Extra Mile: Stories about going over and above

If you've thought that you've ever gone above what is expected in your life, you haven't heard this week's stories. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers give new meaning to going the extra mile.

Part 1: Jack Walsh exaggerates the severity of his brain tumor to get out of buying a timeshare.

Jack Walsh is an award-winning educational television producer as well as a writer, performer, storyteller, and synthesizer mess-around-with-er. He lives in Decatur, GA, with his wife, two daughters, and his pandemic puppy, Trish.

Part 2: Laura Fukumoto goes above and beyond trying to make a special mushroom dish from her grandmother’s childhood.

Laura Fukumoto graduated with a BFA from the University of British Columbia and has worked in so-called Vancouver for more than a decade, wearing many hats to survive. More recent hats include fabric wizard, poet, costume designer, playwright, and graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio. Recent poetry performances include Diasporic Dynasty, Queer Arts Festival, and Powell Street Festival, as well as a small tour of her co-written play “Mending Circle”. She writes about her Japanese-Canadian heritage, queer joy, and hopes to more fully explore her love of mycology.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

Not long after I was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I went with my family to Universal Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida. When I say it that way, it sounds kind of grim, like maybe I was fighting to hold on to life just long enough to fulfill my wish of experiencing Shrek, the ride or something, but it's not that at all.

Jack Walsh shares his story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in August 2022. Photo by Rob Felt.

I have a benign tumor in the third ventricle, which is right in the middle of my brain. Instead of peeling my forehead down and cutting through the middle to get it out, like the neurosurgeon thought he was going to have to do, he, instead, installed a cerebral shunt, which is a device that would drain off any fluid that might otherwise build up and run the risk of killing me in my sleep.

Then, three months later, my wife and I took our girls to do the whole Harry Potter merchandise extravaganza thing in Orlando because we had plans to do that anyway. The two really had nothing to do with each other, at least not at first.

See, while we were in Orlando, we stayed at a really nice resort that we could afford because we agreed to submit to a timeshare presentation. I'm not sure if you've ever done one of those or if you know anything about timeshares. It's like an extended warranty had sex with a pyramid scheme and then gave birth to a whole lot of condos that they have to find a bunch of people to adopt. I'm kind of ashamed to admit that this is not the first one of these that I've been through.

A year or so before this, we took the girls to Washington DC and we sat through the presentation for this kind of timeshare program where, instead of having access to one property, you got what they called club points that you could use to take trips to different resorts they had in countries all over the world.

Obviously, we didn't buy a timeshare, but they did manage to get us on the hook for like a trial period where we paid a very reasonable amount and got a certain, like a couple trips’ worth of club points that we could use to try it on for size. See if it fits.

Unfortunately, this meant we would have to sit through another timeshare presentation. So fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, this time in Florida.

The guy in Orlando who did our presentation, Jim, he looked really tough. He was really big and had a thick neck and a shaved head and a cleft chin. Looked kind of like maybe this was going to be the second half of a good‑cop, bad‑cop thing they were doing with us but, obviously, he didn't act like a hard‑ass detective from a cop show because he wanted to sell us stuff. He acted like he wanted to be my friend. He called me things like ‘my friend’ and ‘buddy’ and stuff like that.

Jim started off by asking us our dream destinations because, theoretically, we could use our club points to go anywhere. So I said Hawaii, because, I don't know. It seems nice.

Then I thought maybe everyone says Hawaii so I should say something more interesting, so I also said, “In Norway, you know, Scandinavia, I guess.”

And Jim said, “Ah, a big beach guy, huh?”

I laughed because I assumed he was kidding, but I also said, “Well, fjords, you know,” just in case he wasn't. It wasn't really clear.

Jim moved on and he was asking us about our travel budget and what we typically spent on vacations and how much we spent on our last vacation and on each night for accommodations on our last trip. And when he would ask these things, he would direct them at me rather than at my wife. I don't know that stuff. I mean, she's the breadwinner. She plans the vacations. I can't be trusted with numbers. So when he would ask me these things, I would just defer to her.

And Jim said, “I get it, my friend. Happy wife, happy life is what I say.” Apparently, this timeshare program allowed you to go to the 1950s, so that was that was impressive.

But Jim told us about all the different properties they had everywhere and the newest resorts and all the amenities therein. He was flipping through this book of photographs and he came to this two‑page spread of green palm trees and golden sand and blue water and he stopped. And he said, “Ah, this. This is just beautiful. This is our brand new property on Barbados. You like Scandinavia. You're gonna love this.”

So that really begged the question just where the fuck did he think Scandinavia was? Because I don't want a geography‑shame anybody. I would maybe have trouble pinpointing Barbados on the map immediately, if you asked me to, but I would say I have a general idea of what Barbados is that is fairly accurate, so I became just really preoccupied with this so much so that as Jim kept going with his presentation, I just was tuned out until he said something to me and I would say, “I'm sorry, what?” And he would say, “Haha, happy wife, happy life,” or something like that.

