It’s been an emotional season, my only child’s last in college. And depending on some complicated playoff calculations, it’s quite possible she’ll play her last soccer game this Sunday.
There has been crying this year. There will be crying this week.
I have a strange relationship with crying. Don’t you?
I think I got particularly, personally weird about crying during a stint in adolescent drug treatment. This was during the Reagan administration, and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” era. We upper-middle-class suburban teens hadn’t hit rock bottom, exactly. But we were supposed to demonstrate our understanding of the dire “consequences” of the several dozen times we’d gotten high and drunk. How? By crying about it.
My problem: The treatment center itself was the worst consequence I had suffered, and I couldn’t bring myself to cry about it.
I wanted to cry. I needed to cry. Crying was the coin of the realm. If you didn’t shed tears and make sobbing noises to demonstrate your remorse and your connection with your feelings, they made you wear hospital pajamas and denied other privileges. If you cried, you got to wear your “street clothes,” and move more freely through the locked ward we lived in.
Some kids were good at this. I wasn’t. After 35 days of trying, I thought something was the matter with me. So did the treatment administrators, and they sent me off to another treatment center, for another 90 days.
I continued to worry about that crying problem, for years—for many years.
My mother died unexpectedly when I was in college. I cried only once—an exhausted wail to my girlfriend, over the phone.
I didn’t cry too often in my twenties, either.
Soon as I had a child, I started crying. “At card tricks and supermarket openings,” I said, relieved and secretly delighted at the newly free-falling flow. Crying felt virtuous. Pure and purifying both.
But then, drunks cry a lot, don’t they? Oily, shitty, boozy, reumy tears. Once, writing a profile of a suburban mayor, I caught him after a lot of rum and cokes, weeping in self-pity about his rotten childhood. I wrote in Chicago Magazine:
Roger Claar has been crying, on and off. The 61-year-old Republican has spent most of a day and part of an evening telling a reporter his life story: His largely unhappy childhood in Effingham, growing up “a shy, chubby kid in a crewcut with hand-me-down clothes” in what he describes as a “dysfunctional” family with four kids and a mother who “didn’t support” him. His journey to Kansas State University in 1971 to get a Ph.D. (“For a fat little kid from Effingham, that was a bold move,” he says.) His early career as a school administrator, which led him to take a job near Bolingbrook. His rise from village trustee to mayor, first elected in 1986. His side of the scandals that have dogged him along the way. His political relationships with Republican governors Jim Edgar and George Ryan, which led to a seat on the board of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority, where he helped make Bolingbrook the thriving suburban crossroads it is today. And his secrets for bringing in the commerce and housing development that put Bolingbrook on the map.
Almost all these subjects make him emotional.
Claar angrily likens Bolingbrook’s onetime status as a poor relation to neighboring Naperville to his own plight as a child at the family dinner table, when he was the last of the four kids to get the fried chicken. “I’d get a back. I’d get crumbs.”
I don’t regret doing that to that guy. But I also can’t imagine doing it to another guy.
Because maybe, it could be done to me.
A police officer trying to gauge my sobriety should not make me walk a line. Instead, should make me read Bukowski’s poem, Bluebird.
there’s a blue bird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you. …
If I get through the whole poem without crying, let me drive home. If I choke up a little, give me a breathalyzer. If I start sobbing, throw me in the slammer, no questions asked.
Meanwhile, at a company dinner last summer, my colleagues and I voted on who’s the biggest crybaby in our little group. Unanimously: me.
I cry at:
• This Lifesavers ad:
E-MAIL SUBSCRIBERS, VISIT WRITING-BOOTS.COM TO VIEW VIDEO.
• The film A River Runs Through It, throughout the credits and for up to 45 minutes after that.
• Everything regarding women’s sports, which is so fucking sentimental and dumb and embarrassing it makes me want to cry.
I cry at even weirder things than that. On my global speechwriting tours, I cry at a bunch of the video clips I show, including one in which a shy, nervous young Queen Elizabeth concludes her first televised Christmas address with a furtive look at the camera that says, Am I finished? My colleague Benjamine has seen me cry at this in front of sympathetic audiences in Canada, Belgium and England. She saw me beginning to mist up in front of an audience in Sydney, Australia, and she had read the room: Australians are flinty. I looked up and saw her shaking her head and making the throat-cutting gesture. Immediately, I dried up like a well-done sirloin at Outback Steakhouse. (So how authentic is this crying business, really?)
I tried to read this piece of my dad’s writing, from his book, A Child to Change Your Life, at my his funeral. I have tried to read it since. I have never been able to get through it without spasmodic sobs.
It seems to me that I must tell my children that the happiness of human beings is too often measured in unrealistic lengths of time—in happy years, or a happy life. I want them to realize that life is not lived in lifetimes or even seasons, but in sunny mornings and snowy afternoons, in picnics in the yard and on Tuesdays with the flu and in hours and minutes and in waiting for a child’s fever to break and sitting quietly with your husband or wife on a Wednesday night or picking up her dress or his suit at the cleaner’s. That if they can’t find happiness here they won’t find it next week or next month somewhere over the horizon, in the excitement of flying an airplane or climbing a mountain or accepting the honors of their fellow men or of kissing a strange new mouth.
I am going to tell any child of mine what I believe—that the clearest indication of a happy life are happy days and happy nights, that the clock, and not the calendar, will always tell her truthfully whether happiness is really hers.
As Robert Redford narrates at the end of the movie that shall not be mentioned:
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
And I am haunted by my own crying’ eyes.
