822: The Words to Say It

Ira Glass

Susanna and Margaret were close. It was a real friendship and a work friendship. They talked four or five times a week, every week for the last 18 years.

Ira Glass

Margaret died on Tuesday. Margaret Riley is her name. She was somebody who managed screenwriters and directors and actors, too. She was 58. Susanna is Susanna Fogel, one of her clients. And she says the remarkable thing about Margaret is how up until the end, she kept hidden how sick she was. The cancer had returned. It was a secret from nearly everybody.

Ira Glass

Margaret didn't want to get into it. She wanted to engage with people the way she always had. She liked working. She wanted to keep at it the way she was used to. And that continued literally until the day she died, Tuesday this week. Doctors had already told her that she didn't have much time. She was getting hospice care at home.

Ira Glass

In fact, the day Margaret died, her mother was flying to LA to see her.

Ira Glass

Susanna was in that situation because just a few days before Margaret died, somebody in Margaret's inner circle confided in her just how bad things were, which Margaret very much did not want her to know. And Susanna couldn't just rush to see her because she was at a film festival, at Sundance showing a film that she and Margaret had spent five years trying to get made. And Saturday was the premiere.

Ira Glass

It continues from there. Susanna sends a picture of her outfit. Margaret hearts it. Then the film screens.

Ira Glass

Susanna sends pictures and a review. Her last text to Margaret on Monday, 7:06 PM, is about how she's going to come over as soon as she gets back to LA to gossip and tell her all about Sundance. This was Susanna laying the groundwork to just show up at Margaret's house Tuesday, whether Margaret liked it or not, and get more real. Margaret never answered that text. And Susanna's found herself thinking a lot about what she wanted to say to her, ideally in person, or even in some last text that she could have sent last weekend when she still had the chance.

Ira Glass

I have to say, I have a lot of sympathy for her friend Margaret's position on all this. I totally understand that feeling of, what good is talking about this going to do. What can words possibly do here against the enormity of this awfulness? Or on the flip side, how can words possibly capture all I feel for you?

Today on our program, people who find themselves in situations where the words really do not seem to capture what's happening. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, The Speaking Part.

So this is a story of a woman who ran out of words, just stopped talking or close to it. It took 72 days, exactly 72 days. Chana Joffe-Walt tells what happened.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The first time I talked to Youmna, it was a couple of months ago. And we mostly talked about her four kids, the questions they were asking her, and how she was answering those questions. There was her youngest, Joury, Juju, who had become obsessed with talking about her cat. The family left the cat when they fled their home in Gaza City on October 13, six days after Hamas attacked Israel.

Juju wanted to know, was the cat getting food? Yes, Youmna said. The neighbors were feeding her. There was Mohammed, 11 years old, who, two weeks into the war, had begun pulling at his lips and biting into them until the skin tore. Mohammed wanted to know if his school was still there. Yes, Youmna said. Cerine, 8 years old. Every time the family fled, she always wanted to know where they would sleep, and would they be able to sleep together? Yes, Youmna would reassure her. We will all sleep right next to each other.

The trickiest was Aline, Youmna's oldest, her 12-year-old.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I talked to Aline a little bit about this, too.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Aline told me she has five close friends. They're a crew.

Chana Joffe-Walt

They seemed like the right words to say, even if Youmna had no idea if they were true. With Aline, with all her kids, Youmna's strategy was to sell them on her own certainty, even if there was no reliable information on who was dead or who was alive. She wanted them to believe there was, and she had it. Youmna would summon all the authority she had as a mom who knows things.

And Youmna is a journalist. She reports for Al Jazeera English in Gaza. So she hoped Aline would look at her, someone who has spent almost a decade tracking down records and information, and believe that of course Youmna would know if her best friend was dead.

Chana Joffe-Walt

But even the younger kids were understanding more than Youmna wanted them to as the war went on. They were starting to worry about everything that was happening in the parts of their world they could no longer see. What was still standing, their school, their cat, their friends. And Youmna just kept trying to convince them, it's all still there.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The kids' fear of what might happen to people they couldn't see began to turn toward the family and apply to Youmna and her husband too. When Youmna went out reporting, her kids begged her to stay home, and not just home, but in the same room right next to them. They wanted all six family members together. They didn't want to let anyone out of sight.

