838: Letters! Actual Letters!
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One thing I did know about delivering mail, I supposed to walk into the sidewalk after each house just to cut across so on to the next house. You'd want to put this through through, out on time.

I mean, they time us. We're not supposed to go down to the sidewalk every time if we can .

avoid IT and just walk across people's grasp.

Everybody wants the government to be efficient, except for the male men to walk across the grass. But people like these guys built a path for me.

So yeah, there's a little dirt path in between these .

bushes because they're nice .

with a little Carrier name grades. And he walked around. There was a pretty day in A V A lovely neighborhood.

Grace Carried shouter bag with flats and catoche and and of course, somebody built a path for her to cut to the house next door. SHE can talk anybody. She's interested other people. So this point, he knows that is a little bit about most of people on her out. Most of she's actually seen their faces should .

walk to a house sometimes this will be like the cousin even know that i'll be like, you have the same face as the wife and I know he has family in denmark. You're the denmark sister. I was just know that when i'm walking up and that all you do, and like I told you, like I just know a lot about people.

there's the house with the state home mom whose son makes drawings for Grace, the public defenders who get public defender mail, that somehow also have been saying, ly, push house with gorgeous landscaping. There's a hard core Christians, his dog are always lunches. The door leg isn't going to break through the glass. There's the dad who organza kids, soft buggy, the Grace daughters and the guy was paying great at a cancer. He seems like he doesn't much time left at all.

And nice guy. And .

it's just.

you know, can help and think about every day did .

you get a lot of visitors?

Yes, and let a male started coming from my old friends and stuff. Yeah.

i'm not using Graces real name. We're doing you anything about where shit works. So this private information can stay private. I could sure our show is about the mail. And Grace is understanding of whose who and out is like a pilot. Knowing the whether they're dealing with is very helpful to doing our your like with this couple on the road with the woman moved to the department across the hall, in fact, of fording address, guy did not Grace's the guy still with her. So SHE wards his male also without the form one house.

This particular .

day there's a postcard for the the Grace notes does not live with that address.

And so waiting and deal and dispose of IT in what we call the undeliverable book business, mal in uber.

SHE could toss IT out like that because it's not first class, mal.

So IT doesn't get return to center and IT doesn't get forwarded. IT just goes to wait.

It's jump out.

That's correct. We don't use that term what .

he said .

for reading that bulk mail or standard class male because .

junk mail applies a value judgment.

correct? And this is what pays our salaries, this so called jock mail.

Grace is an next girlfriend, or around something he was with decades ago. And I, early in the day, he talked out a piece of boatman with her house. SHE passes for a second before .

he tells me about IT. SHE lost a child. Several later go in the pandemic. And that kick got a piece of bulk mail the day. So I was able to throw away without her seeing IT. You know, because I know, and I was very grateful for that, you know, being able to discard that piece of male for her today so shouldn't have to see her dead kid's name when he got male today.

That felt really good.

But all these customers on a road, there's something that do this thing just gets under gracy skin.

So this situation.

yeah.

there in the mailbox jammed, four male.

So this never gets, none of this mail, ever.

This is ripe.

You pull out of the mail. So this is a whole bunch of one might call the mail coupons show the that to .

these thick week advertising mors.

So this is five weeks worth. And like i've definitely put packages in here and they come out.

they are check in.

they've look to see if there's anything they want. And then if something they want, they take IT out. But IT makes the kind of hard to deliver me and it's packed for, you know, you expect to clean up after you was going on your mom and enter your mail. Actually, you like to get your male. And I just find IT very inconsiderate.

Another street, we walk up to a house with a hand pated sign in the window saying, palestine, we will be free. But also usually as male stuff in small box for weeks gooding their male and baLance .

they will walk by every day for a we can have walk rape by the baLance to can box now back .

right there.

that now back right there.

So you can see IT from the street.

You can see the can see IT from the street. You can see IT when you walk by. It's very, very easy to grab on the way. And but they didn't manage to do that for weeks.

And what did you thinking that?

I don't know. I wonder what it's like to go through life not seeing things around you.

but it's very possible that they see. But just the mail is not important .

to them at all. And I understand that if IT was full crap, but they obviously care about politics and like I I considered my ballot like a sacred object kind of and they just kept walking by, walking by. It's not like it's heavy.

It's not like you know it's conversion. It's just a matter of not caring at all or not seeing IT. I don't know which.

Does that make you my .

head sometimes? Yeah, I can actually. So I was telling someone the other day that I can kind engage by mood by a specific male box that I get to because it's always full. And if IT doesn't bother me that much, I know i'm doing well that day, but if I go to the rage about IT that you like sometimes is bothering me, and I can know and saying I can like sort of check back in my life and figure out was making me so much because that male box were really anger me.