There was a monitor behind Jim that was cycling through a slideshow of all these beautiful color photos of countries where they had resorts, you know postcard‑type images. It was on about a 45‑minute loop. It had gone through several times already, because we were there a while, so I knew what was coming back up. As it was cycling through Europe, I was waiting on this one specific picture of a snowy town square in Sweden.

When it came up on the screen, I said, “Oh,” as if I hadn't been waiting on it, “oh, there's Scandinavia right now.”

And Jim, through one quick glance over his shoulder, turned right back around and said, “Hah, how about that?” And then just kept going completely unfazed.

So that didn't clear anything up for me but Jim didn't care because he was getting to the part where he was going to ask us to sign on the dotted line or join the family, as he put it.

Going into this, this time my wife and I made sure we were on the same page, like, “We are not going to do this, right? At all.” But, beyond that, we didn't really have much of a game plan other than I guess she was going to deal with the questions that required data and I would have to fend off the ones that required excuses.

So when Jim asked if we were ready to sign up, I said, “No, Jim. I just don't think this is for us.”

And he said, “Why is that? Walk me through your reasons.”

And I said, “Well, first of all, the expense is quite considerable.”

And he said, “Let me stop you right there. You've already told me what you spend on vacations, what you spent on your last vacation. This is much less money in the long run.”

And I said, “Yeah, but, you know, I don't want to get stuck with this.”

And he said, “What do you mean stuck?”

And I said, “You know, tied down. I know there's a whole separate industry devoted to helping people get out of their timeshares so it's got to be hard to do. I don't want to get stuck with it.”

And he said, “You're not gonna get stuck. When you're ready to leave, we will buy back your timeshare from you, but you're not gonna want to leave.”

And for every misgiving I had, he had a rebuttal. This back and forth went on a little bit. At some point, Jim brought in a tag team partner named Roger, who I think was like a manager sort and he took some of the numbers Jim had given us and the timetables he laid out and some of the numbers we had given Jim and he crunched them all in a spreadsheet on an iPad and it actually churned out lower costs than what Jim had already told us.

And Jim said, “What? Really?”

And Roger said, “I know, but that's what the machine's telling me.”

And Jim said, “Gosh, that's low.”

You know, it seemed a little rehearsed. I don't think Jim was actually surprised. But Jim and Roger kept offering better and better deals and I kept mush‑mouthing one excuse after another and Jim kept following up with why, why, why and I was really kind of running out of answers and I'm not really that assertive a person and it didn't seem like we were ever going to leave without us ending up with the timeshare.

Until it occurred to me the escape hatch we needed was right there all along in my brain, both conceptually and literally.

So, I took a deep breath and I said, “I've recently been diagnosed with a health issue and it's pretty serious. We don't really know what's going to happen with that so…”

And I wasn't lying. About my tumor, it is under control and I would normally say that it doesn't impact my day‑to‑day life. But, in truth, there's probably not a day that goes by that I don't think about it at some point. The tumor could get bigger. The shunt could fail. Something else could go wrong. There's a definite sense of waiting‑on‑the‑other‑shoe‑to‑drop kind of anxiety that comes with having a tumor benign or not, but they didn't need to know that.

So I kept it vague, like it was maybe too much to really get into. Just too complicated. I certainly didn't say brain tumor because that seemed unfair. That seems like an unnecessary escalation, like an unwarranted disproportionate. The nuclear option, you know, brain tumor.

But Jim, who had been calling me buddy up to this point, seamlessly switched over to calling me brother and he said, “Brother, don't you want to give your girls all the experiences you can? Make all the memories you can while you can?” Dot‑dot‑dot, the implication being before you die and he seemed to think maybe it was going to be pretty soon.

And then Roger helpfully jumped in and added that he was a lung cancer survivor and had found having club points available to him to take vacations in soothing locales had been a real source of comfort during all that.

Tumor one-upmanship is really playing hardball. I hadn't anticipated this turning into a sick‑measuring contest, but here we were. I couldn't top that.

I'm sure there's a point in every timeshare presentation, some threshold they cross where they realize they just need to cut bait and get you out of there so they can bring in the next folks. I don't know where this moment is, if they passed some signal to each other or something like that. Wherever this point is, it is a disconcertingly and appallingly long span of time beyond the moment where serious illness and potential end‑of‑life issues begin to loom over the proceedings. I just tried to seem increasingly lost in thought, bordering on despondent, staring into the middle distance haunted by my as‑yet‑undisclosed illness and was less and less responsive to anything they said to me.

