has been Missoula’s homegrown independent source for natural, organic, and locally sourced food.

Learn more@goodfoodstore.com. Thanks to our media sponsors, Missoula events.net Blue Dog Media and Missoula Broadcasting Company. [00:26:00] Learn more about them and listen online@missoulabroadcastingcompany.com. Thanks to our in kind sponsors Float Missoula. Learn more@floatmsla.com and Joyce of tile. Learn about Joyce and the work that she does@joyceoftile.com.

Alright, let’s get back to the stories. You are listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. I’m Mark Moss. Tom Attard shares his story about a raw and emotional Christmas Eve encounter at a Kalispell bar where a man’s heartbreak leads him to his little brother. A drywall delivering, street fighting functional alcoholic.

They’re intertwined lives, marked by a decade of distance and dangerous choices build to a powerful, desperate conversation about change. Crack a beer and listen along to Tom’s story that he calls a ride home from the rainbow. Thanks for listening.

Tom Attard: Where do you go when you get dumped on Christmas Eve?

You go to the [00:27:00] purveyors of peace, the home of the magical elixir of emotional amnesia. You, you go to the bar, but who are you gonna find at the bar on Christmas Eve? Well, I’ll tell ya. You are gonna find somebody who’s burnt every bridge, someone who’s taxed every relationship in their life, to the point of breaking, who has no one left, no relationships to speak of.

And so to the bar I went. So I’m walking up to Stockman’s Pool Hall in Kalispell, Montana. And I look across the parking lot and I see this big, burly guy’s got a bushy beard smoking a cigarette. He’s got a Santa hat on. I start getting closer. I look at that guy, looks familiar. [00:28:00] Lo and behold, it’s my little brother, Tim.

Oh, and what does Tim do when he sees me? I’ll tell ya. He grabs me. He picks me up. He puts me on his shoulder, parades me around the entire bar, introducing me to everyone who he knows by their first name. Every bartender, everyone, because my little brother lives at the bar. He is the most functional alcoholic I’ve ever met.

He can drink all night long. And get up at five 30 in the morning to deliver drywall. He would drive that boom truck. And Tim is the strongest person I’ve ever met. He can beat me arm wrestling on both sides while I’m using two hands. [00:29:00] His hands are so big around that I can’t even close mine around his when I go to shake his hand.

And he’s delivered drywall so much. One of his arms is longer than the other. This might not mean anything to you, but he can carry two sheets of five eights thick, 12 foot long sheet rock at once. He didn’t pull the tape. If you’ve picked up one sheet, you know that that’s impossible. So calling him my little brother was a misnomer.

He is taller than me. Six foot three, just super strong. Uh, but I didn’t have much of a relationship with my brother for about a decade. I only saw him twice a year at most Thanksgiving and Christmas. And that is because if you ever got a call from my little brother, it was from one of [00:30:00] two places. He either is gonna call you from jail.

Or from the hospital, and that’s because he was also the bravest person I’ve ever met. He never backed down from a fight. In fact, he’d fight four or five guys at once, which often lance you in the hospital. So at this moment in time, me and my little brother, our lives merged. We became two peas in a pod.

We were on the same life path. And, uh, yeah, I had a lot of my first experiences with my little brother. Um, I didn’t even know what last call was for until I met him the first time. He came down to Missoula to go out with me. We’d been out drinking and bar hopping and two in the morning at Charlie B’s. He would walk the [00:31:00] call, last call, he walks up to the bar.

He orders three beers and three shots, and he drank them in five minutes and he just was unstoppable and he was so fun. Um, yeah, we would just stay up all night playing guitar and hand drums until they called the cops on us. And then we would laugh at the cops ’cause we were like. It’s Friday night, Missoula.

What did you expect? Um, so I just couldn’t keep up with the guy. I gave it my best shot and for two years I tried to keep up, but after a couple years realized, man, I can’t keep doing this. And I tried to get my life together, you know, I tried to stop drinking, tried to stop doing. All the other stuff. Uh, but I was still [00:32:00] chasing this girl in Whitefish and, uh, she invited me to her house warming party on Valentine’s Day.

And I said, well, if, if I’m gonna come to your house, housewarming party on Valentine’s Day, I’m gonna break you up with your boyfriend. I’m just gonna ha kiss you in front of him. We’ll get in a fight. And then ta-da, I’ll be your boyfriend. So I, uh, went up to Whitefish with evil intentions and I get up there and I get to the party and everything’s going great, right?

