This week we present two stories from people who found the improbable.
Part 1: In difficult times, park ranger Gary Bremen takes solace in "sea hearts" that wash ashore.
As a national park ranger, native South Floridian Gary Bremen has spent the past 33 years telling the stories of the places and people that have shaped this nation. He has visited 254 of the 419 national parks, and now recognizes how much his encounters with lightning storms, bears, drag queens and grieving parents in these magnificent places have helped shape the person he is. He lives in an urban oasis filled with native plants in the little town of Wilton Manors with his best friend, traveling buddy and husband Roger and their cats Oliver, Elliott, and Amelia.
Part 2: When Dawn Fraser finds out that she and her twin brother, Dwayne, who was born with Down Syndrome, are one in a million, she searches for other twins like them.
Dawn J. Fraser is a storyteller, public speaker and a nationally acclaimed communications coach based out of San Jose, California. She is the Creator/ Host of ‘Barbershop Stories’, which features storytellers performing true tales in barbershops and salons around NYC, and the Founder/ CEO of Fraser’s Edge, LLC, which offers programs for businesses, nonprofits, and college students the opportunity to develop their leadership potential through storytelling. Dawn currently serves as a Lead Instructor with The Moth and was featured amongst some of the nation’s top change makers at TED@NYC. She loves being a twin, a Trinidadian, and tweetable @dawnjfraser.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Gary Bremen
Like a lot of people, I owe a lot to my parents. They gave me a sense of exploration. They gave me a desire to learn and I got a love for the ocean from them as well.
My mom was not a science person but she supported my sciencey ways. She was also really, really frugal. So when I saw this ad for this kit to make crystals, I said I wanted the kit, and she said, “Oh, no. We'll make crystals.”
Gary Bremen shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Open Stage Club in Miami, Fl in December 2019. Photo by Jim Rassol.
She went into the cabinet up above the stove and got the box of salt down and mixed it into a glass of water and we stirred it all up till it was all dissolved and we put it into a pie pan, and we put the pie pan out on the patio. Over the next several days, we watched as the water evaporated and I had these giant salt crystals in there. I thought that was super cool.
I scooped them all up and put them in a little glass jar which I took with me to school to show off that I made crystals at home. And I'm not sure, but I bet I could probably still find that jar of crystals in the back of my closet somewhere because I just couldn't bear to throw it out.
She was very artsy. So she couldn't always help with the science fair projects but they really looked great. The honeybee project was black and yellow, the water project was complementary shades of blue and whatnot. So I picked up a lot from her and I guess it was the first time that I really saw this really important marriage between science and art and how they go together.
My dad was a sail maker. He spent a lot of time on Watson Island in the middle of Biscayne Bay because that's where all the sailors were, and so I was there too. Dad was a champion sailor and my brother was a champion sailor, and my other brother was a champion sailor and all their friends were champion sailors, and I was not.
I took the lessons but I didn't want to. And they said, “Oh, your brothers didn't want to either. Go ahead. Take the lessons.” So I took the lessons.
I used to hide behind trees so I didn't have to go sailing. And I really, really sucked at it. There was a time I could take you to Watson Island and the little shed where all the prams that we learned to sail in were kept and I could show you three individual prams with holes in the fiberglass that I personally had put there by crashing into them.
Where I really wanted to be was back on shore. I wanted to be back on shore poking at the seagrass clumps that had washed in and flipping over the rocks and putting crabs and snails in little containers and things like that. Sometimes when I was doing that walking along the shoreline, I would find some cool stuff. I would find a sea urchin test or a Janthina janthina shell. Let's throw that out there.
And sometimes I would find seeds from far-off places. Sometimes it was like the little tiny hamburger seed that's just about that big, looks just like a little hamburger. Comes from equatorial regions around the world and come washing in here in South Florida.
Gary Bremen shares his story with the Story Collider audience at the Open Stage Club in Miami, Fl in December 2019. Photo by Jim Rassol.