Grays have been doing this long enough over two decades. Started before the internet really kicked in fully. If you remembers when everyone's relationship to the mail is different for so much, was on e mail.

There are tons of business letters, first class mail, e magazines back. She's getting way more of that instead of what you Carry. Is now as .

far as what I consider a crap that just adds, I guess, this probably eighty five, nine percent. What I do over, if you exclude the person because they are just to scrap that people bought because the ads told them to.

I mean, is funny because when this country was founded, like the male was the internet, yes, Benjamin Franklin could get any job he wanted in the new government and he's like.

I want to be the post communications .

yeah like being like Steve jobs or something right?

IT was. And there's still vestiges of like that self importance this agency still has, like they told us in training, that is. So if a ambuLance and fire truck, a police car and a postal truck all come to a four waste up at the same time, who has the right way? The postal truck, that somehow is actually really true in the constitution, which is .

hilarious to have this feeling of, like, you have this job there used to be a kind of like noble calling and, you know, snow or rain or a gm of night. And then IT moved from delivering stuff that people really, really wanted and needed and was essential to just delivering .

a lot of garbage. Yeah, totally. It's kind of aching litter that a lot of what we deliver just garbage that people don't want and like you have to make your peace with the theory that, that the revenue that sustains the important work of because what we actually offers dependability, we come every day.

So if you have a return, whatever you just put other, we take IT right there. We know who you are, we know the name. We know the people who used to live there.

I know where take their mall grama sends them something, then move three times in between. I can get get IT to them. We do that all the time at work. We know people so much Better than in the other delivery services.

You provide your job.

Yeah, yeah.

yeah. I mean, I I really do like you. I really do think it's important you have to cause .

it's every day .

for years and years and years. You know.

when comes to the mail that we think we think of the male we want to get, it's letters, personal letters, the old fashion kind, with somebody pours out their heart, somebody else by hand. I ask me to come through the twenty five pounds of stuff he was Carrying, but this one was swing on around. See, you find even one handwritten personal weather.

Financial, financial .

secret .

to wealth. I guess we call that financial. That's a bill, the bill minder, bill, pull IT go. No zero. One male on this blog today.

This day, over the course, the entire day of a three hundred and vt homes, SHE lived at only three personal handwritten letters. Do you write letters? no.

Every once in a while I do.

I feel so proud of myself, probably like once every five years, I really wish I was more .

of a letter writer. Why do you wish you were a letter writer?

Because IT seems like cause such a grey hobby, like when I do right, when I feel extremely good. It's, it's, it's a nice exercise. It's nice to imagine the person getting IT wonderful if they write you back. Like it's one of those things. I like what I should do more of this, but I just don't I don't .

know if you like. I have the same impact sometimes to write somebody, but then I really just type up and send the email, you know like and that seems to be the same viewing.

It's not though try writing a letter sometime you will see how different IT is a different part of your brain come out. You you say things you wouldn't say and the plus getting the physical thing from the other person. It's more there's a connection that the physicality of a letter brings a connection .

to a mental for that part of IT. But it's unlimber. They're getting a letter, a real letter, excited.

It's rare the kind of other where somebody SAT down, dear, you from me really tried to say something that need be said with putting something into words to the very first time of correcting the record, are trying to persuade, and they know it's going to go Better if they do IT in writing. Today only show, we dive into all sorts of dramas. Get out on the page today. We have several letters, funny letters and one letter on a big life changing mission from wb in chicago. It's an american life since you, yours, I regards, stay with us.

Support for this american life comes from, indeed, people are driven by the search for Better. But when IT comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate is to search at all. Don't search, match with, indeed, use indeed, for scheduling, screening and messaging, so you can connect with candidates faster, get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs s more visibility at indeed dot com, slash american terms and conditions, apply, need, the higher you need. Indeed, support for this american life comes from square space, connect, major social and multi media accounts to your website in a few clicks as icon, direct links or embedded fees build visitor trust while updating content only where you need IT. Sellers can also sink their product catalogue directly with instagram, facebook, youtube and google to reach more customers and reduce the steps for a purchase visit square space out com slash american for ten percent off your first purchase of a website or domain.

American live at one deal is so we started with this letter, which is very much somebody trying to figure out something that has been hard to figure out and by the cold, by seki. But something would happen when you was in high school. Dear .

Alice one.

i've started to write this letter at least twenty times in as many years, which is way too much time. I need to find a way to finally be done with this. The only way I ve ever gotten close is by riding in fragments.

Two, when I first walked into your high school english class in Chelsea, michigan, school had been a struggle for me. Every class felt focused on how fast you could do something and how right you could be yours. Wasn't I still remember the one afternoon in senior year we'd finish vocabulary quiz.