According to plan. And I get a call about 10 or so that evening, pick up the phone, and who is it? It’s my little brother and he’s like, Hey, I called to tell you I love you. [00:33:00] And I’m like, Tim, uh, where are you man? He’s like, I’m at the Rainbow bar. And I was like, he’s obviously drunk out of his mind. So I was like, don’t go anywhere.

I’m gonna come and get you. And he started laughing. He says, you’re gonna drive all the way from Missoula, Montana to pick me up from the rainbow bar and give me a ride home. And I said, no. Nope. I actually happened to be in Whitefish, so I’m gonna come get ya. So I left the party and I got in my car and I was, I was pretty angry.

I was frustrated with this guy. And so as I’m driving, you know, I’m working up this whole lecture in my mind. I’m gonna give it to him, and I get to the [00:34:00] rainbow and I pick him up and we’re driving him back, driving him to his trailer, uh, to his fiance’s house. Now, Tim, uh, he. Was actually a recovering meth addict, and he’d been on and off meth.

Meth and oxycont back and forth. So to Tim, alcoholism was a recovery program. A lot of people recovering alcoholics will become chain smokers. Tim recovering meth addict, became an alcoholic. This was actually the best he’d ever been doing in his whole life. He had a house, he had a fiance. But we get back there and he’s his fiance and step kids are there and he walks into the trailer, he trips over this broken tv and she’s just like, Tom, you [00:35:00] gotta get him outta here.

I don’t want him around the kids. It’s like, okay, I understand. So I, we go out on the porch and I’m gonna let him have it. So I tell him, Jim. You are impossible to love. You are destroying yourself. Like, what is your problem? Do you hate yourself? Are you mad at God? Do you have some kind of bitterness or anger?

What is going on? And he looked at me and he said, you know. I made my peace with God. I don’t have a problem with anything. It’s the people. It too many people have hurt me too badly and I just can’t. I can’t stop. I can’t change, and [00:36:00] I wasn’t gonna let up. I was like, man, you can change. Anybody can change.

I’m trying to turn my life around. You can do it. Like, come with me. And he says, you know, I can’t change. I’ll never change. And the more he’d said that, just the more frustrated I got finally, just really in his face. And I’m like, that’s a, that’s not true. You can change. And he looks at me right in the face and he said, Tom, I’ll never change.

I’ve seen it. I’m gonna die. He said, I love you, goodbye. And I was even more, it’s impossible. You don’t know that you can change. You just gotta try. And [00:37:00] so I just, you know, he wasn’t listening. I said everything I had to say and I walked away and I got my car and I drove back to Missoula and I was deeply frustrated, but I was also, I was confused and I wanted to believe so badly that people change, that I could change, that Tim could change.

And four days later, six in the morning, my phone rang. And it is my mom. She was crying and I said, I know Tim’s dead. And she said, how? How do you know? He said, he told me. And that began [00:38:00] a decade of a journey of living my life. As a memorial for my little brother, Tim, to do all the things that he’ll never be able to do and to experience all the things he’ll never experience.

And I went, I got that phone call and I went to my fridge and I got my last beer, you know, went outside and I opened it up and poured it on the ground. And it’s not been an easy road, didn’t. Find sobriety right away. A week here, a month, six months, still going. But I realized along the way that

the strongest thing that I can do is to admit that people [00:39:00] hurt me and to feel my feelings. And the bravest thing that I can do is to choose to trust people and give them a chance. And so that’s what I do every day and I do it all for 10. Tim.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Tom. Tom Attard was born and raised in the great state of Montana and is a father, husband, general contractor, ultra runner, and lover of all things outdoors.

You can find him on most dark winter mornings, running a trail on any of the surrounding slopes in constant motion from birth. Tom rarely still skiing, rafting, fishing, hunting, running, and finding any excuse to get out there. Rounding out this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast, Khali Neum Meister invites you to forget what the movie’s taught you about pregnancy.

This candid account reveals the [00:40:00] surprising realities of pregnancy from a challenging gestational diabetes diagnosis. To an unexpected labor during a severe storm. Follow one woman’s unforgettable journey to motherhood, proving that real life births are far more dramatic and unpredictable than anything you can see on a screen.

KLI calls her story a womb awakening. Thanks for listening.