Sometimes I would find the little, white, round seeds called nickerbeans but we called them ‘burning beans’. I later learned that people in the Caribbean would call them ‘hot rocks’ and I thought it's kind of cool that kids in different places called them similar things. Because when you take those and you rub them on your jeans or the carpet, they build up frictional heat and they hold that frictional heat which you use to burn your friends. That was always kind of fun.
Then of course the real treasure was to find the big ones that were about the size and color of a large-sized Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. It had that little indentation at the top called the sea heart. I would learn about these things and as I grew to an adult, I always kept looking for these things and kept these little treasures around.
And when I became a ranger at Biscayne National Park, I started to really learn about these things. What I learned about the sea heart is that it came from the Amazon and Orinoco River valleys in South America. It was from the largest legume in the world. And legume was like a bean or a pea, right?
So here's this Reese's Peanut Butter Cup-sized pea in a pod that is six feet long and they fall to the forest floor. And you know what happens in rain forests, right? It rains. When those rivers flood up, those seeds start to float. That had fallen to the forest floor and they float down the river and they float out to the sea and they wash in in Miami and in The Carolinas and in Scotland and in Ireland, in England, in Portugal and they're traveling all the way around.
There's all kinds of folklore associated with them. People would cut them crosswise and make little lockets out of them. They would cut the top off and hinge the top and make a little snuff box. People who spend time on boats would carry them with them with the idea that this thing that had traveled so far landed safely on shore, and if you carried one with you then you too would land safely wherever you were going. So I started carrying a sea heart with me 25 years ago.
It was around this time of year, Christmas time that I went to visit my family. I was sitting on the couch with dad watching television. I pulled that sea heart out, as I often do, and I rolled it around in my hands. I kept seeing him kind of making these furtive glances over to the side as I'm rolling it around and he finally says, “What are you doing over there? It’s driving me crazy.”
So I handed him the sea heart and I told him about it and he's looking at it really carefully. I'm seeing the wheels start to spin in his head and he said that his father used to carry a sea heart. I never knew my grandfather. He was 72 when my father was born so I never knew the man, but suddenly had even more of a connection to these sea hearts.
So I'm standing next to dad a few years ago at the funeral home and I had long since given up on all those ideas I learned in Catholic school about better places and heavens and things like that. But there's something about losing someone close to you that makes you hearken back to all that stuff.
I reached into my pocket and I thought maybe dad needed that sea heart for his journey and so I left it with him.
In the next days, I cried a lot. I ran a lot. Exercise kind of helps me get through things. Sometimes I cried and ran. And I went to the water because that's also what makes me feel better.
I had always loved a quote by Isak Dinesen but I never really fully grasped it until this time. “The cure for anything is salt water, sweat, tears or the sea.”
A few days later, trying to get back into the routine of things I was back at work and I was going to do a program. It was a program where I usually use the sea heart. I reached into my pocket and it wasn't there, so I quickly grabbed a different program and did a walk along the shoreline of Biscayne Bay. It was good to be into the routine. Like I said, it was good to be outside by the water.
I'm walking back from this program and we have this little low wall next to the water. I look ahead and there's something sitting on the wall. I get up to it and there's a sea heart sitting on the wall. If you know much about sea hearts, they wash in on the ocean side. They're not really much found in Biscayne Bay, certainly not sitting on top of a wall, yet there it was. I grabbed it and put it in my pocket.
About two years later, I was in the same room standing next to mom and I felt compelled to do the same thing. I gave her that sea heart. And in the next days I cried and I exercised and I went, finally two days after her funeral, to the water. I sat on Fort Lauderdale Beach and I watched the sky turn from purple to pink to orange as the sun rose. I'm sitting there amongst all this sargassum and sea grass and the things that I had always grown up around, the rhythm of the waves washing all this stuff in.
Gary Brenen’s seaheart from his story.