You said, open your notebooks and close your eyes. We looked at you strAngely at first, but what we trust to do enough to follow along, you dim the lights, marine, and you're walking alone through the depths of a woodland forest. You said you could hear you slowly pacing, and you're long, sensible skirt swaying with each step.

You guided us along a path in the woods pointing to tiny mushrooms, a told at the water's edge. Eventually you told us to open our eyes and to start writing to keep describing whatever wilderness sweet conjured in our minds. No teacher had ever asked me to write something for my own engagement, and i'd loved IT.

I started keeping a journal. Everyone, if they're lucky, has at least one teacher who changes their life or makes them feel at home in school. That's who you are to me, my favourite teacher.

Three, i'd never given much thought to my teacher's lives outside of school. You were a fixture in that corner classroom. A woman who seem to exist. Holy there.

I never would have imagined that you were married to a man who kept a gun beneath his pillow, for I took chemistry one with your husband in one thousand nine hundred and ninety two, when I was a soft mall. You were that plant and wall hunting jacket and drink coffee out of that small plastic cup that doubled as a lid to his tall vacuum thermal. His hands sometimes shock when he lifted the cup to his lips. He kept his head red pony tail pulled back with a thin rubber band. I remember that he played loud rock music on the stereo while we did experiments, though I interpreted his personality as arrogant, strange, I didn't dislike him as much as I quietly despise the subject of chemistry, you should know that i've always struggled with solving complicated formulas.

Five, my dad never told me things that a teenager didn't need to know, and I never thought to ask very many questions. He mostly cut his worklife separate from his home life.

I didn't know what a school superintendent did all day, and I never thought to ask him one night, though, when I was standing in our kitchen by the sliding glass door, my dad walked up to me with his hands in the pockets of his faded weekend jeans and said, hey, nik, when you win in early for chemistry help, did mister leeth ever act weird around you? I looked at my dad for a few seconds and wrinkled my brow. Then I defended your husband, what are you talking about?

I replied, my dad dropped the subject without explanation, and I quickly forgot about IT. Even when I was just the two of us, your husband and I, on his chemistry lab, he had never said anything an appropriate to me. I wasn't a pretty girl.

I was self conscious and tomboys acne. Y spotted my jaw line and chin. My chest was as glad as a boys.

And I was the boss's daughter. six. Earlier that year, the mother of a quiet, long hair senior girl called our home telephone at an unusually late hour.

I answered the call in the kitchen. Dad, it's for you. I said in the direction of the living room, he took the call in private seven. One of my favourite photographs of my dad is the one where he's sitting next to my hospital bed at sancho s. In psni, right after my neck surgery.

During my senior year, he SAT that uncomfortable chair, staying day and night as my left leg moved, bending and straightening and a constant passive motion machine. He only stepped out of the room when the nurse arrived. Help me use the bed pain.

In the photograph, he's wearing genes in a blue sweater with a tired, loyal smile on his face. Back then, I never saw his commitment to me as remarkable because IT was all I had known. Eight, surely you know all about the geddington that your high school students felt on the thursday before Christmas break.

My energy that day felt boundless. I practically bounced from seventh period across the grass and straight to the outer window of my death's office. I knocked on his window and he tilted IT open.

He was eating an ice cream sunday from mcDonald out of a small clear plastic cup. He smiled his full face smile. When he saw me and I returned to Green, he reached out and drop the car keys into my hands so I could drive to physical therapy.

As I turned to walk toward the parking lot, my dad said, have fun. See you later and tip the window to close. IT a physical therapy, my friend, Carry on eyebrow throwed stem masters.

And we listen to the lemon heads album. It's a shame about ray on the stereo. We moved our arms like we were dancing.

The snow fell quietly outside the cold windows had White paper snowflakes scotched tape to them midd workout. We overheard someone say, there i'd been a shooting at Chelsea high school. We stepped up to stair masters and around an A M F M radio to try to learn more.

At first, we were worried about our friends who might have done at a game in the school gym. We imagine that the shooter must have been a kid from another school. IT never crossed our minds that the shooter could have been your husband or the victim could have been my dad.

Nine, in the details of that afternoon that your husband killed, my dad slowly leaked out from police reports in school employees. I learned that your husband had been represented for sexually harassing female students in the hallways. I learned that he was on the verge of losing his job.

I learned that your husband had stormed out of agreement ece meeting with administrators not long after the school day had ended. I learned that you and your husband car pulled home from school together that day. I learned that you were with him in his anger for the twenty minutes that took you to to arrive home.

I learned that when you arrived home, your husband disappeared upstairs. He returned with a nine millimeter semi automatic pistol in his hand. He asserted he is going to die. I learned that your husband got back into the car alone and sped toward the school administration building for my dad, and two others continue .

the meeting twenty minutes.

