815: How I Learned to Shave

Ira Glass

I remember the day my dad taught me how to shave. For him to take the time to instruct me about anything was so unusual that, even while we stood there at the sink, I thought I'd remember it. I wanted to remember it. I wanted it to mean something, like it was some sort of "boy becomes a man" rite of passage, though that kind of sentimentality is more my personality than my dad's. I doubt he felt anything of the kind.

I still think about it some mornings when I shave, decades later. I remember every part of his instructions-- that I had to wet my face down with hot water to soften the barely existent facial hair, which were not the kind of men's whiskers that needed softening. So I wondered if he knew what he was talking about. He showed me how to hold a razor, the length of the strokes.

When it came time to demonstrate the actual shaving, he realized he couldn't actually do it from the front. He needed to stand behind me and then reach up to my face at the same angle that he was used to shaving his own face with. So he got in back of me and sort of reached his arms up around me, close and intimate while he did that, which was unusual. He was a conscientious dad, a worried dad, a caring dad, but we never had much physical contact.

What stands out most about this memory is how few I have that are like it of him actually teaching me something, taking the time to impart some kind of lesson about the world. To get that kind of focused attention from him was rare. He grew up without a dad. And he did his best, but he didn't have much feeling for what a son might want or might get from a father. Day to day, his mind didn't seem to be on me or my sisters at all, but on his job. He was an accountant, stressed out, working long hours at the firm he started.

Years ago, I was invited to contribute a short chapter to a book about what men learned from their dads. And I wrote something saying that this shaving memory is one of the few that I have of him passing on some kind of knowledge or wisdom. And I showed him the draft, worried that he would be hurt that I would think that or that I would say it publicly. But his biggest problem with what I wrote was that I called him an accountant. He was a CPA, he told me. Very different. Could I change it? Of course, I did.

He died a few weeks ago, at 90 with dementia. It's weird watching somebody with your same body, your same roll of fat around their stomach, same hands, same fingers, same skin, go gray and stop breathing. Right. That's me, I thought. Soon enough. And I've been thinking a lot about the parts of him that I carry in me. My dad wasn't very curious about others. If he met you, he wouldn't ask you lots of questions to figure out who you are or how you tick. Wasn't the most talkative.

If anything, some of the moves that I developed as an interviewer come directly from being in the car with him and trying to actually get him to speak about something, anything, which I guess happens a lot. Kids develop personalities to fit into the jigsaw pieces of what their parents aren't.

I honestly see his good traits in me and all of his bad ones, too, all the time. The biggest of those, some deep part of me that feels so much more comfortable when I'm alone than when I'm around other people. Sometimes all I want to be is alone and just not deal. That kind of thing isolated my dad from people who cared about him, from love and experiences that he could have had. And it's done that to me as well, at times.

When was the day he taught me that? I think most of what we learned from our parents, they never intended for us to learn. This stuff just shows up inside of us like a virus, one that they never meant to transmit and we didn't mean to catch. Then we look up later and they're in us, while we watch them on morphine, struggling with their breathing, and after they're gone, as well.

Today on our show, we have stories where kids grapple with their dad's legacies-- stuff about them consciously and unconsciously, good and bad, that they left behind. OK, for this next line, I have an old recording of my dad.

Ira Glass

Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Am I My Father's Trapper Keeper, Keeper?" Before we get to the father in this story, let me play you this ad. It's from the '80s. Two teenagers in a crowded library, they stand up and, oops, bump into each other. Papers fall to the ground.

Ira Glass

Such good acting, then this realistic piece of dialogue.

Ira Glass

It's an ad for a Trapper Keeper notebook. One of the main selling points-- keeps all your papers trapped. Get it? So they don't fall out.

Ira Glass

That last line kind of gets to me. What is wrong with me? Ads like this are the kind of thing that either evoke nostalgia or complete bafflement. But if you were around in the '80s, you knew the Trapper Keeper-- the Velcro sound when you open it, the pictures on the covers, the rings of the binder. They sort of smoothly slid open and shut instead of snapping so you wouldn't catch your fingers.

