"Many a tear has to fall ..."

In the fall of 1958 (I was starting 9th grade), Tommy Edwards, a performer whose name (until a recent Google search) I'd totally forgotten, released the song "It's All in the Game." (Link to video.) It was, of course, popular around the country (reached #1), not just at Hiram High School (where it was often played at our school dances and sock hops).

That song popped into my head recently because I had noticed that I'm a bit more (okay, a lot more) weepy than I used to be.

When I was a kid, running around, I rarely cried—just when I hurt myself or in a sad moment in a movie. As for the latter, I fought fiercely against my in-a-movie weeping: not manly, you know?

But I couldn’t help it. Pinocchio became a real kid, Cinderella married a prince, Davy Crockett died at the Alamo, etc.

Books, too, made me weep. Bartholomew saved himself from death by wearing 500 hats, Davy Crockett died at the Alamo, etc.

Later, I still wept in films (Midnight Cowboy, Camelot, Much Ado About Nothing) and in so many books I can’t begin to remember them all.

Lately—as I drift daffily into that good night—I find myself weeping almost every night as Joyce and I stream shows in bed before we drift into darkness. At the end of one season of Schitt’s Creek, the principal characters are gathered in a bar, celebrating; at the end of another, Moira shows up at Alexis’ high-school graduation unexpectedly. And in another show, The Cafe, we’re streaming—and loving—the two of us weep almost every night.

Tonight we’re going to watch the final episode of that one, and we will definitely have tissues in bed.*

In another way, I often wake up crying at night—a dream, or thinking about my parents (both gone now), friends who are gone, former students and colleagues ...

And, of course, I weep as I think about the losses that lie ahead. It’s sometimes unbearable, such thoughts. I know we all have our turns—I’d just like to skip mine, if I could. Which I can’t.

Shakespeare knew it, of course, as he reveals movingly here in one of his sonnets, the last line of which is a dazzler.

Sonnet 64 

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

*This show, by the way, like many others, was recommended to us by our friend Chris Cozens.