That's how long IT took your husband to drive back to the high school. I learned that you didn't call the police, whose small town headquarters were less than a five minute drive away from the school. You didn't call the administration building to warn the three men whose lives were at stake, sitting ducks.

Instead, you called the teacher's union office and in arber, twenty minutes in the opposite direction, your husband war along coat with pockets of ammunition. He squealed his tires in the school parking lot. He told someone who approached him that he had, quote, unfinished business to attend to.

He walked into the administration building, turn the corner into the door way of the small office. He lifted the gun and pointed at first, at my dad daddy data pubs, my forty seven year old dads last words were, Steve, you don't have to do this. Her husband fired round after around.

He killed my dad. He injured two others. You didn't call the police.

Ten, why? Alice, why the fuck didn't you call the police? why? why? I, why? Eleven, after your husband shot my dad, a pockets of time existed where my dad was gone.

And I was still just a thursday in december. I was still just a teenager, happily riding the stairmaster at med's ort, looking through icy windows with paper snowflakes, tape to them. My brother brian was still just a fresh faced, private, first class watching bolts on the engines of fleet vehicles at a marine base in north CarOlina. My mom was still a wave of twenty five years in a middle school special education teacher at a neighbour school district. And you were still just my favourite teacher, the one who let us write about an imaginary forest.

twelve. I can't remember if I was you or I who initiated the meaning a few days after your husband murdered my dad at our school. I hadn't slep since I found out I had been desperately pulling his photographs from sticky plastic pages of family photo albums and taping them to the bathroom mirrors.

Still, I was worried about how you might be feeling. I was eager to believe in you to a firm that we were both unknowing victims of your husbandman's violent actions to tell you that I didn't blame you. I sent some hesitation from my mom, but he took me to meet you. Anyway, the story was still developing. I couldn't imagine any scenario where and you were not the hero SHE.

Could we learn that since the shooting.

you had been staying with your friend and colleague pam, when we arrived at her house? Pam took our damp jackets, and I saw you sitting alone in a wingback chair at the far corner of the large room. You didn't rise to greet us.

When we enter the Christmas ready living room, your face displayed a low, distant gaze, your fingertips vegetation with a pinch of fabric on the bottom of your sweater. I don't know what kind of a welcome I had expected, but I wasn't this. Finally, you approached me.

You said something like, this is for you. And your tone was solum. You reached out and handed me a hard cover book and a hand written letter.

Do you remember the title and the book of a tree on the cover? I never read the book I meant to. My head was too clouded with grief in those days to concentrate for long.

I stopped the book into a raw in my bedroom and never looked at IT again. I did read your short letter. Your words were scroll directly across a yellow legal paper that you'd folded like a business letter.

The one thing i'd always remembered about that letter was the part I understood the least, maybe we can make a circle someday. That said, i've been wanting to ask you for years what that mean. Thirteen, I returned to school only three weeks after my dad died, often arriving late and unprepared, driving up to the school in the youth chevy corsica that was still registered in his name.

My other teachers offered me unspoken allowances for my uncompressed academic performance. During the second half of my senior year, my government teacher passed my late bias research paper that took a stands against the death penalty. I called capital punishment quote an option that doesn't warn n enough suffering.

I was scheduled to return to your english class, but the councillor in intervened. Instead, I met with your student teacher in the library every day. I don't remember her name, only that her severe, serious is frightened and distracted me.

I was afraid I was contagious, and I couldn't bear any other complications in my life. We read hemingways, the old man in the sea, as an independent study. I remember how tired santiago was while trying to real that large marland into the boat.

I wouldn't have hit in me to keep going like he did the final semester of high school. I don't remember speaking to you. Surely I must have seen you in the hallways. Did you see me? fourteen?

IT was confusing .

to see in the courtroom on the opposing side sitting next to your mother in law than taking the stand, making a case for your husband's and sanative defense, trying to keep him on a prison. That defense attorney LED you through a detail account of your husband's bizarre actions. I remember the story of your husband killing your pet bird, how we broke its snack with his bare hands.

He recounted a holiday when he killed himself beneath the piano. And sab, like a baby, you explained his obsession with guns, how he usually kept one within reach in island. The courtroom divided my family from his, your words, you never once looked across, at least not while I was looking.

And you didn't look when the verdict was delivered. Guilty life in prison without parole fifteen. I know exactly where I was when I learned you last your battle with cancer.

I stood outside in the main jam, naim, in Adrian college. I wear my jersey begging White shorts in a bulky nee brace. I had just finished playing a division three basketball game.

My mom came to watch my game because IT was the second anniversary of the day your husband killed my dad. IT seemed that we should be together. I have some news.

Mom said he had done the right thing by waiting until after the game was over to tell me Alice died when I asked her funeral was, today sixteen. Did you ever attend the national council of teachers of english convention? I ve barely missed a year since I began my own career as an english teacher.