According to a press release from the time, half of all middle school and high school students had a Trapper Keeper in 1989. I don't know if I believe that, but there were a lot of them around. Anyway, when the inventor of the Trapper Keeper died last year, it got a lot of attention.

Ira Glass

NPR, The Today Show, The Washington Post, The New York Times, they all ran stories. And then we got this email. It was from a woman who was very surprised by those obituaries. Because, as far as she knew, the inventor of the trapper keeper was very much alive. And he was her father.

She said her dad had invented it, not the guy in the obit. And she was not happy about it. Obviously, this is not the kind of tip that a self-respecting radio producer can just let go. Phia Bennin, here on our program, tried to figure out what was going on.

Phia Bennin

The dad in the email, his name is Jon Wyant, lives in South Carolina. He's 83 years old. And I can definitely confirm he's alive. How do I know? I talked to him. He saw the obit when he was looking at his computer one day, and there, on the screen, was his old colleague, E. Bryant Crutchfield.

Phia Bennin

The sense I get from talking to Jon is that he's someone who tucks his feelings away, sealed tightly, maybe with Velcro. Well, that is not true of the rest of his family. His daughter, Jackie, the one who wrote us, here's how she remembers obit day.

Phia Bennin

It was the obit.

Phia Bennin

Jackie told me Jon may be too polite to say it, but creating the Trapper Keeper has been a big part of his identity, his legacy. A few months before he talked to us, he was at his golf club.

Phia Bennin

Trapper Jon-- that's actually what some of his friends call him. Here's how Jon says the Trapper Keeper came to be. Back in the '70s, Jon was working as director of new product development at Mead. He was the person whose job was to build new stuff the company could sell. And he says Crutchfield, the guy in the obits who worked in marketing, came to him one day and asked him to make a binder that could hold these folders that had vertical pockets. Jon says there wasn't much more guidance than that.

And so, over a few weeks, he put together the pieces that would become the trapper keeper. Jon says he designed the shape of the binder, the shape of the folders, the flap closure, the logo, and even the plastic clipboard in the back with the spot for the pencil. That was something he invented earlier with another guy.

Phia Bennin

Jon says the whole idea that it would trap papers so they don't fall out, like the main sell of that commercial--

Phia Bennin

--Jon says that was him, too. He created the flap closure so nothing would fall out. He even came up with the name Trapper Keeper. Some of the obituaries actually give Jon credit for this. In The New York Times, they say over a martini-fueled lunch, Jon suggested the name to Bryant. It even quotes Bryant saying, "Bang! It made sense." That's the only mention Jon gets. He and his family, they're pretty sure Crutchfield deliberately cut him out of the story, grabbed all the credit for himself.

Learning all of this, I felt for Jon. Maybe anybody would, but I really did. Like, "couldn't let it go" did. I feel a little silly saying this, but I identify with Jon. I'm also a behind the scenes kind of person. I hardly ever talk on the radio. I'm an editor here. I love helping make things happen in the background.

So I saw myself in him. In fact, another producer started the story, Diane Wu, who you hear in some of the interviews. She lost interest in it, but I wouldn't let it die. It felt like if I could get his hard work noticed, the world, in some tiny, little way, would feel more fair.

So did some marketing guy do a marketing job on his own legacy-- like, convince the national press to tell the story he wanted told? Obviously, the person who would have answers was Crutchfield himself. But since that wasn't an option, I found his kids, Ken and Carol.

I'd seen Ken posting about how proud he was of his dad's accomplishments. I didn't relish the idea of calling these people whose dad had just died to say, there's this other guy who says he invented the trapper keeper, and your dad took all the credit for himself. But they were open to talking about it.

Phia Bennin

This is Carol, Crutchfield's daughter. I told her and her brother what Jon said, that her dad had been a big part of the Trapper Keeper's success, did great marketing for it, but that Jon was the one who actually built the thing.