And that rhythm's interrupted by this rumbling sound coming from down the beach over here. I look and I see this big tractor coming along with the beach sweeper behind it, scooping up all the icky stuff that you want to get off the beach, all the stuff that I find fascinating.
But I got to get out of the way, so I roll over on my hip and push up onto the sand through all this sargassum. And about a foot away from me is this nice, round, almost perfectly round opening in the mounds of seagrass and the sand is perfectly smooth. And smack dab in the middle is another sea heart.
I'm a really lucky guy. I get to work in the largest marine park in the national park system, and I've done so for 30 years. Even when I'm inside, the windows look out over the very same body of water where I fell in love with the ocean so many years earlier. But even when I can't be by the ocean, I know that all I have to do is reach into my pocket and I'm instantly in touch with so many of the things that ground me.
Part 2: Dawn Fraser
Thanks Erin and family. This is really cool. I just want to say thanks for this opportunity.
The first time I shared a story on Story Collider, it just kind of changed everything in my life. That was a one-in-a-million opportunity, so here goes another one. Thank you so much for being here.
I don't exactly remember the first time that I remember being a twin, but I do remember the first time hearing about the story of our name. I was about nine years old and my brother was telling me the story about how, at the time, he was about eight years old, my sister was about five years old, and my older brother really, really, really wanted a baby brother. And my sister wanted a baby sister.
So my parents were like, well, all you have to do is pray. Pray for the gender and be really, really good, be really obedient and, most likely, you are going to get that gender of child.
So my brother would be like walking on the street praying, talking about like he's going to clean the hedges on the lawn, he's going to clean the bathroom. My sister was talking about how she's going to clean all around the house and how she was going to give up her allowance.
And they would just go back and forth and back and forth for months in this era that we lovingly now know as like the ‘prayer wars’.
About nine months into this, June 29th of an undisclosed year, pop out me and my twin brother.
Now, the thing about us coming at the time that we did was not only did my mom know that she was having twins and didn't tell her children but she also didn't tell her husband, my dad, that she was having twins. But she knew that she was having twins because twins run in our family. Along with Ann and Anthony there's Eric and Erica, so she knew that twins were in the family.
But by the time that my dad got to the hospital, he was in shock, like there's twins. And right away when we were presented, they put around my wrist Baby A and they put around my brother's wrist Baby B, because true to twins we were a little bit premature. I came out first and my brother came out second.
So my family, my parents come from Trinidad and Tobago. My mom looks down at me and my little wrist and she said, “But wait. You can't name my baby Baby A or Baby B.”
So they didn't know what to do and so she's like, “This one was born at dawn so name her Dawn.”
Then my dad was like, “Yeah. And he was born right after so name him Duane because that kind of rhymes.” Right?
So that's how we ended up with our names Dawn and Duane.
And when my siblings showed up at the hospital they were like there's a boy and a girl. Which one of us won? Which one of us won the prayer wars?
My mom was like, “You both win.”
And their minds were blown. They were just like, “Oh, my God. This is amazing. A boy and a girl!”
So everyone's dream come true. So, to this day, my brother still claims that he's responsible for me and my twin brother being twins, whereas I just think it's science, but whatever.
But it wasn't until we were about like nine years old that I realized that not only did I love being a twin. It's such a special and fun and amazing experience, but I also realized that the questions that people asked me were going to be the same questions they were going to ask me for the rest of my life. Some of them good, some of them bad, some of them just I wasn't so sure.
For example, good questions. Which one of you was born first? I was. I was born like by a-minute-and-a-half so like baller status. Holla! Y’know?
Not so great question. Are you and your twin brother identical? No, we're not. We're fraternal. Two eggs. Two strategies to become birth at the same time. We’re not identical. No. Not a good question.