Youmna told me they'd repeatedly ask a question I'd heard other parents from Gaza talk about too. Her kids would ask her, if we die, will we die together? At first, a week, 10 days into the war, Youmna would wave them off. You're not going to die. Then after a month passed, her answer changed to, you're always safe if you're in mommy's arms. Until finally, after more than 50 days of war, Youmna landed on this answer, yes, we will all six die together.

As soon as she said it, she could see her kids were relieved. It was the one thing she could say that she could tell was actually comforting to them. That's where things were for Youmna and her family. 61 days into the war, they'd relocated five times. The kids were asking harder questions, except some questions which they'd stopped asking altogether. Words were more and more difficult, but not yet impossible.

Then there was a shift. Youmna and her husband got word that she had permission to leave Gaza with the kids, but not with her husband. Youmna's parents and siblings are in Egypt. She has Egyptian citizenship. The kids do too, but her husband does not, even though they've been married 15 years. Immediately when they got this news, Youmna's husband, Selah, started lobbying her.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Youmna told him no. She couldn't bear it. No, he said. You have to go. You have to take the kids out. It was late. They thought they were talking quietly, but Aline, their 12-year-old, was always listening.

Chana Joffe-Walt

They let it alone until morning. They had a week to decide. Their names would be on a list at the border for that week, and then the window would close. When I talked to Youmna, it was the middle of that week. At night, they debated, Youmna and Selah whispering after the kids went to sleep. And during the day, Youmna would quietly turn everything over in her head. Should she take the kids and leave him? Could she?

Chana Joffe-Walt

They talked about it for a week, and then their time was up. Youmna told me she had made a decision. They were staying. All six of them stick together. That was it.

I didn't hear from Youmna for a while. There were communication blackouts in Gaza, no electricity. But I could see she was out reporting, interviewing kids in camps, who told her their stomachs ached from hunger, talking to women living in tents who are trying to manage their periods without menstrual supplies. And then on December 21, I was surprised to see a post from Youmna saying she was in Egypt.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She said, in the middle of the month, her kids had started going hungry. Juju, her youngest, had stopped asking for food altogether because she knew there wasn't any. The phones were in and out. There was almost no internet. They had very little contact with the outside world. And then one night, Youmna got a call.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Her father had gotten them back on the list of people who had permission to leave Gaza and enter Egypt. They had another short window of time to leave. But her husband, Selah, was still not on the list. Selah immediately pushed, harder than he had the last time.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The three other families Youmna and Selah were living with, they joined in too.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And her parents from Egypt.

Chana Joffe-Walt

What actually changed things for Youmna was when her dad called back and said, take Selah with you to the border. I've spoken with them. They will let him through, even without an Egyptian passport. They've given me their word. Go. Youmna wasn't sure if there really was a promise or if everyone just wanted her to do as they said. But she started packing.

Chana Joffe-Walt

They told her, you'll just get to the Egyptian side, and they'll send him back. So let them send him back, Youmna said. Don't you stop us. So the Palestinian guards let her family cross to the Egyptian side, where they sat and waited for eight hours. Her husband, Selah, sat right next to her, whispering into her ear nonstop. Youmna, are you listening to me? Youmna, you have to go without me.

Chana Joffe-Walt

They passed through, made it to Egypt, all of them.

Chana Joffe-Walt

When she got online, Youmna saw that Al Jazeera was reporting her cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa, had just been killed by an Israeli drone strike. She said nothing and didn't cry. She saw messages from the families they'd been living with in Rafah. They told her, right after she left, an airstrike had landed so close to the house that all the windows shattered.