You're gone, so I don't have to worry about running into you there in the elevator, going up for the cafe at lunch. But I must admit that sometimes I think I see you places, I see a modestly dressed woman with shoulder lengths, Brown hair in downward pointing, just not eyes, and my breath catches in my throat. Then I remember, if only IT was just in those moments that I thought of you, but I have a classroom like you had a classroom. And the books I sometimes turn to in my thoughts, I first read in your class.

Seventeen, the last time I saw you in the flesh, I was a freshman at Adrian college, and you were still in english teacher at Chelsea high school. In a moment of a preciousness, I drove the hour north on michigan, fifty two in, parked in a visitor space in front of the high school. All the students SAT in class, which left me alone to walk the cement pathways.

IT still seems strange that life just continue down in that place. A different teachers stood in front of your husband's old classroom, a new superintendent seat at dusk in my daddle old office. New kids replace those of us who had graduated.

I entered the english building and walk down the locker in case hallway to your classroom. I peaked into your classroom window. A threat tangle lar pain of glass.

I saw you leaning on a desk just a few feet from the door, helping a small group of students. I stared through the window until you saw me. When you looked up, your body throws for a moment.

I wonder what you were thinking then I hadn't told anyone that I was coming and still find IT hard to explain my motivation to see you. That day. You look to weak, frail, sick, a demo version of your form ourself.

I remember that you stepped into the hallway and faced me. You looked me straights in the eyes. You weren't expression that I decoded as a combination of compassion and fear.

Even with your full attention, I couldn't speak. A single word I like to do is stand in the hallway and look at you. Standing three feedback, I searched your face and eyes, and you searched mine as if all the questions were written there. You never asked me why I had come. You seemed to understand, maybe more than I did, how long did we stand there saying nothing at all?

Eighteen, I never figured out what you meant when you wrote. Maybe we can make a circle someday. In the letter you handed me over time, I got angry at you for saying something so cyp tic to a seventeen year old. Did you plan to tell me something later, after the trial, something that would have closed the space between us? I can't, even after all these draft, imagine what that could be, what words could possibly .

have accomplished that .

maybe you never figured that out there sincerely at all.

The coal py seche. She's writer and also a writing teacher at the university of colorado, denver, D. A version of the gutter was first published in hypo campus magazine.

The radio version of the gutter was produced by Chris bender AV acto. Dear miss, so this is thing has been happening now and then on stage for over a decade and gone and elsewhere. Called letters live is inspired by this book by Shawn usher.

Letters of note. They get great performers, including some ridiculously famous actors to be litters written by people like gandhi and virgin wolf. They would boy in free to cover.

And James bow and guys are about their own famous people as well. This next other is one of those somebody not famous. He was written back when letters were king for telephones, even in nine hundred sixty six in york, ture, in the north of england, from a farmer named Simon. Fellow field tall mary Foster is read by the actor terran egitto. An is maybe best known for kingsman en and for storing and selling john and rocket man.

My dear miss, I now track up my pen to right to you, hoping these few lines will find you. Well, as IT leaves me at present, thank god for IT you will perhaps be surprised that I should make saw boarders to write to you who is such a lady and I hope you will not be exit for IT. Hardly did I say what I want.

I am so timid about ladies, and my heart trim's like a husband, but I won't seed in a book that faint heart never won fair lady. So here goes. I am a farmer in a small way, and my age is rather more than forty years, and my mother lives with me and keeps my house, and she's been very party lately and cannot stare about motion. I think I should be more comfortable with a wife.

I have had my eye on you a long time, and I think you are a very nice Young woman and one that would make me happy, if only you think so. We keep a serve girl to milk three key and do the work in the house. And he goes on a bit in the summer to gather, weakens and SHE, snags a few turn NIPS in the back end.

I do a piece of work on the farm myself and attends paid market. And I sometimes show a few sheep and athletes between three and four pigs. Again, Christmas and the same is very useful in the house to make pies and cakes.

And so for, and I sells the harms to help pay for the bari meal. I have about seventy three pounds in. There's broadlands, and we have a nice little polar downstairs with a blue carpet and an oven on the side of the fireplace and the old woman on the other side smoking.

The golden rules claimed upon the walls above the settled, and you could sit all day in the easy chair and nick and men, my kittles and leggs, and you could make the tea ready again. I call in, and you could make button for, apparently, market. And I would drive you to church every someday in the spring cart. And I would do all that bees in my power to make you happy.

So I talked to.

away from you. I am in desh bricks and earnest, and we'll marry you at mayday. Or if my mother dies at four, I shall want you to four.

Finally, you will accept me, my dear, we could be very happy together. I hope you will let me know your mind by Turner pose, and if you are favorable, I will come up to scratch so no more at present from your will wish er and true of Simon fell field. P, S, I want people say nothing about this.