Phia Bennin

Here's what I learned about E. Bryant Crutchfield, or "Crutch," as his friends called him, from talking to his kids. Crutch was a memorable guy, could be a challenging guy. Fun-loving. Very proud of his kids. Big emphasis on providing for his family. Maybe some imposter syndrome. A big advice giver, a lover of drink. The martinis in the story made sense.

And Ken says that for most of his life, the Trapper Keeper wasn't a thing he talked about a lot. Ken wasn't even aware of his dad's relationship with the binder until about a decade ago, when a reporter for the website, Mental Floss, wrote a long story about the invention of the Trapper Keeper, and the piece was all about his dad. Ken's friends started sending him the article.

Phia Bennin

The Mental Floss story and the obits explain Crutch's role in creating the Trapper Keeper this way-- that Crutch was the one who spotted a need for something like the Trapper Keeper. The copy machine had made its way into schools. Kids had lots of papers. They needed a way to keep them in place. And Crutch had also learned that there was a different kind of folder that he thought would sell well. It had vertical pockets. He put those things together and sold it to the world, which, with this kind of product, is everything. As Ken puts it--

Phia Bennin

Talking to Ken, reading the obits, I do think Crutch played a really significant role in the creation of the Trapper Keeper. I found this case study all about Crutch's approach to the project. I talked to a former boss. It really seems like the Trapper Keeper wouldn't have happened without him. I think he does deserve credit, just not all of it.

That Mental Floss article seemed like it was the inspiration for all those obituaries when Crutch died. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post obits linked to it. And Carol says the Mental Floss article stirred things up for her dad back when he was still alive. He was in his 70s when that reporter called him up. Before that, Carol agreed with her brother. The Trapper Keeper wasn't a big topic for him.

Phia Bennin

Carol wanted to make it clear that she loved her dad. He was warm, very funny. Her friends loved him. She didn't think he was trying to be mean or steal anything. He was just the star of his own show.

Phia Bennin

I was struck by how honest and thoughtful both kids were about their dad. And after talking to both of them, I got back in touch with John and Jackie, relayed what the Crutchfield kids had said, and they told me it made them feel better. Turns out Crutchfield's son wants to write a book about the trapper keeper and really wants to talk to Jon. I sent them each other's emails.

It's funny. As I worked on this story, I realized the reason I loved the Trapper Keeper actually has nothing to do with Jon or Crutch. It was the cover art-- those rainbows, and Lisa Frank images, and puppies, and palm trees. I'm pretty sure mine had an outer space scene with geometric shapes. I tried to find out who the artist was who deserves credit for that, but I haven't had any luck. If that happens to be your dad or mom, parent, please write me.

Ira Glass

Phia Bennin hates being on the radio-- for now, anyway. We're working on her. She's an editor here at our show. Coming up, explaining the sex robots of the future to your great grandkids and other legacy issues we have yet to face, but will someday. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "How I Learned to Shave." Stories of our parents' legacies and what we learned from our dads, whether it's intended or not. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, "Raised by Wolf."

So we now turn to this father and son who go hunting together, have all kinds of adventures, and then things get complicated. Both of them were raised by wolves because they are wolves. Here's Lilly Sullivan.

Lilly Sullivan

Rick McIntyre has spent more time watching wild wolves than anyone in the world. He's been doing it for over 40 years. His focus on them is singular and complete. He lives alone in a little cabin just outside of Yellowstone. And every day, seven days a week, he gets up before dawn, figures out where they are. He watches them, writes down what they do. It's now over 13,000 pages of field notes, single-spaced. And he's turned those notes into books.

Reading them, it's like you're out there with him, seeing what he sees. And you just watch the wolves. Lots of scientific papers have been based on his observations. Before Rick and others started doing this work, we really didn't know much about wolves-- well, except for one thing-- that we didn't want them around, even in Yellowstone.

Lilly Sullivan

US Park Rangers killed off the last of the wolves in Yellowstone. Then, in the 1990s, we realized that was a big mistake. So we decided to reintroduce them by capturing three families of wild wolves from Canada and bringing them back to try to get them to settle in and repopulate the park.