Kali Neumeister: Pregnancy is not what you see in the movies. Oftentimes in the movies, they portray pregnancy as. A woman who runs out of some important meeting because she feels nauseous, she barely makes it to the bathroom to throw up. Then she looks at her calendar and calculates and says, maybe you should take pregnancy test.

Then you flash forward and you see her for her first ultrasound appointment. She gets excited and you see the bump, you know, gradually develop through the film, and at the end it’s this really dramatic, you know, moment. Either there’s a big [00:41:00] contraction and they say, oh my goodness, the baby’s coming. We gotta

Meco Correia: go.

Kali Neumeister: Or the water breaks at the most inopportune time with friends or at a restaurant. My experience with pregnancy was a little bit different after I found out I was pregnant, I, I go on my chart and I contact my doctor and say, Hey, I had a pre positive pregnancy test. And they say, congratulations, we’ll see you in a month.

Oh, okay. Well, what do I do in the meantime? Oh yeah, sorry. Here’s a pamphlet you can read. Okay, so take my prenatals. Don’t drink alcohol, avoid substances. What about the diet stuff? Okay, cool. So then you go to your first doctor’s appointment. That is my child right there. Spoiler alert.

So then you go to your first appointment, you get your ultrasound, they say everything looks good, you know, we’ll keep following up every month. And then you hit about [00:42:00] your 28 weeks of pregnancy and you go in for your glucose test, which I have a few pregnant people in my life, so I did know about this, but not from the movies for the record.

So you go in for your glucose test and you know you’re pretty healthy going into your pregnancy. So it’s a surprise when you fail the first test, right? Then you go through your second test and you’re not quite sure what the results will be. You have to fast and drink this awful sugary liquid. And then, you know, they tell you, all right, well you have gestational diabetes, which is something that was surprising to me.

I had to be on a pretty rigid diet and they test you, test your blood sugar four times a day, make sure the baby’s not getting too big, you have to go in for appointments, and that was challenging. I’ve never had a lot of exposure to the medical world besides just my regular exams. So. That was hard. You know, I had to worry a lot about her getting too big, her, her having complications, but things were okay.

They stabilized. So we’re going through this process of being on [00:43:00] this new diet and things are going okay. Well then July 24th, 2024 hits, and I’m about a week and a half out from my due date and I’m starting to get contractions through the week. And once again, it’s not something where you just rush off to the hospital at this point.

You have to wait. How long are the contractions lasting and how long is it between each contraction? So my husband and I aren’t at home. We’re just relaxing watching Netflix after a day of work, and we get an alert on our phones that says severe storm warning, and then the power goes out. I don’t know if you know where you were at on July 24th, 2024, but I was 38 weeks pregnant having contractions.

I’m knowing what to do with my evening ’cause I’m not quite ready to go to the hospital. So what do we decide to do instead? We don’t have our entertainment for the evening, so we decide to, um, you know, look through our list of things we have to get done, you [00:44:00] know, set up crib, check, set, you know, clear out the nursery.

Almost check. We had a, um, desk we wanted to, um, assemble, you know, before the baby arrived. So what do we do? We drag this, um. You know this box out, we pull out this desk and we have pieces all over our kitchen island. I put on my headlamp and my husband has his, his headlamp on. We’re lighting candles and we just gotta get this desk done before the baby gets here.

Right? It’s the only logical thing.

And so I hand him a wrench and I hand him, you want a bag of the tools?

Just gimme a sec. Okay. I’m good. What’s the next step? Because there’s no owner’s manual for what do you do when there’s a major storm event? But we have a manual to assemble the desk, so let’s do that. The contraction slowed down and my husband says, you know, the storm is over now. Um, you know, I kinda [00:45:00] wanna go check things out, see how things fared, see how our town is doing.

We had some branches fly across our yard. I later heard that my, um, sister and brother-in-law, they had their cottonwood ancestral tree pull up and drop right in front of their house. You know, we heard about, you know, trees coming down on top of roofs and cars and totaling them, you know, a hundred mile per hour winds on mount jumbo.

But we got through that, right? I didn’t have the baby. So then the next morning we both go onto our separate work days, and about midday, I noticed that I had some symptoms that I wasn’t really sure about. So I go to the bathroom and I pull down my underwear and I look down and there’s a little bit of fluid.

So I take a picture, shoot it off to my sister.

