This has happened to me quite a few times lately. Most notably, while revisiting some favorite movies from my childhood. I pulled 'em out of the shed, dusted of the thin cardboard and clamshell VHS cases, and tried to remember how to work a VCR. (Stop picturing me in a rocking chair wearing a cardigan. And get off my lawn.) During several of these movies that I watched hundreds of times in the early '90s, something strange happened. My throat felt tight. I began raging a battle against my own face, fighting the sudden onset of some strange liquid trying to force its way out of my eyes. What the hell is happening?! It's the opening credits, for cryin' out loud!
Fast forward to why this is in the Books to Read spot and not the Dasm Has Issues spot. (Please do not actually create this spot.) In my quest for old stuff that reminds me of being a kid, I read Mary O'Hara's Flicka trilogy. (My Friend Flicka is fairly popular, but the next two novels, Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming, seem to have fallen into obscurity.) After years of hunting, I finally got my hands on an affordable copy of Green Grass of Wyoming. Now, to be clear, all of these books made me cry, but I always knew why. Animal pain. Favorite character pain. Animal death. (I don't wanna talk about it.) But when I finally started Green Grass of Wyoming, a book I'd been hungering for since I found out it existed, I cried. First page. Nothing had even happened yet. And I couldn't figure out why.
Here we have it, the reason for this article: There is a passage in Green Grass of Wyoming that explains the sudden onset of happy tears. I read it. I cried. I thought about it for a while. I read it again. And so on and so forth and what-have-you.
The passage is in the words of Nell McLaughlin, the wife of a rancher and mother of three, who is in the hospital resting after having a mental breakdown during an animal attack. (That was a whole different kind of crying on my part. Nell is one of my favorite characters ever. Her pain is my pain.) The McLaughlin's oldest son, Howard, has just left Wyoming for military school on the east coast. He had asked his mother a few days earlier for some life advice to get him through the two long years away from his family, but being hospitalized, Nell was unable to see him before he left. She wrote him a letter from the hospital the day he boarded the train. The letter is a long one, and mostly about God. I'm not particularly into that sort of thing, and her speech about love circles back around to it, but I don't think Miss O'Hara would mind too much if I took something different away from it. This passage is one of the most wonderful things I've ever read, and I had to share part of Nell's letter about love:
"So the upshot is that I have done a great deal of thinking about it myself, trying to figure out how that beautiful flame can be lit within the human heart. I have traced love, any kind of love, back to its beginnings, or tried to, and it seems to me I have found out a good deal about it.
To begin with--just one more word about the way LOVE bestows happiness. When you come to think of it, there is nothing that bestows happiness except love. Love is implicit in all praise, in admiration. You know how, in yourself, when you see some glorious thing, a sunset, or a beautiful face, or some of those exquisite scenes of nature that you now and then come upon, a great tide or praise, love and happiness rises in your heart until it seems that it will burst, and tears push up behind your eyes! Or perhaps it is the grandeur of a symphony. Or perhaps it is great courage or a noble, unselfish deed--and again that bursting love fills the heart. This can be traced down to the smallest thing. Imagine a young girl, about to go to her coming-out party. She sees her dress lying on the bed, clasps her hands (a classic attitude of praise and love!) and stands there in a trance of happiness. Or, a gathering of friends. Analyze your warm, happy feeling. You may call it good cheer, geniality, hospitality. These are other names for love.
And so I say that it is love that gives us all our happiness, and if only we could find some way to kindle it to a great flame in ourselves, which would never wane or die, and for some One who could never disappoint or abandon us, we could ask nothing more. We would be just bursting with happiness all the time.
The great happiness is what the Saints have, and is why they are Saints. This happiness is what the mystics have.
So now, back to our search - how to get it?
Well then, look at love. Wherever you see it (and you see it nearly everywhere) trace it back to its beginnings. What started it?"
Page 236-237
Green Grass of Wyoming by Mary O'Hara
1946
Dell Publishing Co., Inc
Tenth Printing, July 1980.
So that's it. Happy tears are just an outpouring of love; a love that we feel so deeply, we can't possibly keep it on the inside.
Maybe my cold, black heart isn't so cold and black after all. I still cry at happy things, but it doesn't seem so annoying now that I know why. It seems obvious now, but "I just love it, okay?!" didn't seem like a reasonable explanation before reading it in Mary O'Hara's words. And now, whenever I get all teary, whether it's at an old movie, a picture, a book, a news article about people doing good things - instead of angrily berating myself for being an overly-emotional crazy person, I try to trace it back and figure out why it makes me so happy. Feeling things is much more enjoyable that way.
Kristen Bell experiences happy-crying in her famous link. She really loves sloths, okay?!