Meanwhile, in her parents' home, all around her, everyone was busy, her kids, her husband. They were re-entering the world, reacting to everything, to the food and beds and lights.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Youmna's family was safe. She was safe. She was suddenly one of very few people who had experienced the war and was now about to start living on the other side of it, the after. It was 72 days into the war, and that day, Youmna stopped speaking. Aside from the bare minimum basic instructions to her kids, yes, no, Youmna stopped saying anything at all. It went on like that for a week, her first week in Egypt. When we talked, this conversation, it was two weeks after she'd arrived.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She wasn't able to sleep either or eat.

Chana Joffe-Walt

What broke the logjam for Youmna to start speaking was an invitation to lunch. A week after they'd arrived in Egypt, she and her husband visited a family of Palestinians they knew from Gaza, who are now in Egypt. They all sat, ate food, and she talked. They talked about neighborhoods, places they shared in common, people they knew, and flour, what it was like over the last many weeks to try to find flour.

They didn't talk about the most brutal or scary things they'd witnessed. They talked about the world they'd shared together in Gaza. That's what did it. And when Youmna got back to her parents' house, she kept talking. And she tried to share that world with her family, to tell them what it had been like in Gaza, what she'd seen.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Youmna was speaking, but she could never get anywhere.

I talked to Youmna one more time after this, mid-January. And she told me the day before, she had gone to therapy in person. And apparently, she talked the entire time. It was just a stream of a million thoughts and feelings in no particular order. And as she talked, she noticed there was one particular feeling she kept circling back to.

Chana Joffe-Walt

People shopping in the market in Egypt made Youmna mad, people going to work, her family.

Chana Joffe-Walt

That's where Youmna is more than 100 days into the war. When she does talk, most of the time what comes out is rage.

Ira Glass

Chana Joffe-Walt is a producer on our show. Coming up, a mother reads her teenage daughter's diary. And the things she confronts her about, the thing that upsets, her choice of words. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

This American Life. I'm Ira's Glass. Today's show, "The Words to Say It," we have stories today about situations where words fail to get at what is really happening. We have arrived at Act 2 of our show. Act 2, Toska.

When Valerie Kipnis was growing up, there was one word that her mother just did not want to use, even if it seemed like the right word for the situation. This went on for years, and it was a real puzzle for Val. Here she is.

Valerie Kipnis

When I was 10 years old, in the fourth grade, my guidance counselor called Mama in to see her. It was urgent, she said. I knew why she had called in Mama. It was most definitely because of my nearly failing grade on a geography quiz. I should have just told my mother.

I sat outside the office, ear pressed against the splintered wood door.

Has anything happened in the home recently?

No.

Has there been any family trouble?

No.

Perhaps you can remember a triggering event from her past or present.

Again, no.

Any familial history of mental illness?

Of course not.

Is there a history of physical abuse?

What? No.

Why the bruises then?

A snort. Gymnastics. Why must you Americans always assume the worst? She does gymnastics.

Well, I apologize for asking. It's just that the state requires that I do. Still, may I suggest some sort of counseling or therapy for her? It could be helpful. It's not particularly normal for 10-year-olds to write this way. Mrs. D is concerned. I am concerned. We're all concerned. Here's a list of some good counselors in the South Brooklyn area if you decide to seek help, which we, again, recommend.

Yes, OK. Thank you, Mrs. Guidance Counselor. Appreciate your time, Mrs. Counselor, Mama said in her fractured English.

On the walk home, Mama said nothing. She marched quickly in her burgundy crocodile print pointy-toed leather heels, clutching a paper the counselor had given her. It was not my geography quiz. It was a creative writing assignment about trees for my living environment class. The last run-on sentence was, "I am hollow and dead and alive all at the same time. How am I any different than a tree stuck in a permanent fall?"

As we walk through our apartment building's metal gates, Mama addressed me in Russian. Look at me, she said. Are you sad, Lera? No, I'm fine, Mama. Your stupid counselor seems to think you are depressed, she said as she opened the door to our apartment, gesturing with her fingers to make quotation signs in the air around the word "depressed."

What a stupid American word. How can a child be depressed? You have everything. You can be sad for a little, sure, but you are not depressed. Bozhe moi, these Amerikantzi are so dramatic. My mother yelled out to my father, Marik, do you think children can be depressed? In America, my father shouted from the bedroom. No, they have everything. What do they have to be depressed about? Exactly like I said, Mama responded, satisfied.