I don't know if that's what finally wore them down or if they just ran out of time but, eventually, we were able to leave. And as we left, they expressed sympathy to me, possibly for the fact that I would spend what was left of my life without knowing the joys of timeshare partnership, but at least we had the rest of that day to pretend like we did. So we spent it all beside the pool at this fabulous resort that we'd gone through all this just to enjoy.

And I'd like to think also maybe that Jim went and Googled ‘Scandinavia’.

Thank you.

Part 2

My grandma says matsutake are among the top best mushrooms in the whole world. It's too expensive for us peasants. They say you can smell them in the forest. She also says that you have to sort of spit the ‘ts’ in matsutake to pronounce it correctly.

Last fall, I was finally able to see my grandmother again in her care home in Toronto and, obviously, I was showing her some mushroom photos when she asks me, “Hey, have you ever found those matsutakes in the forest?”

And I say, “No, they're in the mountains and I'm stuck in Vancouver all the time.”

And then she gets this faraway look in her eyes and she says, “Gee, I'd love to try those matsutakes again one more time.”

I started learning to identify mushrooms about four years ago. I think they're silly and beautiful and sometimes they look like dicks and butts, but they bring me joy. I love learning to name them.

I have a theater degree and I grew up in the suburbs, so it was very recently that I found out peas don't just come from a can. So, learning to identify mushrooms was my first step towards learning about the world around me.

I quickly found out mushrooms are really tricky. You have to get to know them like you're getting to know the face of a new best friend. What's their favorite season? What trees do they like to grow near? What do they look like when it's a drought? What do they look like after a torrential rain?

After doing some spore prints and messing around with some ID keys I realized I needed a bit more help trying to identify mushrooms, which is how I joined so many Facebook mushroom groups. There are ID groups. There's the Mushroom Social Club, no ID requests allowed. And there is also the group called Dumbass Mushrooms That Don't Know How To Grow.

Laura Fukumoto shares her story at Fox Cabaret in Vancouver in October 2022 . Photo by Rob Shaer.

As we all know, every niche hobby has several niche subcultures. For mushrooms, there are foresters and there are foragers. There are subsistence hunters and scientists in these groups. But there's also the cottage core, the fairy core, Wookies. Yes, this is in reference to Star Wars I think because it's often someone with really long hair, who's unshaven, asking where the magic mushrooms are.

Generally speaking, I've found mushroom people are very kind. They are extremely generous with their knowledge and their time and we are all really weird.

I'm not a forager myself but I started to seek out some foraged mushrooms at farmers markets. There are some mushrooms that you can't grow in controlled farming conditions because they're mycorrhizae. They grow in relationship to trees.

I was especially excited to try matsutake. Matsu means ‘pine’ in Japanese. It's very well known for its distinctive flavor and it commands a billion‑dollar‑a‑year industry. It's very important as a gift, part of the gift‑giving industry in Japan.

Mr. David Arora, who is the writer of All That the Rain Promises and More… describes matsutake as smelling like cinnamon Red Hots mixed with dirty gym socks.

One autumn day a couple years ago, I finally found matsutake at a farmer's market. So I bought one and I rushed it home so that I could start an experiment of my specimen Tricholoma murrillianum.

First things first, I held it to my nose and I gave a deep smell. Okay. I can definitely sense the idea of cinnamon. It's a very full and pungent smell, kind of like some kind of animal.

Okay. Next, I consider the color. The cap is a buff off‑white color and there's patches of cinnamon brown on it. And I think maybe is that dirt but, no. I try to rub it off and it comes off with the skin.

The stipe is very meaty and solid. I try to cut through it with my sharpest knife and it makes a lot of squeaking sounds as I try to get through it.

Lastly, yes, there's the podzol soil. A podzol is kind of a gray ash color because of the organic acids at a particular layer of the soil bleaching out the color.

So, once you know all of these details like the face of a best friend, you could not possibly mix this mushroom up with any of the other less favorable, potentially poisonous look‑alikes.

A photograph of Grandma Kay. Photo courtesy of Laura Fukumoto.

The infamous matsutakes dish. Photo courtesy of Laura Fukumoto.

The final part of my experiment was to eat the mushroom. So, I cut the stipe and the cap up into thick, greedy slabs and then I melted a gigantic knob of butter into a pan and I fried it to crispy perfection. It's chewy. It's kind of rubbery. I can't really chew through it very easily, actually, and it tastes a bit like overcooked octopus.

This mushroom was like 25 bucks. It turns out, I find out later that matsutake is like one of the only mushrooms in the world that doesn't taste great with butter. It just doesn't pair well with the fats. And it goes a lot better in Asian recipes and Japanese recipes, soups, stews, like matsutake gohan, which is a rice dish I plan to make the next time I spend 25 bucks on a single mushroom.

