I've seen it happen maybe half a dozen times. All of a sudden, during a recording session with a storyteller, out comes a "Morning Story" like a golden egg, flawless, priceless, and succinct.

The first time it happened was nearly four years ago, when Morning Stories was just getting started. Back then I allotted only 45 minutes, rather than an hour and a half, of studio time for our storytellers to follow their memories and let their feelings flow.

During our recording session, my guest Hitesh Hatthi touched on a number of topics that were much on his mind, including his family story of exile and dislocation and his confused sense of cultural identity as an educated high caste Indian now living in an Irish working class neighborhood in Boston, married to a white American woman pregnant with their first child.

Hitesh was thoughtful and articulate. But, with only ten minutes left to go in our session, I was beginning to despair. Hitesh had still said nothing I could shape into a narrative. There was nothing in his eloquent insights about love and family and society that touched the ground. No matter how beautifully he spoke, no matter how many questions I asked, Hitesh remained hidden behind his words. I was so tired of trying I did what I've since learned can be the smartest thing for an interviewer to do. I shut up.

With what was probably a sad little smile, I looked at him and let the silence build. With only five minutes in the session to go, he looked off into the distance, remembered something that had happened to him long ago and told me about it. And there it was, his "Morning Story," barely in need of a single edit, a real living, human moment that shed a warm light on every generalization he had spoken before. Maybe my silent cry for help touched his heart; maybe, knowing he had only a few minutes left to speak (and the safety of a quick getaway) let his emotions show; maybe, like a lot of very articulate speakers, he needed to "explain" his feelings before he could show them, but out his story came. We called it “Such a Good Boy.”

Tom Cottle, another deeply thoughtful and articulate man, presented me with a similar problem. He talked for an hour and a half on a number of important events in his life as a psychologist, but none of the anecdotes seemed to catch fire for him or leave me with the feeling, "Yes, I've been there, too!" We both seemed to feel the disappointment and we parted in a kind of mutual embarrassment that we had let each other down.

It turns out that, in the midst of all Tom's professional recollections, there was an intensely personal story, but I was four years too young to hear it.

Recently, after a thirteen-year stint at WGBH, I was layed off. While clearing out my office I came across the interview I had taped with Tom and, for sentimental reasons, decided to hear it all the way through for the first time. And, about half-way through, there it was, an anecdote Tom had told about the death of his best friend the year before. Not only was I hearing the story for the first time, I was hearing other things Tom had said about what it means to connect and say goodbye to someone, to have and lose a person's trust. After four years I had found the story I was ready to hear.

Recently, I listened to Hitesh's story again, too. The last four years of changes in my life have re-tuned my ears to some of its sounds and silences, as well. It, too, is a different story from the one I first heard.

As the saying goes, you never step into the same stream twice. Thanks to the internet, there is now a  place where the stories that speak to us, the moments from others that make us feel "I've been there, too!" can continue to flow and be re-entered again and again.

Listen to the edited story,

“Tommy, It’s Chuck”