They put tracking collars on them so they could find them and watch them, which meant we could really learn what these animals were like in a way that hadn't been possible for most of history. That's what Rick's job was. And of all the things he observed, this is the story that got to him most, of two wolves, a father and a son.

We're going to start with the father, who was one of the first wolves to be reintroduced to Yellowstone. As Rick puts it in his book, "If Shakespeare were telling the story, he'd start it deep in a forest, deep in a wolf's den." Three pups come running out of the den, all robust and strong like their father. And then a fourth pup tumbles out after them, like an afterthought, a scrawny gray pup, the pup who seemed least likely to amount to anything.

Lilly Sullivan

They named the pup Wolf 8 because the collars they gave the wolves, each one had a number. And his was number eight, so that became his name. These pups were all new to the park. Rick was kind of new to his job, too. This was the first time he'd ever gotten to watch wolves so closely. And Rick felt for 8 immediately, started calling him the little guy, worried about him. But then one day, he was watching 8 out playing with his brothers.

Lilly Sullivan

Rick lost sight of them in the trees for a while. Then they came darting back out, the three bigger pups in the lead.

Lilly Sullivan

One of the big pups was carrying a dead elk calf. At first, Rick was impressed that such young pups had taken down an elk.

Lilly Sullivan

His bigger, beautiful brothers didn't see this act of heroism. No one shared the elk with him. And they kept picking on him. As the months passed, 8 started spending more and more time alone to get away from them, just kind of wandering the forest, like a high schooler might do to get away from their family. And again, Rick felt for him, small like that, out there all by himself, with a family that didn't get him.

Then one day, wolf 8 was out wandering alone as usual, when he ran into these wolf pups. Their mother was in a rough spot. She'd had a litter of eight pups, and she was all on her own. Because the same day she gave birth to her pups, her mate was illegally shot and killed.

And the thing is, it's really hard to raise wolf pups alone. In order to produce milk to feed them, she needed to hunt and eat. But that would mean leaving them alone. And newborn pups can't regulate their body temperature on their own. So starve or freeze-- she and her pups were screwed.

The Wolf Project staff was so worried, they even captured the family for a bit so they could feed them. But then wolf 8 came along, the little guy, just a yearling, just out by himself. He saw these pups, and he started playing with them.

Lilly Sullivan

8 liked this family. Over the next days, he started hunting for them, bringing them back little snacks. A little tangent I learned from the books-- a wolf often feeds pups by regurgitating the meat it's hunted. A wolf can carry up to 20 pounds of meat in its belly, which is easier than carrying that much in its jaws over a long distance. Once back at the den, the pups then trigger regurgitation by licking its face. That's why your dog licks your face. It's trying to get you to puke. Gross, right?

So wolf 8's going out, hunting and bringing back these little snacks, as I said, all for these little pups. That was the first time they'd ever documented something like that-- a male wolf caring for another pack's pups, who he wasn't related to.

Lilly Sullivan

He adopted those pups like they were his own. This is one of the things they were seeing while monitoring wolves, by the way. Wolves, like lots of creatures, they have really distinct personalities. And now they could see. Some wolves are aggressive. Some are aloof. And 8 seemed really-- I know how this sounds-- he seemed really nice.

So that's the dad, which brings us to the second wolf in this story, the son, one of 8's adopted pups, known as 21. When 8 came along and started feeding the family, he and 21 really bonded, father and adopted son. Part of it was that 8 was young for a father, just a year older than the pups, so still puppy-like in lots of ways. 8 would do things like let all the pups attack him, roll on his back and pretend to lose to them. Or they might chase him around, and 8 would pretend to be scared and run away. Not all father wolves play with their pups like this. Some are standoffish or dominant.

But 21 seemed particularly connected to 8. As the years went on, the other pups in the litter wandered off, joined other packs. It was just what wolves do. 21, though, stayed first one year, and then another. There was one spring that their den was especially visible. And Rick's spotting scope had a clear view of them. So that whole season, Rick was able to watch them every day for hours on end as they chased and played.