Fast forward to last fall. Grandma, Toronto, care home. She asks me, “Have you ever found these matsutakes?”

So my grandma, here's the thing about my Grandma Kay. She gets very embarrassed when I talk about her. One time, she was featured in The Toronto Star for being a Good Samaritan and she got a two‑page spread that was just a picture of her and she absolutely hated it. It was really cute. It was very good.

But, sorry, Grandma Kay, I'm talking about you publicly again. So my Grandma Kay was born in Prince Rupert, British Columbia in 1921. She was 19 years old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

In 1942, 22,000 Japanese‑Canadians were displaced from a 100‑mile exclusion zone along the west coast. My grandma traveled by train for three days to Hastings Park, which is today's PNE Playland. And, there, she lived in a barn for close to a year.

After that, she and her family moved to the Slocan Valley where Japanese‑Canadians lived in abandoned mining towns. And, in 1946, my family left British Columbia forever.

I tell you all of this because, at the moment, my 100‑year‑old grandmother said she wanted to eat matsutake again. It occurred to me that maybe she used to forage matsutake at a time when food was scarce. Maybe my grandma hasn't had matsutake since 1946. So I have to get this goddamn mushroom to my grandma.

It's fall. I'm in Vancouver, they're in season. Can I get this mushroom in a box and get it through Canada Post in maybe one or two days? But then I imagine trying to explain why there's a crushed mushroom to my grandma over the phone so that's not going to work.

Then I think maybe I'll try DoorDash. Maybe there's an Asian restaurant somewhere in Toronto that has matsutake on the menu and, like 20 restaurants later, I am just hungry and out of luck.

That same week, I have a new co‑worker and she also happens to be Japanese‑Canadian. I mention my side quest to her. She says to me, “Oh, I have like a hundred matsutake in the deep freezer because my aunt forages them. Do you want one?”

I think, “Oh, is this my solution?” But, no. My grandma deserves a fresh‑not‑frozen mushroom, and there's still the issue of how to get the mushroom to her in Toronto.

So, I turned to the Facebook hive mind.

I type, “How do I get my 100‑year‑old grandma matsutake? Pic of Jima for the algorithm.” It was a really cute picture of her holding a bottle of champagne, by the way.

Then I wait. Within 24 hours, the mushroom people responded.

My post was liked and shared more than 600 times in that time period. Dozens. Dozens of people offered to drive matsutake to her front door. When I asked, “Where are you located?” All of them said, “Central Oregon.”

So I kindly thank them for offering to drive to Toronto and really wondered about their sense of geography.

Finally, Mr. David Arora himself commented on my post, and I cannot remember what he said. But, basically, I felt extremely blessed by the mushroom gods.

So, on a recommendation from one of these comments I found a company that will overnight same‑day ship fresh matsutake to anywhere in the greater Toronto area. At this point I realized I have to get my dad involved.

My dad is a very good cook and my grandma doesn't cook much these days, being a hundred. But I had to call up my dad.

I said to him, “Dad, you have one job in life and it is to cook Grandma matsutake gohan.”

My dad is the kind of Asian dad who asks for a fork at the Chinese restaurant, so the ingredients list was extremely intimidating. “What's mitsuba? What is dashi?”

And I won't tell you how much money I spent shipping every last ingredient to his front door, because I'm a working lady, but many tense phone calls followed.

“What do I do with this mushroom? How do I clean it? How thin do I cut it? Why did you buy a whole kilogram of matsutake? I only need one or two.” It was a very good deal and, you know, got him a whole kilogram because it was for grandma.

Many tense phone calls later, finally, I get the one phone call that matters. They did it. They cooked the recipe.

Short grain white rice, rinse it until the cold water runs clear. Shoyu, dashi, mirin all go into the rice pot. Make sure that the matsutake is clean. Slice it thinly. Let it float on top. Lid on. Let it all stew down and fill your house with the amazing aroma.

In the pictures, my grandma has a kind of twinkle in her eye after eating two big helpings. That very same week, my co‑worker gifts me a matsutake and I make us matsutake gohan as well. I couldn't read the labels at Fujiya so I accidentally got dark dashi so it turned out a little salty. And I maybe accidentally got sushi rice so it was a little sticky, but the mirin has this kind of sweetness to it and the fishy taste of dashi lifts the very particular taste of matsutake to the top. And there's a crunch to the mushroom even after being cooked for so long.

The taste of this dish makes me miss my grandma even though we've never eaten it together.

I love my grandma and I really love mushrooms. Mushroom people know that they are gifts of sustenance and gifts of humor. Mushrooms are for poking and squishing and they're also for gazing at in wonder. They are as diverse and plentiful as our own stories, as our bodies and our journeys. And, most importantly, mushrooms are for sharing.

Thank you.