She has three kids. She has her md, so I thought she’d be the best person to talk to about this. There’s no water gushing, so I’m probably okay. Right. So at the [00:46:00] end of the day she says, you know what? You probably should just call lab and delivery just to be sure. So I go ahead and do that, and I say, you know, here are my symptoms.

I started having contractions, but they weren’t that intense yet. You know, this is what occurred today. And they said, okay, well, we can kind of see how things go. I said, oh, I forgot to mention, at her last appointment on Tuesday, just a few days ago, she was breech. And for those of you who don’t know about what that means, her head was straight up and her butt was straight down.

And we knew this. We knew that we should go to the hospital if, if things progressed and they said, you don’t have to rush, but we would recommend getting a bag together as quickly as possible and heading in. So I called my mom on the phone. I said, I don’t think we’re having the baby today, but we’re heading to the hospital.

I just wanted to let you know. So we do that. We get our bags packed and we say, you know, we’ll probably just check in with them. Go get takeout, head home, relax. I didn’t have any two intense tractions that day. So then we get to the hospital and [00:47:00] they do their little swab, and at that point we’re just relaxing and hanging out.

And, um, I get a test alert that says positive for amniotic fluid. And my doctor walks in and she says, we’re having a baby today. She explained to us that during major, um, bariatric pressure changes, something can happen called the preterm rupture of the membranes, which means your labor doesn’t progress very far, but your water can break.

And when we had driven up, the parking lot was full of labor and delivery cars. I wasn’t the only one. So we go back and they begin the process of going through the C-section and they numb me from the, the chest down. And my husband and I are behind this, this tarp. And for those of you who have been pregnant or have had a c-section of what that feels like, and they start to pull and, and tug.

And I feel this very bizarre pulling and tugging sensation. And I feel kind of dumb in this moment, but I’m like, have you started? [00:48:00] And she says, oh, we are well on our way. And she pulls our daughter out and she roars like a lion. And our doctor says, that’s a really good sign. She’s born the sign of the Leo.

She was born the year of the dragon, and she was born Amids. The greatest storm that I have ever been witness to, and I think back to Marian Zimmer, Bradley’s sci-fi novel Storm Queen. There’s this character who when she would feel great emotions, the storm would rage around her lightning bolts and wind.

And I’m saying, I think you are our storm queen. You brought this storm and you brought, um, as you went into this world. And I looked down at her with her bright, um, blue eyes, her stormy blue eyes, and her dark hair at that time. [00:49:00] And to this day, as you heard earlier, she still hollers, she still roars like that.

Lion and dragons are a big part of it too. The the Chinese sign of dragons is also very special to us. And I look down at her eye and I say, this is your new home. Now. You’re safe. If we can survive this, we can survive anything. Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks Khali. KLI New Meister is 33 years old and was born and raised here in Missoula.

A counselor by Trade kli enjoys the quiet life of reading and storytelling and the adventures of skiing and scuba diving. Thanks for listening to the Tele Something podcast. Coming up on the next episode of the Tele Something podcast,

Mark Schoenfeld: I’ve been told I look like Matt Dame, and you’d have to imagine me skinnier.

With more hair on my head and less on my face. But I a [00:50:00] little bit.

Tess Sneeringer: So I turn back to Officer Becky who has a second question, which is, have you been drinking? And I say, no, ’cause I have not been drinking. And she walks closer than me and she smells me. And she goes, you’ve been drinking

Kelley Provost: my hand finds its way to my purse.

I do not let go of these hot five fingers that are my child’s. And, and I grab my phone and it does not ring a second time. My sister and my husband lock eyes with me. We know that this is the news that we’ve been waiting to hear since we left Missoula.

Jeff Ducklow: I looked to my left and a tower of ice, probably the size of two Wilma buildings stacked on top of each other, was slowly starting to lean away, and I just went, oh my God.

My heart was beating so fast. I couldn’t feel it. It was, I was just frozen in disbelief.

Marc Moss: Listen to the concluding stories from the Hold My Beard. Tell us something. Event from January, 2025. Subscribe to the podcast so you’ll be [00:51:00] sure to catch it on the next Tell us something podcast. Remember that. The next tell us something event is October 7th.

The theme is Walk on the Wild Side. You can pitch your story by calling 4 0 6 2 0 3 4 6 8 3. Learn more and get your tickets at Tell us something. Dot. Org.