Lilly Sullivan

They were a funny couple because 8 was so small, and 21, his son, grew huge, became significantly larger than his dad. Rick describes 21 as an almost cartoon version of a wolf. If you wanted to draw a wolf as a Marvel superhero, it'd look like 21. They'd go hunting together. 8 would decide when to go. And if 21 wasn't around, 8 would howl and wait. And then they'd head out together. When they found the prey, 21, so muscly and fast, would usually get there first and grab hold. Together, they'd take it down.

Lilly Sullivan

Another season passed, and still, 21 stayed in the pack. He was nearly three at this point, which, honestly, is like too long for a grown-ass wolf to be living with his parents. It'd be like a 24-year-old with no friends, except for his mom and dad. Eventually, 21 did leave. And here's where things get complicated. He went to the pack right next door, what Rick and his team had been calling the Druid Peak pack, a pack that their family did not get along with. They'd battled in the past. There was still a lot of tension.

The Druid Peak pack was led by a female who was notoriously violent. And seriously, she was wild. She drove her own mother and sister out of the pack. Rick's pretty sure she killed entire litters of her sister's pups two years in a row. To this day, Rick calls her "the psychopath." And she was the leader.

The whole alpha male running the pack thing, by the way, one male beating all the others into submission, that's a myth. A pack is usually just a family of wolves, and the lead male is just the father. The one calling the shots is actually a female. She's in charge of strategy and decisions. And this female was terrifying. One year after 21 joined her pack, 21's sister wandered into the pack's territory. The psychopath just went off on her. Someone from the Wolf Project was in a plane, saw it all happen.

Lilly Sullivan

21 was there. But he was in her pack, and she was the leader. He didn't intervene. As the years went by, he got bigger, and their pack thrived. He became the lead male of the pack, and he had pups of his own. His true love seemed to be wolf 42, a real sweetheart, Rick says. They'd bed down together all the time.

And his pack grew huge, too. Someone shot a documentary. A lot of the footage focused on 21, and 21 actually got famous for being this amazing, majestic wolf. People would travel to Yellowstone to see him. No one really came to see his dad.

One winter, the tension started to escalate between 21's pack, the Druid Peak pack, and his father wolf 8's pack. Rick would be at home and hear the packs howling at each other from across the valley. He could tell from their radio collars that they were encroaching on each other's territory. Neither side seemed to be backing down.

The main way wolves in the park die is in fights with other wolves. Rick had seen wolf fights. They could be brutal. And if a clash came, 21 and his father, 8, would be pitted against each other. 21's job was to protect his pack, and 8's job was to protect his.

Lilly Sullivan

Then there was the lead female, the vicious one. 8 would be up against her, too.

Lilly Sullivan

One side howled. The other side howled. It was January. There was snow out. Rick pulled over in his truck, got his spotting scope on the wolves. 8's pack was up on the ridge. 21's pack was running uphill through forests and meadows. 21 was out in front of his pack. 8 was in front of his. Both packs were charging at each other.

Lilly Sullivan

Rick starts ticking through possibilities, trying to figure out if there was some way out. 21 could just pin 8 down and let him go. But no, that wouldn't work. The psychopath was right behind 21. She'd surely jump in and kill 8. No question.

Lilly Sullivan

It was the strangest thing, two sides heading into battle and then running right past each other. 21's pack kept following 21 because he's leading the charge. So when he sprinted past, they just kept following him.

Lilly Sullivan

This happened 23 years ago. But Rick still thinks about it all the time, wondering what happened that day. Rick's convinced that what 21 did that day was intentional. He thinks that 21 changed the battle into a game of chase, knowing that the other wolves would keep following him, and also, that he could outrun them all.

Lilly Sullivan

Rick had been watching 8 and 21 day after day for years, their whole lives. And 8 was such a nice wolf. I know how that sounds, but I really can't think of a better word for it. You'd think that in a world as brutal as theirs, niceness could get you killed. But in the end, it was the thing that saved him. After all, 21 learned how to be a wolf from 8. It's like a dad who just poured out all this love, and the son inherited it.