We arrived in the US when I was one. Immigration defined the first decade of my life. Cans of tuna for dinner, ESL classes, and small, often crowded living spaces. I didn't speak English fluently until I was eight. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I had shed my thick Russian accent and the last two letters of my first name, Valeriya. I went by Valerie now, Val for short.

My grandmothers deemed me an Amerikanka. That meant I took phone calls with Con Edison, instructed landlords how to fix our oftentimes broken radiators, and negotiated rates for vacation timeshares. I could be a moody child, self-serious, sometimes sad in ways that felt too big for my body. Mostly, I kept this to myself. But occasionally, my feelings would slip out, like one day when I was 15.

I came home from dance practice to find my diary open on the marble-topped island in our kitchen, my mother crying. Lera, come sit next to me, pozhaluysta. Throwing down my backpack, I settled myself on the stool next to her. Lera, Lerachka, why do you write this way? Scrawled in seafoam green jelly pen, my handwriting read, "There is no meaning to it all. I would end it, but that would hurt everyone around me." The words now felt foreign.

Because it's how I feel. I write what I feel. That's the point of having a diary, Mama. It's private. Why would you look through it? Why?

What are these negative thoughts? Why do you have such feelings? Tell me, Lera, please. Is this coming from the TV you watch? I knew your father should not have installed that stupid cable.

From cable? Really, Mama? You think Hannah Montana is making me depressed?

Again, with that word, "depressed." She let the syllables roll thick out of her mouth. You are not depressed, Lera. You simply cannot be. This feeling is momentary. You are a teenager. It is hormones. It happens to everybody. OK, you are sad. Sure. But it will be over tomorrow.

In true teen fashion, I yelled, you don't understand. I hate you. Then ran into my room, slammed the door, buried my face in a pillow, and cried. I wished I could reveal her inadequacy as a mother, to hurt her by really ending it. But even alone in my room, I could hear her voice in the back of my mind, shaming me. We immigrate here for you, and this is what you do to us. You are not depressed. You're a selfish little girl. This was my mother's power. She could wear me down, even if she was only inside my head.

And this was how it went. I could be sad, but not depressed. I could be nervous, but not anxious. I could be particular, but not obsessive. Therapy and medication were completely out of the question. But maybe she was right. My job as the immigrant daughter was to be grateful, to be content.

I grew up. I moved out. And then a month before I turned 25, I stopped being able to take full breaths. At first, small, enclosed spaces like elevators made me anxious. Within a few months, I'd stop taking the subway. Then obsessive thoughts kicked in. I moved apartments, and when I couldn't adjust to my new home, I began to walk the Williamsburg Bridge at night to my old place. I still had the keys.

I would sit on the floor of the vacant apartment for hours. I did this for a month before I realized that I should perhaps seek help. My therapist-- I'll call her Terry-- had pink hair and worked from an office with another therapist's name on the door. It was kind of confusing, but she was cheap. She certified that I was depressed and anxious with OCD-like tendencies, more O than C, she said.

I was sort of proud, to have a word. It felt real. I decided to tell my parents that I was seeing a therapist. I told them one night in the car. I thought maybe they would be concerned or ask questions, but it was like they didn't hear me. Except I heard my mother mutter in Russian, Amerikanskaya chyzh, meaning American nonsense.

And just like that, my mother's voice was back inside my head. Whenever Terry told me I was depressed, instead of feeling relieved or understood, I wanted to argue. I wanted to yell. Really, depressed? Good one, Terry. Maybe I'm just sad today. Can't a person be sad? Stop diagnosing me.

But I didn't actually yell any of this. Instead, I would nod and let her tell me about coping mechanisms, such as yoga and journaling, a healthier diet, vitamin D. Chekhov once wrote, "If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure." And whenever Terry would prescribe self-care to deal with my never-ending sadness, I would think about my parents. I would think about toska.

