This Cold Heart is Filled With Sap

I should be cleaning my house in preparation for this weekend when my sister will be here for her yearly pre-Christmas visit.  Sorry, Sharon, the house has to wait.  And while I'm at it, sorry in advance for the smelly-dog-couch (not that any amount of cleaning will take away its peculiar odor).  It's just that my brain sparked a musing and I need to get down pronto.

While on a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up some cleaning supplies (namely furniture polish--why is it that I only dust my furniture with polish on the average of once a month [if that], but when I go to look for the polish it is gone?  Are Jay and the kids doing on-the-side cleaning that I am not privy to?  If they are, they're doing a good job of hiding it.  Snort.  Sometimes I crack me up.).

Anyway, at the grocery store there were those holiday fixtures, the Salvation Army volunteers, ringing their bells and playing Christmas music.  I put a dollar in their bucket (plug for a Jay Vocab Word:  The Imperfectionist: Of Buckets and Sauce, Poopies and Sweet Peas: A Language All Our Own ) on my way past and suddenly got so choked up and emotional that I couldn't even wish them a Merry Christmas back without my voice cracking and me feeling the need to inhale sharply.  I got into the store and realized I had actual tears in my eyes.  Good god.  I'm turning into a sap.

They get me every time.

Now, as Jay would tell it, I am a cold-hearted robot that has no feelings.  This is because I don't cry at the usual things.  The kind of stuff that makes him sob.  Sappy movies.  Doctor Who.  Our wedding.  I can't help it that his empathy gene is stronger than mine (though maybe I could have at least faked a couple of tears by screwing up my face a bit when we got married).  One exception:  we both cried during the ceremony at our friends' daughter's bat mitzvah this past spring, much to the surprise of many people who only know Jay and me to be the merry pranksters we normally are.  So sometimes I am able to match him in the getting-all-emotional department.

And today furthered that fact.  I do believe I am becoming a softie.  A chump.  I also cry at parades.  I can't watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade without a box of tissues beside me.  And that's not even being at it live.  Small impromptu parade-like things do it, too.  I remember the year our high school girls' soccer team won some kind of state thing, the fire trucks and police cruisers drove through town with their lights and sirens on, escorting the bus to the school.  I was sitting in a parking lot waiting for our son to finish basketball practice and saw the whole thing.  Yup, I got all messy-sobbing, simply because it was so overwhelming.  Happily, I was alone in the parking lot, having shown up too early.  That could have easily put the "UNSTABLE" stamp on my forehead with the other basketball parents for good, but c'mon, isn't that stirring?   And no matter how many times it is played from November 30th to December 25th, hearing the Boston Pops' version of Sleigh Ride makes me catch my breath and well up. 

So.....
No matter how much we think we are all tough-skinned and aloof and what-not, there is always at least one thing (and maybe eventually more!) that can hit us right smack in the heart!  

And now that I've aired those thoughts, I'm going to clean.  Here's my advice:  find that thing that makes you go all mushy and embrace it!