Ira Glass

Lilly Sullivan is a producer on our show. Rick McIntyre told the story of 8 and 21 in his book, The Rise of Wolf 8. Rick says wolf 8 died a few months after the fight that never was. From what it looked like, he died taking care of his pack. An elk kicked him in the head while he was out hunting for them.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "Storycorp, The Post-Apocalypse Edition." We close out our show today with Simon Rich, who has this story about a dad who is also a grandfather and a great grandfather, who has some very strong ideas about what he wants family members who come after him to know about him and his life.

Simon Rich

I interviewed my great-grandfather Simon because he is the oldest person in my family who is still alive. He was born in a country called America on Earth. He said he used to be a writer. I asked him if he wrote Spider-Man, and he said no. He wrote other things that have all been lost.

My great-grandfather was one of the only men to escape from Earth. The rest of the people who got seats on the escape pod were women and children. My great-grandfather says they let him on because they needed one man to row the spaceship. I'm not sure what he means because there are no oars on a spaceship, but that is what he said.

My great-grandfather told me how scary it was when Earth became too hot to live on. The skies burned with fire day and night, and you couldn't walk across the street without collapsing. I asked him if he had any kind of warning about climate change, and he said yes. There had been articles, movies, and books about how it was going to happen. I asked him if he tried to stop it from happening, and he said, yes, of course. I asked him how, and he said that he had done something called recycling, which is where you throw your garbage into different colored boxes.

I asked my mom what he was talking about. And she explained that when people become as old as my great-grandfather, their brains start to break down. And it's almost like they turn back into babies. Since my great-grandfather is going to die soon, and he is one of the only survivors of Earth, I decided to ask him what his favorite memory of the planet was. I thought he might tell me about the end of World War IV or going to see Spider-Man, but instead, he told me about the first date he went on with his wife, my great-grandmother Kathleen.

They met in college, which is a place people used to go to after high school to drink alcohol. My great-grandfather said that when he was in college, online dating hadn't been invented yet. Instead of matching with someone through a dating app and sending a series of nude photos to each other before eventually meeting up for sex, you would meet them in person before doing anything else. This meant that when my great-grandparents went out for the first time, they had no idea what each other looked like naked.

At this point, my mother, who is recording our interview, told my great-grandfather that he was being inappropriate because this was a project for school. And he apologized, but said that the naked stuff was crucial to the story and that he was going to keep bringing it up whenever it was relevant. My great-grandfather explained that not only had they not seen each other naked, he wasn't sure if my great grandmother wanted that to happen.

Sometimes, in those days, when someone agreed to go out on a date with you, they were still undecided about the naked thing and wanted to learn more personal information about you before making up their mind. Since this was before social media, the only way to get this personal information was by asking people questions to their face, like, as if their actual living, breathing face was their social media profile.

Sometimes this would get embarrassing. Like, you might say, what do your parents do, and they would say, my parents are dead. And then you would have to say something like, I'm sorry I didn't know that because I have no information about you. We're strangers.

The point, my great-grandfather said, is that he had no idea what my great-grandmother thought about him. He had no idea what she thought about anything. He had zero information about her, other than what she looked like wearing clothes and also how it sounded when she laughed, which she had done a couple of times on their long, slow walk through campus with the cool fall breeze whipping through the scattered leaves.

My great-grandfather said that all dates began with the same custom. The two people on the date would take turns verbally listing all the TV shows they liked. If they both liked the same show, they'd exchange memes from it. But here's the thing-- GIFs did not exist yet. So instead of texting the other person a funny moment from the show, you would say out loud, do you remember the part when? And then you would perform the meme yourself, using your face and body to imitate what an actor had said and done.

Exchanging memes in person was much scarier than doing it by text. Because when you text someone a meme and they don't respond, you can tell yourself that maybe they liked it, but just didn't have time to text you back. But when you performed a meme with your body and the other person didn't like it, you would be able to tell. Because instead of laughing, they would just kind of sadly look away and say, yeah, I remember that part. And you would have to just keep on walking to the restaurant.