If you will not accept of me. I have another very nice woman in my eye. And I think I shall marry her if you do not accept me. But I thought you would suit me mother Better SHE being very crossly at times.

Terran egitto reading a letter is live. Apparently mary Foster, who got that letter, turned down this proposal of marriage. My videos that we will be a common, but in the comer batch brand, coxe, d.

Falco, jude, all and so many other great actors reading gledhill the letters life youtube channel, or at their website, letters live dog calm. The next shows is gonna at the royal Albert hall in december. Actually, dear doctor casting bone, they tell you, I never meet your heroes, but can you write to them not long after the request, bang, this old job in particle physics, which is A P H D. N, became a reporter. He tried just that.

When I was a Young science journalist, I sent an email to one of the most famous physicists in the world. I was nervous about IT. I was new to journalism.

I did not know how to find stories. I still don't really. But I figured this is how real reporters Operated.

They developed sources. My goal was to get him on the phone. The physicist was a man in Peter higgs in scotland.

Higgs was famous because way back in one thousand nine hundred and sixty four, he had written this paper proposing the possible existence of a new subatomic particle, everyone in the field called IT, the higgs particle. Well, as everyone who was a book, the god particle, though, people kind of hate to their name. Anyway, IT was a big deal.

If IT did really exist, IT could explain why other subatomic particles had mass, which you want them to. If electrons were mass less, they would fly off. You could have atoms.

We would not be here. I've been a physics grad student in a few years before, in one of the things we had been searching for with this massive experiment was the higgs particle. So my goal is to get Peter higgs, who maybe he had seen this deep truth about the nature of the universe, on the phone.

I needed some excuse, so I wrote that I was curious how the higgs had come to have his name. Not a great question, but the only one I can think of, would he have a few minutes to talk? I sent the email the next day, no reply a week and by two weeks, and then after about a month, a male man game with a letter, a letter.

Actually, IT was this thing called an area gram that had been popular during world war two, a single light weight page that folded over light. Wait, because, you know, airmail, which is the funny thing, the handwriting overseas letter in response to an email. But he was older guy at that point.

Imagine his assistant printing out his emails for him. I opened IT up. IT begins. Dear doctor, casting them.

Thank you for your email message dated nine december and one thousand nine ninety seven. Remember being excited to get IT, but also pretty quickly disappointed. He is a very boring letter. He did answer my question in a very detailed and technical way.

Quote, the earliest reference to hig bosons that I know is in the late bin lease talk as reporter at the one thousand nine hundred seventy two rochester conference at firmy lab. And quote, IT was filled with stuff like this, names and dates. Quote, IT is possible, however, that the terminology is being used before the thousand nine hundred and seventy two conference, fAiling to hop's rediscovery of the Anderson wrote on gay higgs at all mechanism the previous year is a kind of frustrating experience.

So I was having with a lot of scientists, they gave you tons of detail that no one else would care about or could possibly remember. And as to my request to talk on the phone for a few minutes, which is my real hope, nothing. I penned the letter up in my cubicle with a thumbtack, then after a while, moved into a draw. Fourteen years went by.

In two thousand twelve, nearly fifty years after higgs roth, that this particle might exist, we learned that really did. Justice had said in my giant teams of physicists managed to make and detect some hikes particles at the certain laboratory in europe. IT was a massive multi I billion dollar effort.

Peter higgs won the nobel prize for at the following year. The letter still SAT in the door of my house. I got married, had kids.

Last year, I came across the letter again, finally stuck in a frame. I say where IT is in the bathroom. And then a few months ago, Peter higgs died. He was ninety four years old.

I went back and read .

the letter again, really for the first time since i've gotten IT almost twenty five years ago. And I have very emotional reading IT. There's something in there that the Younger me, I didn't unable to see.

Appreciate what Peter hicks was doing in this letter is going out of his way to try to give credit to everyone else. Some scientists spend their lives angling for a nobel prize. Hikes are trained to downplay his role in everything, to put IT in its proper context.

Who was generous and humble, he taken the time to write IT all carefully out, intended to a reporter across the ocean that he never met. I went online and found a recording of higgs talking at a press conference after he won the nobel. Actually, he shared the prize with another guy in the press conference. He's doing the same thing. He wasn't .

that people seem to, a lot of people seem to think of that. I did all this single handed. IT was actually part of the a theoretical program which had been started in one thousand nine hundred and sixty. The man who who really initiated was your hero number originally from japan, who is now back in japan. So it's part of of a story which goes back at least two thousand nine hundred and sixty and one thousand nine hundred and sixty four is just of what turned out to be a rather successful episode in that story.

In the press conference, hig also mentioned this thing I never knew, which is that he only wrote about the particle in the first place, sort of a chance. His first draft of his now famous paper was actually rejected by the journal he tried to publish IT in. So I went back and basically added a few lines mentioning that if all the other stuff is true, there might be a new particle.

