RICHARD BRADY: A TEACHER'S LESSON

True Lives; Is Every Man Everyman? Is Everyone a Story? We Drove Nails Into the Phone Book, and Went to Find Out.

There are eight million stories in the naked city.

That was the sign-off line for the 1948 movie "Naked City" and the TV series it spawned. It was an arresting premise: Everyone has a story to tell. All lives are interesting.

It makes for good fiction. Is it true?

On Monday, five writers each took a nail and hammered it into a phone book. Where the nail stopped, the writer started. That person would be the story, so long as he or she agreed to be interviewed.

We used phone directories for the District, Northern Virginia, and Prince George's and Montgomery counties. We used nails from Strosnider's. We used a hammer from Hechinger. We used the stories as we found them: Ordinary. Unembellished. Riveting.

The old man in the nursing home asked the question often.

"Who is Richard Brady?"

A math teacher, a father, your son -- none of the possible replies mattered to him. The facts could find no perch in Rudolph Brady's dying brain, and so his son Richard Brady became something less and more than all of them. He was simply the person in the room. The one who visited, who smiled, who held his wrinkled hand, rubbed his neck, took him on walks through a world that was no longer decipherable.

Alzheimer's disease had robbed the old man of his past and future. Now, Brady met his father in a permanent present, unconstrained by expectations.

"He and I actually became very close," the son says. "He was probably my most important teacher in those last years of his life."

Richard Brady, 52, teaches math to the children of the driven elite of Washington at Sidwell Friends School. He and his wife and daughter have a home in Takoma Park in which there is no TV. He wears Birkenstocks and tie-dyed socks.