A quick warning.
There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org when my friend Eckhar was a kid growing up in Israel, his mom would tell him his story every night before he went to sleep.
But it was almost always a story that you would invent, like right then on the spot.
Never read him any children's books.
And for my mom, the idea of telling us stories from children books was very much like kind of ordering a pizza instead of making us a dinner.
It would mean that she doesn't love us enough.
So almost every night it was a custom made story with flying camels or a room that people would walk into and lose the power of speech and all sorts of other made up things.
But always, Edgar says the details and the feelings in the stories echoed whatever was going on in Eckhart's life that particular day.
Eckhart's mom did this for Eckhart because her parents had done it for her when she was a little girl in.
Poland during World War II, during wartime.
The greatest gifts that she got from her parents were the stories that they told her because they couldn't give her food, they couldn't give her clothes, they could only tell her stories.
And they would put all the love and knowledge and imagination in it.
So those stories would be amazing.
And she would tell me that when they would begin the story, she would be afraid that she'll fall asleep in the middle.
And then if she fall asleep in the middle, they would never finish the story.
So basically nobody will know how the story ends.
So my mom kind of grew up about this idea that a story was like kind of a hug or a kiss or it was just something that you give or share with somebody that you love a lot.
After all that, Eckhart grew up to be a short story writer.
He's Eckhart.