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| A Little League baseball game under the lights in Northern Virginia. I cried, here, too. |
A week ago, I attended my re-scheduled 50th high school reunion. In 1968, there were more than 800 of us who moved on from Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia; at the reunion there were a few dozen of us (and spouses or friends) who returned to reconnect. We spoke kindly about the more than 80 alumni of our class who are dead—two that I know of died in Vietnam—and of our teachers and parents, many of whom are also gone now. Most of the class of ‘68 spread to the winds of life as best we could, fledging awkwardly (speaking for myself) on just-acquired wings. As with so many reunions that bring us back together in our later years, it was a comfortable, light-hearted event because we all had nothing to prove, nothing to put on any scale of my-accomplishment-vs-your-accomplishment. We’d long-since proven ourselves to the world, and that’s who we were that night. After a wonderful dinner and happy conversation, I walked back to my car in the twilight and felt the tears come—tears that were called forth by the memories of things I will never, ever, reconstruct properly, but which I’m pretty sure were good things and mellow things and worthwhile things shared in a moment of time that has slipped over the horizon of my life.
Later in the week, I attended the high school graduation of my youngest niece, Grace, a beautiful young woman whose brother and sister, equally loved by their doting aunt and uncle, are capable of making me cry just because they are such nice human beings. Grace’s graduating class of more than 600, and all their parents, relatives, and friends, filled a popular event arena in Northern Virginia. As the graduates took their places in the well of the auditorium, the evening sun cast beams across their caps and gowns, and moved on across the crowd, illuminating all of us under a warm evening sky. The scene was perfect. And I cried. I cried when we all stood and said the Pledge of Allegiance; I cried as the school choir sang the National Anthem and the Color Guard presented the flag; and I cried as I watched Grace and several of her classmates sign the ceremony for the deaf and hearing impaired.
Let me be clear about one thing that I’m sure crossed your mind when you read that I cried during the Pledge and the National Anthem: my emotional response was not founded on a some notion of America First or righteous nationhood or political positioning to the right or left of a social media ideal version of America. I was in tears because of what I wished for, what I hoped for, what I longed for for all the young people getting ready to move forward in a nation facing a very troubling future. My tears were for what they will encounter, what will lift them up and what will trip them up.
For the graduating class of 2019, the path forward will be totally unpredictable, no matter how hard they try to make it conform to their wills. Life will not be kind to some of them; life will not care about their GPAs or their skin color or their ethnicity or their lineage; life will take its good sweet time in acknowledging their passions, choices, partners, points-of-view, achievements, and failures. For some, life will be a hammer and they will feel like nails; others will have the capacity to be hammers—they will bear great responsibilities--and they will have to learn that human beings are not nails. There will be plenty of tears shed in all their lives, happy tears, sad tears, tears of frustration, tears of anger, tears at loss. I am afraid that until our society comes to terms with—and arrests—the apparent rise in anger and hate, mockery and discord, division and distrust, that are becoming our nation’s face to the rest of the world, more tears of sorrow are in the offing. And so I cried.
Friday morning, I attended a pre-school graduation ceremony for about 15 boys and girls decked out in blue caps and blue gowns with yellow trim. To one of those children, and his older brother, I am “uncle Jim” and have been so-named all their young lives. To be sure, I am just a neighbor to their family; we are not blood kin. And yet, even as I and my wife are to both of them and their parents just neighbors, we have become so much more in the many years they have lived next door. Next week, they will move away to Illinois to begin a new chapter in their lives, and Carolyn and I will watch them leave and feel that hole in our spirits that comes from wanting happiness for someone when finding that happiness means moving on. So I will cry about that. But at the graduation—where my little buddy stood with his friends as the strains of Louis Armstrong’s “A Wonderful World” filled the church sanctuary—I was a wet mess, and would not have wanted to be anything else but. It would be inhuman—robotic—to watch four- and five-year olds facing lifetimes of who-knows-what accompanied by that song of hope, kindness, and love. So, yeah, I was pretty teary.
And, finally, on Friday night, I went to see our neighbors’ oldest boy play his last little league baseball (T-ball plus pitching) game under the lights at a nearby recreation center. If you have been a parent of a seven- or eight-year-old boy or girl who is just learning the basics of baseball (or if you were one of those little boys or girls once), you know what that evening was like. Sort of like the demonstration of atomic fission using a gymnasium floor covered with mousetraps loaded with ping-pong balls. When the first trap is triggered the floor becomes a mass of flying ping-pong balls, each moving in its own trajectory until the last trap is sprung and the last ball falls to the floor. Pretty much describes the pre-game activities on a little league baseball field. But then, the magic happens. The coaches and players line up from home plate along the first- and third-base lines, the knots of parents huddled near the dugouts stand up and face the American flag beyond center field, and the announcer plays the National Anthem which echoes across the grounds covered in dusk. And I felt the tears coming and didn’t mind at all.