Luckily, though, my great-grandfather's meme performances went over well, or at least well enough to keep the conversation going. And while he still had no idea whether they would ever see each other naked, he knew it was at least technically still possible. My great-grandfather had invited my great-grandmother to a Spanish restaurant because it was the only restaurant he knew that served wine to people under 21.

But when they arrived, it was too crowded to get a table. They needed to find some other place to eat, but neither of them had internet access. So their only option was to physically search for food by walking around and looking in random directions, like truly the same process used by animals.

Things grew tense. The sun had set, and my great-grandfather was fearful that they would not be able to find alcohol. But after a few stressful minutes, they followed the scent of fried food around a corner and found a Chinese place that served beer. And they were so proud of themselves that they spontaneously high fived, and that was the first time that they touched.

My great-grandfather told me they stayed at the restaurant so long that, by the end, they were the only customers left. Because they were strangers, they asked each other very basic questions, like who are you? Where did you come from? What kind of a person are you?

They ended up having a lot of things in common, which was exciting because that didn't usually happen on a first date. Often, the other person would dislike things you liked or love things that you hated. Or things would seem to be going pretty well, and the person would seem really nice, but then out of the blue, they would say, what is your relationship with Jesus Christ.

My great-grandfather said the main thing he talked to my great grandmother about was how nervous they both were about the future. I asked if he meant climate change. And he admitted that the imminent climate holocaust hadn't come up much. And instead, they'd mostly talked about their careers.

It turned out they both had the same dream-- to write stories down onto pieces of paper. In fact, they were both already trying to do that. Every day, they would each type out stories on computers and then print them with ink onto pieces of white paper. Their goal was to get better at making these paper stories in the hopes that someday they might be able to persuade someone to reprint their paper stories onto multiple pieces of paper, and then sell those pieces of paper for pieces of money, which were also made of paper.

At this point, my mother whispered to me that it was time for my great-grandfather to take a nap, and she gave him some medicine which made him sleep for about four hours. When he woke up, though, he was still insisting all this paper stuff was real, and that it was their actual shared ambition to write stories down on paper and then sell the paper for more paper.

And my mother smiled, and rubbed his hand, and said she believed him. But while she was doing that, she buzzed for the doctor. And he brought in this huge syringe that was almost like a gun because it was made out of metal, and it had this trigger on the bottom.

And the doctor explained that he was going to shoot this thing into my great-grandfather's brain to make him less confused. And my great-grandfather laughed weirdly and said that he had been joking about all that paper stuff, and that really what he and his wife had talked about on their first date was climate change. Because that's what any sane person from that era would have prioritized-- being a climate warrior.

And the doctor looked into my great-grandfather's eyes with his finger on the trigger and said, are you sure? And my great-grandfather swallowed and said, yep. And so the doctor left. But on his way out, he told my mom that he would stay nearby in case my great-grandfather got confused again, in which case he would come back and give him that gunshot right in the middle of his brain.

My great-grandfather was quiet for a while, almost like he was afraid to keep going with his story. But I pressed him for more information. And he said the main thing he wanted me to know before was not what he and my great-grandmother talked about, it was how they talked. Because even though they were basically still strangers who had never even seen each other naked, they somehow believed in one another from the start.

My great-grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom. After the two people finished all the alcohol they'd been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch Arrested Development. Arrested Development was a non Spider-Man show that you played by putting small round disks into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge each other's interests in becoming naked without having to directly ask them.

The way this worked was a little complicated, but my great-grandfather was able to explain all the steps. First, you ask the other person if they had seen Arrested Development, and they would respond, "Some, but not all of it." This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes they'd missed. If they didn't want to see you naked, they would say that they had to finish a paper, which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch Arrested Development, it meant that they probably did want to see you naked.

But here's where it gets complicated. Sometimes it did not mean that. Sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch Arrested Development. That's why there was a third part of the custom. After walking back to your dorm room and putting one of the disks into the disk playing machine, you would sit side by side on a small couch. Your eyes would be facing the screen, but your attention would be focused entirely on each other.

