One of my favorite Saturday Night Live characters is Kevin Nealon’s Barbara Walters-like interviewer who grins smugly into the camera when he gets his subjects to cry. For such oily journalists, getting someone to break into tears means mission accomplished.
There’s something funny about mocking others. I join the Howard Stern crew laughing in mockery at big league ball players who cry during their retirement press conferences. There is a playground cruelty to that kind of humor that also serves as a youthful armor in swashbuckling through life.
My college roommate and I would play an old 45 Mike Douglas hit song, “The Men in My Little Girl’s Life.” In full-tilt ironic mode, we’d howl with laughter listening to verses like:
Is it really so long ago she'd come to me and want to know...
"Dad, there's a boy outside, his name is Lee.
He wants to carry my books for me.
Can he daddy? Is it all right, dad? He's got freckles, dad."
Yes it seems only yesterday I heard my lovely daughter say
"Dad, there's a boy outside, his name is Jim.
He asked me if I'd marry him. I said yes, dad.
Got something in your eye, dad? I love him, dad."
Visa recently used this song to underscore a TV commercial in which a middle-aged man sees his little girl playing with dolls. He then blinks and the little girl is now a woman in a wedding gown. I don’t laugh at the song anymore. I just clear my throat and hide behind Newsweek. More than ever, life’s small moments, those understated snapshots of sadness and joy, make me misty.
I used to be more happily jaundiced. Nine years ago I attended an overnight retreat for Catholic men. One young man offered weepy testimony about how he and his wife grieved when she miscarried. My wife and I had a miscarriage. So did many couples we knew. It’s common and natural. We were sad, of course, but this guy was using it as the centerpiece of his world suffering. I once broke my foot, but that didn’t make me one of Jerry’s Kids. I heaved an impatient sigh, and after locking eyes with a kindred spirit across the table, smirked in superiority.
Around this same time that I noticed a change, a reverse chemical reaction in which my inner vinegar started turning into a sweet port. I’d just returned regularly to church after a hiatus of about 15 years. I was moved watching people take Holy Communion. There is something childlike and expectant in their faces as they wait in line, extending their cupped hands, accepting the bread. It still reminds me of the haunting finale to Disney’s Fantasia in which a miles long processional of shrouded faceless people march slowly on a mysterious pilgrimage to the score of “Ave Maria.”
Now what good am I if, puppet on a string, I have the same reaction to hearing Tim McGraw sing, “I don’t know why they say grown men don’t cry”? What’s next, collapsing with the vapors when the Nashville Network reruns old clips of the Mandrell sisters singing “Silent Night”? In The Godfather, Don Corleone said that women and children can afford to be weak, but not men. When my father died, my 8-year-old daughter sobbed openly. A few years later, she did the same thing when Clay Aiken came in second on American Idol. That does not diminish her sincerity, or dishonor my father’s passing. It merely illustrates the purity and the uncontrollable nature of a child’s emotions. What I can’t figure out is how my own emotions got to be on a hair trigger?
A friend of mine said he has also entered a stage of life in which he is emotionally overwhelmed at nearly every touching moment. I can easily see why. He’s a recently ordained priest, administering the sacraments that commemorate life’s most deeply touching moments -- birth, marriage, death and the rest.
On the other hand, I am a copywriter. I slather advertisements and brochures with the glucose of words that borrow from the equity of these sacraments. Our products also promise redemption, success, satisfaction, and salvation -- what you’ve always been waiting for. My friend leads people in vows, recites prayers. I describe the microscopic fecal matter and pet dander that can be eliminated when you choose our client’s central vacuum cleaning system.
Somewhere, in my mind there has been a blurring of the line between a feature/benefit and the genuine appreciation of a blessing. The tipping point that turned all of this into combustible kindling of gas-soaked hucksterism and mortality-flamed spirituality was when I hit 40. That’s when I got the first aerial view of my life. I saw what of my youthful potential I met, and what I squandered. It’s life’s first big job review. It’s a precarious time, being both a washed-up, over-the-hill young person and a geezer-in-diapers all at the same time.
For instance, I can watch The Graduate and cheer Dustin Hoffman, as Benjamin, as he eschews work, beds the wife of his father’s partner, and disrupts Elaine’s wedding. At the same time, I see Benjamin as self-indulgent, humorless and lazy. At the end Benjamin grins wryly on the bus, a man with no cares and no plans. I’m thinking, “Now see if your dad’s buddy will get you that job in plastics.” I disapprove of Benjamin -- or envy him.
The musical Annie is another confusing litmus test. Any parent of small children completely understands how, after getting swift kicks in the shin, Miss Hannigan sings:
Little cheeks, little teeth
Everything around me is little.
If I wring little necks
Surely I will get an acquittal!
Yet I turn to porridge when rags-to-riches Daddy Warbucks, with his wealth and influence, still cannot find happiness and sings to Annie:
The world was my oyster, but where was the pearl?
Who'd dream I would find it in one little girl?
Yes, something was missing but dreams do come true
That something is no one but you!
I don’t know if it is maturity or mortality, or a little of both, that gives us perspective to see things from different points of view. Is it because we have failed to reach our dreams that we step back and assess situations in search of new ones? Or, do we realize that our first dreams were castles built in air, and we now retreat to a vantage point to get, for the first time in our lives, a genuine unfettered look at what is really going on in life?
I recently drove my ten-year-old and her friends to a party. In the back seat, they innocently chattered about the boys they liked last week versus the boys they like this week. At first I thought it was wonderful that they spoke with such ease and openness in my presence. Then it occurred to me that I was completely off their radar screen, invisible as a book of George Will columns on Britney Spears’ nightstand.
That’s a shock to the ego. But you adjust to it and, if you’re smart, embrace the invisibility. A friend of mine who hunts deer says it took him years to get accustomed to sitting still for hours in a tree. At first, it made him bananas with antsiness. Now he anticipates deer hunting season for the rare serenity he gets in being perched for seven hours in a tree, so still that falcons alight on branches just feet away from him. He says he doesn’t even care that much about the hunting anymore -- that there is more magic in being invisible. In “September of My Years,” Frank Sinatra sings,
As a man who has never paused at wishing wells
Now I’m watching children’s carousels
And their laughter is music to my ears.
That playground laughter might well ripple with cruelty, the delightful squeals could be the humiliating mockery of buck teeth and booger noses that lead to scars that never heal. While this carousel and laughter is all theirs, from my undetected perch, the music belongs to me.
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