Also, when people could find something, hg wasn't the only one who could have done what he did, but what he did was remarkable. And the end of day, he was the one who got to Carry the pattana over the finish line. When I look back at the letter now, I think seems like a nice guy for that to happen to, and glad I was him.

Dev customer M A C E, editor of our show coming up. Somebody has an urgent and deeply personal request for the U. S. army. Also other matters that in a minute above a radio when our program continues.

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American life, mara glass, today's program, letters, actual letters, and to be, hear the vast variety of things that can happen when you put your thoughts and feelings down on paper, we have arrived. Deduct four of our program. Act four, dear U.

S. army. So letter does not enough to be long to get point across this one read by the actor cycle. Clark at the royal aborted all in london for letters live does his job and adorable efficiency.

November one thousand and forty three draft board points set .

county arkell deer.

united states army. My husband asked me to write a recommendation telling you that he supports his family. He cannot read, so don't tell him. Hey, I know good to me. He ain't done nothing but raise hell and drink lemons sence.

Since I married him eight years ago and i've got to feed seven kids of his, maybe you can get him to Carry a gun. He's good with square ls and eaten. Take him and welcome.

I need the club in his bed for the kids. Don't tell him this, but just take him and send him as far as you can. mr. Casey murdoch.

Presto kark writing a letter .

for letters live at .

five years away. There the letter you get and then they're the little you wish you got. Forget between these two things and say so much, he's Bruce every chase.

My dad wrote a lot of letters. He would them to me and to everyone in his life. After my parents got divorced, he would write to me at my mom's house, even though i'd see him that weekend.

IT sent postcards. Ds, that just said, for instance, punch, buggy blue, no punch back was nine hundred eighty nine. I was eight years old. He was almost sixty.

He treated letter sometimes like text messages because he wrote so many for big and small reasons, sometimes two a week, sending inside joke between us. Or always he's sent along his plans. Here are the plans.

Come with me for the weekend. After you get back, you can come to my office on friday, and then we have dinner with sillily ana. We might also see a movie call the L.

C. About a famous warrior in the middle ages in spain after bring home on sunday of that week. About newish, because I have to teach, even though there is a holiday on monday, labor day semi.

Colin, at this point, we can go to the harbor the following weekend, a picture up at school, and off we go. That was August nineteen ninety three. He'd often add in a PS, I am writing to you without using capital letters, because I like to write letters that way, because this is time consuming and boring to make caps.

You should not do this because this is a bad habit until you, we're grown up. As I grew up, the letters grew up. They took on a different tone.

Here's one for me, twenty five, one thousand ninety five. Dear zi, this is another letter from dad. All of those can be kept over the years and then reread, and then used in your memories.

This is the tone grandiose. He's offering important words of guidance to his child. IT goes on. IT is important to understand the nature of work and how will affect your life, whether school work or something else.

What you will find out in most work situations is the way in which work helps one to get through hard times. I know that when I split up with both gene and her mother, that helped me to have a job, to give me structure so they could survive. Okay, and look forward to a Better time when things would be Better for me.

So work helps a lot in that respect. Few of up and downs at school and social matters, for example, while the work school work, but also in your case, sports helps to get one through a rough period. I don't mean that work whether to be sports would you take seriously and should replaces human values, friends, lovers, whatever.

But IT helps complete the roundness of life. Believe me, I was in six grade. P. S, don't use lower case when you type. That's just for me, otherwise you will get into bad habits.

Dad was a writer, a historian, magazine editor, professor, foreign policy guy, a dry subject, maybe, but he was not a dry person. He was warm and loving and excited and shower his letters. What they weren't really was vulnerable.

They weren't peer to peer. They were farther to daughter, which I loved. I didn't want you to be different.

I like being taking care of and guided and mentor fast over. And he was just clearly enjoying playing the role he was playing. June thirty eighth, one thousand nine hundred ninety nine, I was seventeen twelve grade.

Dear zi, the opening lines of the divine comedy in the middle of the road of our life, I found a myself in a dark wood where the straight way was hidden. In any case, sometimes one does find oneself in a dark wood in the right way. The state is lost and one has to find the path again, and sometimes again and again.

How is camp? The last miss of I received from dad came two days after he died in two thousand four. IT was a postcard he had mailed from paris.

I can't find IT now, but I remember he recommended against opening a credit card. Just stick with a debit card for now. I was twenty two.

I didn't get another letter from him until this year in june, as his friends have died, their families found these old letters my dad had written to them and sent the letters to my sisters and me. I got one from dead from one thousand nine hundred and sixty. He was twenty eight years old.

