(CNN) -- The deep financial mess at the U.S. Postal Service has revealed a deep fault line in America about whether we even need the postal system.





This week we heard from the "let 'em shut down, I do all my communicating online" group. And there are those who want to "save the art of writing a letter by hand and mailing it."





We're going to get beyond this divide, right here, right now, with a real-life love story that gets to its destination, as most love stories do, through a route that's never been traveled before.





The letter





Our love story begins with a guy in a rush.





"Gimme a ticket for an aer-o-plane.





Ain't got time to take a fast train.





Lonely days are gone.





I'm a-goin' home."





Why is this guy in such a hurry?





"My baby just-a wrote me a letter."





The letter. That's why.





His baby didn't send him an e-mail.





She wrote him a letter. By hand. Put it in an envelope.





Found a stamp buried in her drawer. Took it to a mailbox. Double checked, I'm sure, to make sure it dropped in all the way.





"The Letter," performed by The Box Tops, Joe Cocker and other artists, is one of the 500 most popular American songs.





To get to the bottom of the story, I made a long distance phone call to Wayne Carson, the man who wrote "The Letter."





The back story





I asked Carson if he could imagine the guy in his song rushing to the airport -- paying full fare to get home to his baby, who seems to have sent him packing -- if she had sent an e-mail or a tweet.





He says he never thought of it. He wrote the song in 1967.





Who was the guy, I asked. Was it you?





No.





"My dad was in show business for 50 years," Carson tells me. "He fancied himself as a songwriter. Never wrote a hit. He would get into the story. He didn't know when to quit. By the time he got the story told he had four or five pages. He didn't have a song. He had a short story."





Carson's father handed him one of those "short stories" called "Her Last Letter" and told him to see if he could do something with it.





There was one phrase in there that stuck in Carson's mind that he'd one day come back to. Halfway down the third page. The phrase was "Ticket for an aer-o-plane."





And that's the way aer-o-plane was spelled.





One day, in his small kitchen, Carson swiveled his chair to his pump organ and just banged out the melody and the lyrics in one take. "I just put the words together as they came to me. All because of that one word, aer-o-plane, that my dad wrote in the middle of that damn story." Just a songwriter in the zone.





The plot gets hot





One more question for Carson.





"Do you have a favorite among all the songs you've written? "





"My favorite song," he says, "is always the last one I wrote. ... I don't have a favorite kid or dog. I have a favorite wife. But then again she's the last one I married."





Uh oh. I guess I have a couple more questions.





How many times have you been married, Wayne?





Three, he tells me. His first wife died too young. His second marriage didn't work out. But this marriage...





"What brought us together was songwriting. We wrote two songs together before we actually met in person."





They did not, if you
Who wrote the song?
Wayne Carson,
question: Who wrote the song?, answer: Wayne Carson,