860: Suddenly: A Mirror!
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbpeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBE's East Chicago, it's this American Life from Ira Glass, and I am joined in the studio right now by one of my co-workers, if you would have cornfeld. Hi, Ira. Hi there. And so you're here to tell us a story. Yes. It happened probably when I was 11 or 12. I was with my older sister, Ora, who's probably 14, and our cousin, Jake, who's 16 or so, he was visiting us. And one night we decided it would be fun to sneak into the community pool, which is just a few blocks away from our house. The community pool was closed. Yes. It's probably midnight, our parents are asleep. We'd never snuck in, so we're walking to the pool, and I actually didn't even want to sneak into the pool. I was scared, but I just, the bliss of being included with the older kids as the younger one, very much overrode my reservations. Absolutely. So, we get to the pool, scale the chain link fence, hop over, triumphant, immediately. Like, one second after we've entered the pool, sirens go off. They're so loud. It's like, woo, woo, woo, and then an automated voice comes on, and it's like, you are trespassing. The police have been alerted. They're on their way. Evacuate the premises. You guys are children, so... So, we panic, and my cousin, he is the oldest in the palace, and he just, like, runs the fence, hops over it, clears it, no problem. Takes off running. And then my sister is next, and she hops up on the fence, but then she, like, kind of falls down, she, like, doesn't quite make it over, and then she hops up again, and she was just moving so slowly in my mind. It was probably 15 seconds, actually. And what I did, in my panic, is she was up about two feet off the ground holding on to the fence, and I grabbed her waist, and I ripped her off the fence, and I climbed over myself, and it's the... We get home, she's fine, she, like, eventually makes it over, but for me, this is the first moment that I remember thinking. I have been shown what kind of person I am, and I am a very bad person. Or there is a part of me that is, like, deeply selfish, or capable of deep selfishness. Yeah. That's, like, a very grown-up thought to have, and there comes a time when you think that for the first time, and, right, like, you're 11, and you're capable of that. Yeah, and what I saw was, this is who you are. You're the kind of person who prioritizes yourself over other people, including the person you love the most. Like, my big sister was, like, the person I idolized at the time, and we're still very
Transcription truncated.