OK, a word about toska. For most Russians of my parents' generation, there was no real word for depression. The word they did say was toska. After I gave up on Terry, I started googling around, hoping to understand why my mom was so uncomfortable with the word "depression." And here's what I learned.

It goes back to the Soviet era. During that time, mental illness was stigmatized, seen as a problem that only afflicted capitalist societies, a problem that would disappear under Communist rule. The model Soviet citizen, a tovarish, could not be mentally ill. My father once told me there could be no depression in the world we were building because we were striving for this perfection.

They did use the word "depresiya," but it felt like a foreign import. And anyway, it was reserved for those in the highest rung of emotional distress, those who had lost a spouse in war or a child at birth, and not much else. And there was another much more menacing way Soviets talked about mental illness, and that was as a political weapon. Political and cultural dissidents were pronounced mentally ill, unsound of mind, and locked up in psychiatric hospitals.

It was a very dark Soviet logic. You couldn't be mentally ill and be a model Soviet citizen. But at the same time, if you were not a model Soviet citizen, well, the reason for that was, you were mentally ill. And if you were just a person who wanted to see a psychiatrist, like people did in the West, well, therapy was essentially banned by Soviet authorities for three generations.

Every person who received psychiatric treatment, even just a consultation, was registered by the state. After that, it could be difficult to apply for work or keep jobs. Whatever psychiatry did exist was mostly underground. Mostly things stayed this way until the 1990s, until the Soviet Union fell apart.

Now, things are different. But for people like my parents who left just a few years after that, mental illness remained taboo. They had different words to talk about these sorts of feelings, words like "toska." "Toska" is a word Russians consider to be, in its essence, Russian. It is both of them and for them. It's one of the things that defines the Russian soul, which is perhaps why it is so untranslatable.

I think Vladimir Nabokov captures toska's meaning best. "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels, it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning."

Toska and depression share some things in common, but they are not the same. Like, depression is the lack of desire, while toska is the desire for something unattainable. Toska is not a diagnosis. It is a collective sense of loss. It is a heavy weight. It is the darkness of long winters. "Toska" is the word my mother always used to describe her first decade in America. Bilo ochen tosklivo. It was filled with toska.

Mama describes her first months in New York as horrific. The story goes like this. When we arrived at JFK, she took one look around and immediately started crying. We moved into an apartment on Avenue P in Brooklyn. It felt like my soul had been ripped out of my human, my mother once told me. I stopped seeing life in color. Everything about New York seemed awful and gray.

She was a 28-year-old refugee with a one-year-old. She became obsessed with the past. She forgot about the poverty that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, the lawlessness, the gang violence, the dead bodies she herself had walked past in the street. Mama said, I could only think of the beauty, the canals. I could only think of my mother.

She spent hours walking around South Brooklyn with me in a carriage and her Walkman on full blast, listening mostly to Alexander Rosenbaum, a Russian folk singer known for his lyrics about prison confinement, Leningrad, suffering, and tortured love. She would play her favorite song, "Naletela Grust," Sadness Has Descended Onto Me, on repeat. I imagine her cold fingers-- not yet swollen from the houses she'll clean, the toilets she will scrub-- reach for protruding plastic buttons. Pause, rewind, play.

During her first year in America, my mother lived in almost total solitude. My father was in school during the day and working as a dishwasher in a Burrow Park restaurant by night. For company, she had only me, a crying baby. Mama said, I felt unnecessary in this country. I felt unnecessary to myself. I was an adult woman with an engineering degree, and here I was sitting at home all day, not knowing how to ask for directions or buy food if I was starving. I felt like I might as well just roll over and die. She'd say, Tosklivo bilo mne. Toska had come over me.

For a long time, I felt like "toska" was a word that belonged to my mother, but not to me. I felt like I didn't deserve to take on a feeling from a place where I'd only spent a year of my life. It felt fraudulent to equate my puny American miserableness with the great Russian toska. I wasn't Russian enough to feel toska, and I didn't deserve to feel depression. Despite having two languages at my disposal, I had no word to cling to.