I was forty two reading IT. IT was the first letter i'd ever read where he was Young, her than me. And the first where he was writing to another adult, IT, was very different from the ones I used to get, no lessons or grand gestures or guidance.

IT was about his first book, which was a novel. He wrote IT in his twenties while living in paris, serving in the army. Looking through the book, IT was clear.

Hemingway was very much on his mind, was called the rules of the game a novel of love and IT was published in one thousand and sixty. IT was not received. Well, I gather the letter was to his brothers in law at the time.

Jack, dear jack.

thank you so much for your letter about the book that was so good to have someone discuss the book in terms of its moral implications rather than style, isc or technical fault. The fact is, of course, that I am only too aware of its shortcomings, or indeed more aware than ever before. To counter with my own despair about this, i'm working harder than ever on my next book, but I hope i'll be richer and fuller than the rules at the moment.

I am involved by critical silence, a hard lesson, but maybe a good one. A tough outer skin is something I need learning to grow. one.

He never wrote to me about his insecurities in my twenty years and thirties. I would have loved to know that he had this feeling, to hear him talk about the weight of being a neist adult. So disappointed with yourself after imagining greatness and trying really hard and seeing the lack of greatness.

Even at forty two, he was a comfort to see him questioning everything he was doing. That kind of self doubt and self criticism is a huge part of my personality, that is, every day. And apparently IT was a thing we had in common my dad in me and you know.

I got a letter he wrote to someone else, a close family friend, known to me as I magi IT was one thousand nine hundred sixty six. He was in studies. He was getting someone know before my mom, dear Maggie, the novel pcc eds, a pace.

And my agent is happy with IT. Finally, I ve made a woman who I am very fond of. We have been going out. Is that the word since the end of october? And IT is very nice indeed to have someone who cares a lot of about one.

Dare I use the word love? Life seems to me so insubstantial, so filled with egg shells that I will predict nothing but SHE makes me happy. SHE is very kind, straight and quite remarkably beautiful.

Also, SHE is thirty three and has not been married. Her hang ups, whatever they are, strike me as minor. SHE is so loving and giving on far, who knows? Maybe my luck is changing. And then again, you see the old distrust for happiness he had there to the feeling that things would always go wrong, that even if IT feels good in the moment is a drink, IT won't last. And I know .

there's another letter .

to Maggie in which every single feeling in IT is new to me, not to my experience, of course, frustration, heartbreak, hopelessness. Just knew to my experience of my dad, he was in the middle of his first messy divorce yet two Young kids, my sisters, dear magi, a mad chase letter, because I can't really call up, and sometimes that is good to get things down on paper, no reply called for.

I've realized you can't just move out when things get too hot. No one's life is that bloody good. Anyway, no one has IT knocked yet.

I do not look forward to the future. I see breakdown in trouble, in pain. And no matter how one tries, one cannot be in different.

Take care of yourself. I'll believing. June six and back june twenty seven, hanging on by your thumbs.

Appearing, keeping their hard earned bitterness from you is a gift. It's generosity and that selfishness. I'm grateful for that.

Still, I remember our last conversation. We were at a bar in fall river massachuset, the old milltown, where my dad grew up. The tvs were on the olympics.

I think people striving to perfect perfection in the background was talking to dad about my new job, first post college job, how cool the people were who worked there. How afraid was they wouldn't like me? That's the old joe dead said.

You don't need to spend time worrying what people think about you anymore. Okay, I looked away and didn't say anything, wasn't looking for advice at that moment. Maybe if I known this was the last conversation we were ever, onna, have I would have had a question.

Have you ever felt this way? Tell me about IT. Tell me everything about that.

I wish you told me more about second guessing himself about errors and uncertainty. But really, there is not any specific thing I wish he told me. It's not that I always wanted to know.

And I like you or you like me. Are we the same? It's that we were interrupted when he died.

That's what I hate. I wanted our conversations to continue and to change and expand. The letters are great.

I love the letters. The letters are what I have, but the letters are fixed. They leave me so much far as dad might say, still hungry, they end endless love. Dad is not the same as having a conversation. It's nothing like what a conversation would be.

The chase is a producer on our show.

Is getting high. Picks up the mail from the slide. Rush up.

Some postman is growing too, all our letters.

Problem to stay by the executive to a man you very people put together today and mick m. Svan franchi. Management editor is sara of special today, rebeca chase, sara chase, Susan chase, Frank close and Victoria Martin's, our website, this american life at org.

You can stamp for eight hundred episodes of our show for absolutely free. This american life is to the local public radio stations by P. R.

X, the public radio exchange. This is always your programs cofounder. ms.

Militia is new get rich quick scheme. He likes incense, says a Better bill on fire. And so the chance final.

final secret to wealth and amErica .

glass back next week with more stories. This american life.

Some postman is moving to want a love letters. Can we try here, you?

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