After getting at least some of the bejesus scared out of me watching The Descent my friend went home and I settled in to some nice comforting programming on PBS. On a Best of Nature retrospective they were showing a story about a poor old New Orleans man searching for his cat left behind after Katrina. The man started crying about his lost cat which made me start crying. This was followed by the story of Shirley and Jenny, two abused circus elephants reuinted in a sanctuary after decades of being apart. I'd heard about this story, but it was still crazy to watch the black man who cared for Shirley in the zoo lead her to the sanctuary and start crying about being the person to finally free her. 'Free at last," he said. "Free at last." Of course, by the time the elephants were nuzzling each other, twisting the bars of the divider between them to get at each other I was all tear-soaked too.

I don't cry often but when I do it's almost always over something sweet and corny I've seen on tv, as if crying over anything greater would be too much to bear. There was a time in my early twenties when the stress was running HIGH and my only access to anything sweet and corny was the hour of Days of Our Lives I allowed myself while I ate lunch before returning to the self-imposed prison I'll call My First Business. I'd never watched soaps as a teen, but for those few horrible months I lived vicariously through Bo and Hope. This is all to say that I remember distinctly and with a little bit of shame how I would sit alone in my living room and cry over the melodramatic tragedies of those people. I guess it's a sign of my age that now it's kitty cats and elephants that get me weepy.

Funny, to be so drowned on such a glorious day.