And the complicated question. Can you all read each other's minds? Sometimes I just didn't know how to answer this question because, unlike a lot of twins, whereas like the other twins I knew in my area, like Donna and Diana who were also in our high school, who went to the same classes, I was in general education and Duane was in special education. Because when we were born, I was born healthy and everything was fine, whereas my twin brother Duane, he was born with an extra chromosome on the 21st chromosome, meaning he has Down syndrome.
So this question about like reading his mind, I never really knew how to answer it or like how much detail do I need to go into or do I even really represent other twins. I don't even know. But I wanted to know what was the experience like for other twins out there. I didn't know any other twins that had only one special needs.
So at around the age of 14, I found the internet. Founded the internet. I didn't find the internet but you know that internet found me. I went on it one day on AOL. It was like dial up and I just wanted to find other people who were like me. So I went on to the browser and I typed in… I wasn't so sure what I was looking for but I put in like twins where only one of them has Down syndrome.
The first thing that popped up on my browser was this article. It was from the U.K. and the article said the twins that are one in a million. I was like the twins that are one in a million?
So I read through it and there was a story about this woman who had twins and, according to the article, they were statistically one in a million. I had never thought about that before.
So I went back to the browser and I just simply clarified my search and I said what are the chances of having twins where one has Down syndrome and one doesn't. And sure enough, there was my answer. About one to four births in every million was one that had Down syndrome or both that have Down syndrome.
And I thought, wow. Like no wonder I've never met anybody else that's like me. We’re like unicorns, which was amazing but also really crazy and kind of intriguing.
So after this process, I figured I want to meet other people who are like me, but this is before Facebook, this is before blogs, this is before any of that kind of stuff, support groups, anything. So I started thinking like maybe I can narrow it down to a family in the city of San Francisco. But San Francisco has like only 800,000 people, not even a million people. What was I going to do? Like knock on everyone's door and figure out if anyone was a twin? No, that wasn't going to happen.
I thought about the Special Olympics where Duane and I would spend our Saturdays. But then again the same thing. Was I going to go up to every single Special Olympics athlete and ask them if they had a twin brother or twin sister? My strategy, I just had to squash it and I just figured, I'm just probably never going to be able to have this opportunity.
Until one day when I was out playing soccer with my dad who was our soccer coach. It was going into the championship season. It was like probably the second-to-last game. And at our second‑to-last game, I look over to the side as we're finishing up the scrimmage and there are these two boys who are on the sidelines. I can tell that they have Down syndrome, both of them.
And they're waving to one of my colleagues on the soccer field. They're waving at Mary, one of the strikers. I was playing in the backfield.
Dawn Fraser shares her story with our Story Collider audience at our online show in April 2020 from her house in San Jose, CA.
I was like, “Mary, who is that?”
She's like, “Oh, those are my twin brothers.”
I was like, “What? You have twin brothers who have Down syndrome?”
She's like, “Yeah.”
I was like, “Do you know that I have a twin brother who has Down syndrome?”
She's like, “No.”
I was like, “I would love to introduce them to him.”
She's like, “Well, yeah. All of us are like… those are my twins. I'm actually a triplet.”
I was like, “What?” Like my mind was blown.
So I started asking questions. I was like, “How does that happen?”
She's like, “Well, we're triplets, so one egg split and that became the two of them, identical twin brothers with Down syndrome. I was that third egg who came out and the three of us are triplets.”
I was like pumped because this was my first, this was going to be my first person I could ask these questions of like can you all read each other's minds? I mean, like do you ever feel the need to protect your siblings, your brothers? What about your parents? Which one takes care of who and why? I had all these questions for her.
But the weekend came. We played our meet and I introduced Duane to Mary's brothers who were Martin and Marvin. Unfortunately, that was it, because not too long afterwards, Mary and her brothers moved and I never got a chance to really ask her these questions.
To this day, 40-some odd years into life, I still haven't met another twin like myself and Duane. But that day when I met Mary and the triplets, it gave me a little bit more hope, a little bit more of a spark that maybe, possibly, one day I will.
Thank you.