A SENTIMENTAL FOOL AM I or ESSAY ON BEING A WUSS

In my search to find something sensitive for the holiday yesterday I came across this little piece that I wrote one morning in September of 2001, days before 9/11 and a few years before the Red Sox sold their soul to the devil. Turns out that I have quite a few of these essays and even though they aren't 'fiction' per se, I think that I'll include them on this page. Here 'ya go:
A sentimental fool am I. Really. I am much more sensitive now than I have ever been. When I was younger I was easily moved, even touched, by things around me, but those things always involved me directly, and most often than not, sex. Sensitivity was foreplay, and in the far too many cases where things went wrong in that matter, I was also feeling enough to drown myself one glass at a time with beer and cheap whiskey. I cared about things, sure, but I definitely had my priorities.
Then I grew up. Or old. Or soft. I grew something. Perhaps in a moment of Grinch-like awakening my heart grew to an incredible size. I don’t know. All I know is that I used to be different inside. Now I am a wuss.
The weirdest things choke me up. Commercials. What in the world can there be worth crying about in a thirty second ad? There’s something, and Hallmark makes it.
Take last night for instance, I was alone on the couch watching baseball. Yes baseball. It was the Yankees and Red Sox in the last game of a three game series in Boston the first weekend of September. Now, you may read this and think that crying in this situation is understandable, but the thing is, I’m not a Sox fan. I’ve no reason for tears. Besides, I didn’t actually cry at this point, but I was touched deeply by how close Mussina came to pitching a perfect game. It was his first year with the Yanks, and he had been pitching wonderful all season. The only reason that his win total wasn’t higher was the lack of bat support that the bombers were failing to supply. So last night it was the 8th inning, 2 out, 2 strikes to Carl Everett, and that bastard had the nerve to get a hit. Christ, you would have thought he was Ted Williams the way the crowd cheered him, Carl Everett, the man all of Boston treats like a boatload of tea. That really made me feel bad.
I changed the channel to the MDA telethon. It was a little odd, because as far as I could tell Jerry Lewis wasn’t there, or maybe he was napping, or sleeping one off. Like the rest of America I have grown accustomed to the lack of actual entertainers that do the show, but I figured Jerry might make an appearance at some point. I watched some guy named Norm slur and sit through half a dozen "entertainers" (of which the Oak Ridge Boys were the only legit, albeit has-beens, in the stretch, and even they were via satellite from Branson, which is something else that bugs the hell out of me. What is up with Branson?) while Ed McMahon played straight man for some "comic" and called out tympanies at a rate that seemed much more forced than I remembered. Then out of the blue they cut to Lou Gerhig giving his famous speech about being the ‘luckiest man alive’ and how he died from his disease just two years later. Even though that happened before I was born I have always been amazed by that footage to the point of goosebumps and periods of silence. With that effect still lingering Norm introduces a video clip featuring a woman singing ‘Amazing Grace’, my all-time favorite song to sing in the shower, to the names of all the people that have died from various sorts of Muscular Dystrophy in the past year. Man, that was heavy. Bank accounts across America were depleted by the second verse. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not making light of this, it was very moving, and that’s my point. I found myself holding back tears and watching the MDA telethon, not for the hopeful chance that Kiss might make an appearance as I did for many years on my livingroom floor when I was a kid, but for the humanity and pain and hope behind it. I didn’t even care that the Oak Ridge Boys made us sit through two other songs before they played ‘Elvira’, I cared about Jerry’s kids.
This isn’t to say that I haven’t always cared for people that face odds on a daily basis that I will hopefully never know, of course we all do, but how often do we actually think about it. Unless our lives are actually involved we pretend it doesn’t exist and then every St. Patrick’s Day we pay a buck for a Shamrock with our name on it to hang in 7-11.
I decide that I needed a change of pace so I turned the channel again, this time stopping on one of my favorite movies, Awakenings, with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. I remember seeing it the first time years ago in the theater, and that I had cried even then. If you haven’t seen it then turn of your computer and go rent it. It is based on a true story about the deterioration of the human body and the perseverance of the human spirit. It is a very touching movie that always makes me cry, and then I was. I laid in the dark on the couch and I cried.
That’s when I went to bed where my wife had been sleeping for hours and lay down against her, holding her as close as I could with my eyes closed and my lips lost in her hair, thanking anyone that cares that I am not going through this world alone.