58 is a precarious age. 57 was, too, I guess, but as usual, I wasn’t paying attention.
This morning, the gathering storm clouds promise a break in the drought and the change in barometric pressure has left me a little on the brink emotionally. I’m sure there are more factors than the weather but my mood often follows the meteorological conditions. Not necessarily a bad thing. I’m all about navigating everything that falls off of the back of the life truck that is always weaving erratically just ahead of us.
Personally, I wouldn’t care if it rained hard for a week. Rain brings reflection and that’s a nice time to write. However, a monsoon would really disappoint the boys and girls of spring with their bats and gloves, and their fresh uniforms, and I wouldn’t want that.
Sure, I’m a big, opinionated, fat head most of the time, but I’m a crier. The beauty, complexity, sadness and exhilaration of this life have always had control of my tear ducts. I have watched “It’s a Wonderful Life”, 40 or 50 times and I always cry.
Sometimes the flood gates open with the breath of an angel that opens your eyes to some miracle of humanity or nature. Sometimes a good cry is a little more of a process of melancholy realization.
One morning, you are sitting on the edge of your bed and you look down in the dark and you see an arm and it is the arm of an older man and you feel sorry for the man, who is not you, can’t be you, with the flabby arm.
Later that day, you are thinking about another day, an earlier day, one that felt just like today feels. The people were so young and carefree, you can barely recognize them.
That day, they were just married. They cuddled in their sleeping bags in their tent “first home” in the Quechee State Park. They listened to the warning wind in the pines overhead, smelled the coming rain and watched the light growing greener and darker and comforted their new dog. There was no other day than that day and that moment.
Then you cry because you want to do that day all over again, exactly the same. You are struck with the terrible feeling that that day was not yesterday and too many days have passed. No matter how many years pass on those moments, you can close your eyes and you are full of the joy of having been there at least once.
There is a boy-man in the shower. Soon he will leave for college, as the others have, and the water bill won’t be as high but I can’t think of anything else good to come of that. I am sorry I ever gripped about the long showers and high water bills or the cost of car insurance or the rowdiness at bedtime.
Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind if life played in a loop and I could relive over again all of the family days with my wife and our boys. Just once more through the sweet times. But if life could loop around the block one more time I might never get to see what wonders come after.
Thank the lord for the life giving rain.
azenyardhen 
I love a person who can show their emotions, in a safe place. Not on a basketball court or in a restaurant when you have a disagreement. I love a man who is unafraid to cry when a child misses a challenge and the child next to him achieves it… or when an animal is in pain. Tears are a part of life…if you live it fully. I am sorry for people who are unable to feel that deeply. Your tears are one reason we are able to love you, trust you and admire you.
Awwww honey. I feel it too, but as I think about it, and feel grateful for all those wonderful years past, It helps us be in the moment, and opens up all the new! Here’s to us! I love you. Keep writing you goof.
The whole crying thing was always a bit of a mystery to me while growing up. And I use the term “growing up” very loosely. I remember like it was yesterday the time I cried after my YMCA baseball team lost a game and my parents stopped the car and admonished me that losing a baseball game was *not* a reason to cry. I was.8 or 9 and that’s the first time I recall being told to essentially man up. I’m sure my mom had said it in gentler terms a dozen times before when I had come home with a scrape or bruise or cut and thought the doctors would have to amputate. Losing that baseball game might have been the last time I cried until 1971 when, despite my efforts to fight it off, I cried at the end of “Brian’s Song”. When I couldn’t hold back the tears, I tried to conceal them. And when that didn’t work, the first sob came out of me like a sneeze. And to this day, that’s still how I cry. I don’t necessarily try to hold it back anymore, but the truth is that I never learned how to cry like a man. No gentle weeping, no expressionless stoneface while a single tear leaves its telltale trace down my cheek. For me it’s all or nothing. The triumph for me is that I ever learned it was ok for men to cry. My dad was the definition of quiet stoicism and my mom was the strong disciplinarian. Showing emotions wasn’t discouraged in my family but neither was it encouraged, and for too many years I tried to mimic my dad’s demeanor. It wasn’t until my early thirties that a woman I was in love with changed my life with the simplest of truisms: “Laughing and crying – it’s the same release.”
beautiful, kb. granted, I am loose with the firehose, but my wife doesn’t seem to mind and while she is tougher than I am, I catch her letting loose a deluge at the sight of an old photo or that subaru commercial with the girl asking her mom, “What?” There is no accounting for what tweaks a nerve. I held it and held it at “Big Fish” and it finally welled up as a sob-gasp and the whole theater was startled. Note to self: No more movies about difficult relationships between fathers and sons!