“Mom! Dad’s crying again!”
I may not have actually heard that cry, but my three children can all attest to the weakness of my tear ducts. Advertisers love me; subtle pitches to a person’s good nature always “hit me in the feels.” While covering one of the Heartland Film Festival’s entries, “Marie’s Story,” I sat in a darkened theater with the creative director of this publication (also a friend for lo these many years). The film was about a deaf and blind girl who is taught how to live a more fulfilling life by a nun who was in failing health. The end of the film has the young woman at the nun’s grave, using the sign language taught to her by the nun to “sign” to God of the love she learned. When Paula sniffled in the seat next to me, a flood of fluid broke loose in my eyes, and I got a healthy “face rain.”
In Mark Twain’s book, “Letters From The Earth,” there is this passage: “Most men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay when others are singing…” I am unlike most men. I can sing, will sing and like to sing. My mother used to ask me to sing when I visited her, usually Lionel Ritchie’s “Three Times a Lady.” And she asked that I sing “The Old Rugged Cross” at her mother’s funeral, a tearful gift to my grandmother. But there is a song that reminds me of my beloved brother and I will cry through a rendition of “Wind Beneath My Wings.” I cannot think of the song (tears are forming as I write this) without developing blurry vision. Given my inclination toward “cryfullness,” one must question why I would be an avid fan of the TV show, “This Is Us.”
For the less likely to follow commercial television shows among us, “This Is Us” is an NBC program about a Pittsburgh, Penn., couple and their unusual triplets, Kevin, Kate and Randall. The “Big Three” are unique because when one of the expected triplets does not survive birth, a young boy who had been abandoned at birth is adopted into Rebecca and Jack’s family. They leave the hospital with the three children they had expected to have, this white couple with their two white babies, and one black one. When I first started watching the show, it was hard for me to follow the story line, which is crafted with flashbacks, but the black and yellow of Steeler football was prominent enough to keep me engaged, and the complex and loving relationship between Rebecca and Jack was endearing.
In the movie “Garden State,” the young adult Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) tells Sam, (Natalie Portman) about his 9-year-old self, the kid who had pushed his mom and caused her to be paralyzed from the waist down. And there was that. But there is also, Largeman says to Sam, “ … I like you … I guess I have that.” And for me, “That” is my inability to control the flow of tears from my eyes, and onto my face. But there are moments shared between people that are uniquely special and precious, and sometimes, when attempting to capture those moments, writers get it right.
I should say more about how it is that “This Is Us” commands my emotions, but scribes better than I am have already done so; the Pearson family — Jack and Rebecca and their “Big Three,” of Kevin, Kate and Randall — have “that,” and give for me, bawling at the end of an episode, “This.”