There is something about a tearful moment—the act of crying without shame in the face of exquisite beauty, inexpressible love, unimaginable horror, or in deep contemplation of self and one’s place in the continuum—that is, at least for me, a release, a permission of sorts to let the soul show through without fear of judgment or embarrassment. I find that my tears clear things up…wash off the accumulated dust of doubt…rinse away the motes of mistrust…sluice away the skepticism that comes so often…and, in the very act of wiping them away, reveals anew the world around me.
It is clear to me that the world in which I grew up cannot, and should not, be looked back at with blinders on; there was much to cry about that I did not understand in my youth, and I’m sure my parents did their share of weeping for what was happening then, and what they feared lay ahead for me and my sister. They believed then, as I believe today, in the power of a glad heart to heal a wounded spirit; in the power of a firmly-held hand to steady a friend in a time of moral and ethical testing; in the power of a kind word to push back the darkness of hate; and in the power of tears to help us see more clearly what lies ahead for us all. And, of course, I’m crying as I finish this.
For the graduating class of 2019, the path forward will be totally unpredictable, no matter how hard they try to make it conform to their wills. Life will not be kind to some of them; life will not care about their GPAs or their skin color or their ethnicity or their lineage; life will take its good sweet time in acknowledging their passions, choices, partners, points-of-view, achievements, and failures. For some, life will be a hammer and they will feel like nails; others will have the capacity to be hammers—they will bear great responsibilities--and they will have to learn that human beings are not nails. There will be plenty of tears shed in all their lives, happy tears, sad tears, tears of frustration, tears of anger, tears at loss. I am afraid that until our society comes to terms with—and arrests—the apparent rise in anger and hate, mockery and discord, division and distrust, that are becoming our nation’s face to the rest of the world, more tears of sorrow are in the offing. And so I cried.
Friday morning, I attended a pre-school graduation ceremony for about 15 boys and girls decked out in blue caps and blue gowns with yellow trim. To one of those children, and his older brother, I am “uncle Jim” and have been so-named all their young lives. To be sure, I am just a neighbor to their family; we are not blood kin. And yet, even as I and my wife are to both of them and their parents just neighbors, we have become so much more in the many years they have lived next door. Next week, they will move away to Illinois to begin a new chapter in their lives, and Carolyn and I will watch them leave and feel that hole in our spirits that comes from wanting happiness for someone when finding that happiness means moving on. So I will cry about that. But at the graduation—where my little buddy stood with his friends as the strains of Louis Armstrong’s “A Wonderful World” filled the church sanctuary—I was a wet mess, and would not have wanted to be anything else but. It would be inhuman—robotic—to watch four- and five-year olds facing lifetimes of who-knows-what accompanied by that song of hope, kindness, and love. So, yeah, I was pretty teary.
And, finally, on Friday night, I went to see our neighbors’ oldest boy play his last little league baseball (T-ball plus pitching) game under the lights at a nearby recreation center. If you have been a parent of a seven- or eight-year-old boy or girl who is just learning the basics of baseball (or if you were one of those little boys or girls once), you know what that evening was like. Sort of like the demonstration of atomic fission using a gymnasium floor covered with mousetraps loaded with ping-pong balls. When the first trap is triggered the floor becomes a mass of flying ping-pong balls, each moving in its own trajectory until the last trap is sprung and the last ball falls to the floor. Pretty much describes the pre-game activities on a little league baseball field. But then, the magic happens. The coaches and players line up from home plate along the first- and third-base lines, the knots of parents huddled near the dugouts stand up and face the American flag beyond center field, and the announcer plays the National Anthem which echoes across the grounds covered in dusk. And I felt the tears coming and didn’t mind at all.
There is something about a tearful moment—the act of crying without shame in the face of exquisite beauty, inexpressible love, unimaginable horror, or in deep contemplation of self and one’s place in the continuum—that is, at least for me, a release, a permission of sorts to let the soul show through without fear of judgment or embarrassment. I find that my tears clear things up…wash off the accumulated dust of doubt…rinse away the motes of mistrust…sluice away the skepticism that comes so often…and, in the very act of wiping them away, reveals anew the world around me.
It is clear to me that the world in which I grew up cannot, and should not, be looked back at with blinders on; there was much to cry about that I did not understand in my youth, and I’m sure my parents did their share of weeping for what was happening then, and what they feared lay ahead for me and my sister. They believed then, as I believe today, in the power of a glad heart to heal a wounded spirit; in the power of a firmly-held hand to steady a friend in a time of moral and ethical testing; in the power of a kind word to push back the darkness of hate; and in the power of tears to help us see more clearly what lies ahead for us all. And, of course, I’m crying as I finish this.
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