I Love TAL...TAL and me...Forever...TLF

I met Fella in June. The very beginning of June. But during the winter leading up to that, I had a very serious relationship going with This American Life. It welcomed me home. It always had an interesting story. Fourteen years worth of them to be exact, minus the reruns. And it talked to me at length, never tiring, never running out of things to say.

I let TAL tell me every story. We started with the present, and as TAL opened up we made it all the back to 1998. I cut TAL free before we got to 1996-1998. Sometimes these days I go back and pull out one I haven’t heard yet. And just like the times when someone you think you know tells you a story about themselves you’d never heard, I am always relieved that there something new, something surprising about TAL. It makes me fall in love a little bit more.

When TAL and I were getting to know each other, I heard all the go-to stories. The ones held in reserve for those preliminary days of a relationship. TAL’s best-of. I never had to pull out any of mine in return (the one about the time when our cat got sprayed by a skunk and my dad had to go to the supermarket to buy douche by himself because the rest of us were on vacation; the one about the time the burglar alarm went off in our house while I was babysitting and I took my little sister and went down the basement to silence it without even thinking that it might have meant there was an intruder.) I didn’t have to offer anything. I didn’t have to worry about whether I was keeping TAL entertained. I could just listen.

And, I listened, as I cooked dinner, sat at the table with my legs tucked under me, as I moved to the couch, tried to read without tuning out TAL’s voice. Sometimes more than one a night. Sometimes three.

David Sedaris kept me entertained, with his spot-on impression of Billie Holliday (one, he reported, he wouldn’t even do at the request of Terry Gross when I asked him about it in person at a book signing). He made me feel okay about myself with his self-deprecation and clear disdain for people lacking his cultural aptitude.

I commiserated with Sarah Vowell, as she queried Phil Collins for his opinion on her relationship.

David Rakoff stood in for my best gay, inviting me to sit in on his television experiment.

Ira orchestrated it all, seemingly for my enjoyment alone. He told me about the time two little girls were switched at birth and one of the mothers knew and kept it a secret for forty years. He told me about unsolved murders, standing up to intruders, violence and people who couldn’t help themselves from fighting. Ira clued me into the fact that there are things like this that happen that people actually live through. It’s not over ‘til it’s over. He also told me about how he and Anaheed used to sing the entire theme song to the O.C. whenever the show began.

They kept me company, during the dark winter months. Dark, lonely winter. Except I wasn’t lonely. I loved coming home to my empty apartment, picking out a story I wanted to hear and listening to TAL tell it in a way that no one else could. Never an awkward silence, never a dull story, and I never skipped over one unless I had heard it before in recent memory. (Sometimes I listened over and over again…begging, “tell me again about the time you, John Hodgeman, had to kiss Charlie Chaplin on his white powdered cheek!”)

One time I remember asking Miranda, who has also had a long-standing relationship with TAL, dating back long before mine, how many times she could listen to an episode, when I noticed they used to sell CDs and even cassettes back in the day. She told me that I would be surprised. And she was right. She’s wise, experienced. She loves TAL too. TAL is one of those types, those wandering geniuses, who don’t really have a hold on their magnetism. They never fall for anyone but everyone always falls for them. I became obsessive. And I don’t regret a minute of it.

Labels: for the love of NPR, journal