As Arrested Development played, you would physically move closer to the other person, inch by inch, without making any sudden movements. The idea was that if you both moved incrementally towards each other, eventually, your hands would touch. If the other person pulled their hand away or laughed and said, sorry, that meant that they had really truly come to watch Arrested Development.

But if they did not pull their hand away from yours, that meant it was time to start kissing, which is what my great-grandparents did, even though they had never exchanged even the most rudimentary of nudes. And at this point, my mother told my great grandfather to stop telling the story. And he had to admit that the next part was genuinely inappropriate.

My great-grandfather said that their marriage wasn't perfect. Sometimes they argued. And in the 2050s, they both had full-fledged affairs with sex robots. But they ultimately forgave each other because nobody's perfect. And also, by the 2050s, sex robots had become extremely advanced, as well as incredibly persuasive. If you refused to have sex with them, they would start making really high level philosophical arguments about why it wasn't wrong, using logic that was essentially bulletproof, while their boobs and dicks lit up and spun and stuff.

And eventually, it got to the point where the UN had to regulate the sex robot industry because they needed people to leave their apartments again so we could go back to being a society. The point is, my great-grandparents rekindled their romance in the 2060s. And they even ended up renewing their vows while riding on the escape pod to New Earth, surrounded by their daughters and their grandchildren.

And my great-grandfather asked my mom if she could remember the ceremony. And she said she was only four at the time, but she did vaguely recall how weird it was to see him on the spaceship when it was supposed to be just for women and children. And my great-grandfather said that they needed to bring one man to help the women lift their bags into the overhead compartments. And I reminded him that earlier he'd said he'd been on the ship to row an oar.

And there was a long pause. And then he said that he was tired and had to go to sleep. And he closed his eyes, but it didn't really look like he was sleeping. Because every few seconds, he would open his eyes to check if we were still there. And when he saw we were, he would quickly close his eyes again.

And it was around this time that my great-grandmother rolled up in her wheelchair. And my great-grandfather stopped pretending to be asleep, and he sat up and smiled. And she smiled back. And then he lowered his voice and said, do you want to watch Arrested Development? And my mom reminded my great-grandfather that Arrested Development has been lost, along with everything else on Earth, because of his generation's crimes against humanity.

But my great-grandfather ignored her and motioned for his wife to wheel next to him. And he flipped through random channels while their hands inched slowly towards each other. And that's when I finally figured out what the Earth was really like. It was kind of like Arrested Development. It was something people talked about, and praised, and maybe even tried to save.

But the whole time, what everybody secretly actually cared about was the person sitting next to them. That's where all mankind's effort went, the sweat and the toil of billions not to saving the world, but to the frantic, desperate quest for love. And that's why the Earth is gone, because it was nothing more than a conversation starter. It wasn't what we really truly cared about. We never even really lived there. We lived in the presence of each other.

And when my mom read my first draft of this, she said that I shouldn't end it this way because it's glib, and defeatist, and seems to absolve my great grandfather for his political inaction. But it's not like anybody's going to read this stupid essay anyway. And even if they do, it'll eventually be lost like everything else, besides Spider-Man. So I'm just going to stop it right here. Because I want to go out and the night's still young.

Ira Glass

Simon Rich reading a short story, "History Report." His most recent collection of short stories is called New Teeth.

["I LOVE MY DAD" BY SUN KIL MOON]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by our show's senior editor David Kestenbaum with James Bennett II. The people who put together today's show include Bim Adewunmi, Chris Benderev, Jendayi Bonds, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Micky Meek, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Ike Sriskandarajah, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Nicole Wolf Rodriguez-Robbins, Tarek Fouda, Mark Johnson of Global Wildlife Resources, David Mech of the US Geological Survey and the University of Minnesota, and Bill White.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. You can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's merch for your holiday shopping needs, list of favorite shows, tons of other stuff there, too. Again, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He was helping his little nephew with a school project, this 3D topographical map of the Ottoman Empire, which was very nice until he called the kid's teacher to brag--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

["I LOVE MY DAD" BY SUN KIL MOON]