I've Got Something in My Eye

We're kind of a sappy family, it turns out. This morning my parents (who, quite wonderfully, have been in town for the last month) and I were talking, and we got kind of "into" what we were talking about, and all three of us started crying. You might remember that I was engaging in that kind of activity fairly recently.

I find all this sappitude somewhat hilarious. Clearly each of us is highly in touch with his or her feelings. And apparently we process all of them by giving our tearducts a work-out. I may have mentioned this before, but when I turned three, my mother started crying at the breakfast table. When I asked her why, she said it was because I was getting so "grown up" and it made her happy.

Huh?

That was my first introduction to parental weeping for what seemed to me the bizarrest reasons, but my brother and I grew to become pretty familiar with it over the years. On Sunday afternoons after church, we used to read novels together aloud as a family. There were more than a few which my parents had to pass back and forth to each other at the end because they were crying too much over the poignancy of the final scenes to actually be able to finish reading them.

But . . . apparently it's hereditary. A late-onset thing or something, undetectable in childhood, but beginning to manifest sometime around college. Now if I feel at all strongly about anything, either positively or negatively, I begin to choke up when I start talking about it. And my brother? He does, too.

Just today, for example, we learned that his little niece (his wife's brother's daughter) makes him teary. Why? When she sings "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," she inserts the name of our family's favourite team. Tears worth shedding, for sure.