For Crying Out Loud

I was a cry baby, my mother announced to anyone who would listen above the whines of her cranky baby. That probably caused me to cry even more. I don’t know why I cried so much. Maybe I was feeling the pain of the dust bowl farmers or the rise of Nazism or maybe there was an open pin on my diapers. She also said I had chronic ear aches. That news sort of got me off the hook.

The fact is that I was probably late controlling my lachrymal glands. I have memories of tears filling my eyes around age seven when someone would look at me for what seemed to be an elongated moment. It was as if they were seeing into the shambles of my mansion.

I also remember crying over certain scenes in movies. Not over dead soldiers but when news reached the family I shared in their grief. Yet my weeping was somewhat selective. I didn't weep over opponents of Joe Lewis when he beat them to a pulp in the first round. Of course, this was conveyed over radio. 

At some point I learned to control my tear ducts like the rest of my gender. Boys simply don’t cry; we learn to stifle the flow though I wonder if ingesting all that salt erodes the soul.

I’m sure I must have cried over the decades. There was plenty to shed tears over. The next big cry I had, which stays vivid in my mind, was when my father died in 1976. I literally could not stop. When Peggy died I cried a river. The salinity of those tears was of a greater order than any. Grief is love with nowhere to go.

It isn’t so much sadness or even distress that prompts my tears these days. It seems to be a sudden, raw burst of empathy or spontaneous compassion with a person most vulnerable. There is a point in which walking in the other person's shoes may be counter productive and tears become a hinderence to dispensing needed care. But tears issue unbidden. They come not from the bombing of a city but from the helplessness or humiliation of an individual. It is an outpouring; an identification with anyone being caught emotionally naked. I can imagine having an emotionally intimate connection with a friend, which touches a nerve provoking tears neither from pain nor sorrow.

Not having access to our tears may prove to be a more serious deficit than going through life as a cry baby. Maybe it takes decades to free our crying self from layers of inbitions.  Yet some of us simply do not get teary and that's alright too. Dry tears may be enough. If we cried for all the suffering in the world we might flood the planet.

I cry for you Alabama.  

We've seen your lashings.  

We've seen your lynchings. 

You've lost your compass.

You broke your promise.