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question one of the most foolish and inhumane ever conceived.) I am fascinated when I see men crying on the news. I empathize with their loss, while I envy their ability to do what I cannot.
    When my mom died, I returned from the hospital and went on with my day. When my roommate/then partner came home, I told him in almost an “oh, and by the way” manner, and we had dinner and watched TV and went to bed. After a few minutes I got up and went into the other bedroom, and I cried. This was my
mother
, who I loved more than anyone else in the world. And yet even then the door soon slammed shut on my grief, trapping the tears inside, and try though I might, I could not reopen it.
    When my “second mom,” Aunt Thyra…Uncle Buck’s wife…died in 1973, I don’t remember whether I cried or not. Probably a bit, but far more on the inside. I remember my cousin Tom, about 12 years younger than I, leaning against his car and sobbing uncontrollably. I felt for him. I understood him. But I could not join him.
    To this day I have not really cried for Ray, whom I consider, through the softened light of time which blurs the sharp edge of reality, to have been the love of my life. Nor have I cried for Norm. I do wish I could.
    * * *
    SOFTIE
    A friend sent me a video taken from YouTube…a Budweiser commercial which aired only once, during the first Super Bowl game following 9-11. It shows the Budweiser Clydesdales...magnificent animals...pulling the Budweiser wagon through farmland and into New York City. Framed against the skyline, the horses bow toward the space where the twin towers once stood. Lump-in-throat time.
    I regret I cannot recall the sponsor of what is, to me, the most powerful commercial I’ve seen. I may have mentioned it once before: a young boy is with his father in a dog pound, looking into the cages at various strays in eye-level cages. The boy points to one and says, “I want that one.” A close-up of the dog shows it is missing an eye. “You don’t want that one!” the father says. “Get a normal one.” The final scene shows the boy and his father walking out of the shelter, the father holding the disfigured dog while his beaming son walks beside him with crutches and leg braces.
Big
time heart grabber!
    Patriotic songs. Broadway show tunes (“Impossible Dream,” “I Am What I Am,” “Maybe This Time” and countless others), full orchestral music, movies and plays with powerfully uplifting endings (I cried at not one but three points in
E.T.
, twice near the end of
Man of La Mancha,
and had my heart torn out every one of the eight times I saw
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake
).
    People’s bravery under the unfathomable stresses of a major disaster fill me with both sorrow and wonder for what it shows about the nobility of the human condition. Seeing men cry on television frequently brings me, too, to tears. Gratuitous acts of kindness move me.
    I sometimes cry when I am writing dramatic passages in my books. I can easily cry when I think of those people I loved (and still love) who have died…which is why if I start to think of them, I have trained myself to think of other things.
    I’m not a blubberer who can burst into tears at the slightest provocation, but when things move me deeply I do get a tightness in my chest and a lump in my throat. I shed tears of joy and wonder as often as tears of sadness. And like most men, I cannot recall the last time (if I have ever done it since turning six years old) I cried in public…which is probably why I am moved to tears by television coverage of events in which men are shown crying.
    I turn to mush around babies of all species, except possibly reptiles.
    As to how or when I became such a softie, it’s a classic “the-chicken-or-the-egg” situation. I am and have always been an incorrigible romantic, so it’s impossible to say whether I’m a softie because