Bawlin' Neumann

Let me watch any corny old movie, a movie where stifled love finally emerges triumphant, - watch my river flow. Come from behind sports events, where the player in question has had hard times and finally wins big? Watch me weep. Poignant television commercials with knowing looks, grampa can play with the grandkids again ’cuz he's on a new kind of dope? I turn on the waterworks. I always wondered about why I do that.

One day I was talking with my aunt Marianne about it, and she just laughed. “You are a bawlin' Neumann - we're all like that.” The Neumann’s were my father's mother’s folk, a big bunch of sentimental crybabies. I certainly didn’t get it from my mothers side (that’s where the chronic low-grade depression comes from.) So pass me a Kleenex when Sam in Casablanca plays As Time Goes By—it's just my defective genes expressing themselves.