Everyone Has A Story

My drive to work takes about 35 or 40 minutes. I usually listen to books on CD or NPR. Yesterday morning it was NPR. Storycorps:Recording America came on. For those of you not familiar with it, Storycorps is a oral history project whose purpose and goal is to honor one anther's lives through listening. Each conversation is recorded on a CD that the participants are given to take home. Their conversation is also archived at the Library of Congress for future generations to hear. For example, friends or relatives might interview one another, grandmothers and grandfathers might tell their stories, etc. Every Friday morning NPR airs one of these interviews. This is a portion of one I listened to yesterday morning. E J Miller interviews his father, Ed Miller Jr about his own father, Edward Miller. Click on the following exerpt to read or listen to the whole interview.

Asked what kind of advice his father had given him, Ed, 57, admitted he thought most of it was "corny" at the time.

"Do a good job and work hard, and you'll get noticed" was one bit of advice. "And not necessarily to get noticed, but because it was the right thing to do," he said.

"The most important thing I learned from Pop," Ed said, "was to be gentle — not a gentleman, just gentle, you know?"

EJ said he had learned that same lesson from Ed. Then he asked his father what it felt like when he became a dad.

"If I had advice for people now who are young, having babies," Ed said, it would be this: "Try to remember every single minute of that time when your son or your daughter thinks that Daddy is the greatest thing in the world — when you walk in the door, that the sun is shining because Daddy walks in."

It's the memories of those times, Ed said, that he still cherishes, especially when he sees parents out with their young children, walking hand in hand.

"And I'll tell you, my heart aches for the days I used to do that," Ed said. "It's heartaching sometimes."

But he added that he feels lucky because "I'm blessed with a woman that I'm still in love with. And you three guys."

"There's no doubt about it," EJ said. "You are my hero. You're what I think of as a good man. I thank you and Mom for just being such great examples."

"That's pretty cool, J," Ed said.

I love you," his son said.

"I love you too, man."

It was a gently told story and it touched me deeply.