And then something happened. I was with my mother at home in her kitchen. We talked as she waited for holodetz to solidify. And I asked her a question I used to ask all the time as a little girl. I asked her to tell me the story of how we got here. And she told that story the same way she always had, until I asked her about the days when we lived in the apartment on Avenue P, when it was mostly me and her together.

She sighed. Her hands were covered in a sticky gelatin, so she wiped her brow with the inside of her wrist. Oh, Lera, those were the hardest years of my life. It felt like the shadow had come over me. I definitely felt toska, but it was also, well, probably depression, she told me. It was so casual, so effortless, the way she just said "depression" as if it was nothing, as if it was a word she had been saying all her life.

I could see her reflection in the mirror of the microwave, and she didn't even hesitate, just kept on cooking. I sat behind her stunned. Did that just happen? A few weeks later, we were on the phone, and I could tell she was in a strange mood. So I asked how she was doing. Depressed, Lera. I'm feeling depressed, she said. Jeez.

This time, I was angry. This is a word she's just using now? Why did she get to use the word she had always denied to me? Did she even have the right to use the word, to redefine her life so late in the game? I resisted the urge to say something cruel.

Months passed, and I began to realize that I had spent so long feeling that I did not deserve to be depressed that now, I was not allowing my mother to be depressed either. It took me a while to get the courage to finally ask her about it. Why was she suddenly OK with this word? She shrugged. What did you expect? I didn't know what the word really meant until recently. How was I to know that's what I was experiencing?

Coming into this knowing, it wasn't a big moment for her. It was a bunch of smaller ones. She started hearing more Russian speakers use the word in America, on Russian-language TV. She unattached the meaning of that Soviet depresiya from depression. And over time, the word just lost its stigma.

I didn't think I could feel depression as an immigrant, she said. I thought I could have only been toska. I think if she had said she was depressed, then she'd be admitting defeat as an immigrant. She would be admitting that even here in America, after leaving her home to give her children a better life, things could still feel bad. And all those times my mother told me depression was an American concept-- that I wasn't sick, but just particular, that my mood was temporary or could not possibly exist because I was too privileged in America-- looking at it now, I wonder how much of that was meant for me and how much of it was for her.

My mother wasn't wrong in describing how she felt in America as toska. But I think she didn't realize she didn't have to choose between "toska" and "depression." She could have both words. I didn't understand that either. To me, "toska" is the word that comes the closest to the feeling of being a child of immigrants, maybe better than any other word I know. It's the knowledge that no matter how hard you try, you will never see the things your family saw, that you will never understand them fully. And they will never really understand you.

It's the yearning for a place your parents claim as home. And it's a word I finally feel is mine. These days, while my mother and I are on the phone and she's cleaning, I'll hear the way she's breathing and ask if she's OK. She'll tell me she's feeling depressed, and I'll tell her that that's OK. There's no shame in that. I feel it too.

Sometimes when she asks how I'm doing, I'll take an inhale, the kind that gets caught in your throat right before you start to cry. And she'll wait a minute and check I'm still there. And I'll tell her that I feel toska. And she'll say, of course you do. You're my daughter.

Ira Glass

Valerie Kipnis, a.k.a. Valeriya, a.k.a. Lera, is a producer on our show. She's working on a memoir about immigrants and untranslatable words.

["SEARCHING FOR A NEW WORD" BY CON BRIO]

(SINGING) I'm searching for a new word. I'm searching for a symbol to represent my mind in these shifting times.

Ira Glass

Our show today was produced by Susan Burton. The people who put together today's show include Bim Adewunmi, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Cassie Howley, Seth Lind, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Safiyah Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, and Diane Wu.

Our Managing Editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our Senior Editor is David Kestenbaum. Our Executive Editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Amy Walters, Nabil Shawkat, Jack Saul, Gisha, Jennifer Kipnis, Matthew Steinberg, and Al Jazeera's podcast, The Take.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. You can listen to our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks as always to our program's cofounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, sometimes I think he doesn't like it in this country at all. When we named our radio show, Torey thought he had a much better name than the one we picked.

Valerie Kipnis

Amerikanskaya zhyzh, meaning America nonsense.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Nonsense.