Need a Good Cry?
How about some tear-water tea
The other day I had a yearning, very specific in its musical nature. I wanted/needed to hear “Dance Me to the End of Love,” à la Leonard Cohen when he first recorded it. Maybe not an anthem song in the way “Hallelujah” is, but there was every good reason that the set list of his final concert tours opened with a song of longing and loss transformed into a wistful tango.
And I needed to cry.
I’m talking about a good cry. A really good cry. A cathartic purge.
He was 78 when I last saw him perform in 2012, dapper as ever, even if his voice was a whispery incarnation of the younger, stronger version of the singer/songwriter who hooked me with his very first album. Don’t ask how many nights I found solace from those “Sisters of Mercy” or slipped into the longing of “Suzanne.” Or told a boyfriend that’s no way to say good-bye.
God knows there are other Leonard Cohen songs of love that make me tear up but none that bring on the waterworks in the way that “Dance Me to the End of Love” can. The roots of the song, in Cohen’s own words, were a photograph he saw as a child, concentration camp prisoners in striped pajamas playing music outside a crematorium where fellow prisoners were gassed and cremated.
Then there’s Pavarotti belting out “Nessun Dorma,” Ben Webster’s saxophone crooning, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” the stirring cadence Brandi Carlisle brings to her breakout song, “The Story.”
The list goes on. And what threads it is the triggering power of music coursing through my body, taking me back, no line between today and yesterday.
Here I am stretched out on a wine-colored velvet couch in a large living room, looking through glass doors at the autumn landscape.
There I was in a small NYC studio, my head resting against the pillows of a white Haitian cotton couch, too many years ago to count. I would take a toke, pump up the volume. Feel the space between the notes and the lyrics. Leonard Cohen got to that crack in my heart. Janis Joplin took a piece of it. Billie Holliday made it ache.
During the worst days of the pandemic I found myself listening to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (used so effectively in the movie, “Platoon”). Not that daily headlines and personal stories weren’t enough to bring me to my knees in sadness and anxiety.
Arthur Rubinstein playing Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 2” always touched me in ways inexplicable until I finally got around to reading the liner notes. I learned that the great Russian composer was emerging from a period of despair about his work when he wrote this concerto.
Doesn’t the heart know what the mind takes time to figure out? And of all the arts, isn’t music the one we most embody? It makes us dance, it makes us sing, it makes us cry.
It’s no secret that crying does so much more than soothe us and ease pain. Shedding tears, according to scientific studies, has the effect of releasing toxins and reducing stress.
But who needs science to affirm what is nothing short of an intuitive reality?
Infants cry out of pure need. They cry with their entire bodies and as they get a little older we try to teach them to communicate without crying. Then one day as they test their mettle in learning to read, they open a book, Arnold Lobel’s Owl at Home.
All of Lobel’s books are a delight, and this one follows a lovable owl through a series of vignettes that take place right in his home.
My favorite is “Tear-Water Tea.” With a kettle on his lap, Owl starts thinking of things that make him sad —
chairs with broken legs . . .
songs that cannot be sung because the words have been forgotten . . .
books that cannot be read because some of the pages have been torn out.
As more sad things come to mind, more tears drop into the kettle, which he then puts on the stove to boil. It tastes a little bit salty, he says once he starts sipping. But tear-water tea is always very good.
My daughter is a grown woman, soon to have a child of her own, and this gem we used to read together still sits on my shelf, a reminder that the best children’s books are never really just for children.
Even without the catalyst of music or tear-water tea, it’s easy enough for me to get weepy this time of year, not to mention time of life, what with a big birthday (75) around the corner. So much passes so swiftly. If we can’t slow time, we can learn to be in the moment, recognize the chatter in our minds for the elusive thing it is, not something to consume us.
If we can’t go back in time, we can look at old photographs to remind us of our younger selves, see earlier incarnations of friends and family, some still with us, others gone. We can play the songs that, in an instant, make a seamless moment of past and present.
Here I am cruising along in a slate grey Lexus, a command to Siri, please play Billy Eckstine, “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”
There I was in a gold Dodge Dart, same song, a cassette tape, driving to visit my dying mother in the hospital. It was 1993, she loved Billy Eckstine’s voice. Hearing the same music so many years later is a comfort even as it makes me tear up.
We can cry for what’s lost to us, rue what feels lost in us, maybe even swell with anger at wrong turns, missed opportunities, mishaps we had no control over. Until the crying and inner screams finally give way to some relief.
I look out my window, a bouquet of leaves glowing with that hue of Halloween that brings a hint of a smile to my face. Words popularized by the poet Maya Angelou come to mind.
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.
