Man, I must just be turning into a complete emotional sap these days! I'm still recovering from my all-out crying jag while watching "Cinderella Man" earlier today.
It's such a beautiful movie, whether you like boxing, or Russell Crowe, or not. I still don't know how Ron Howard captured the gut-wrenching nature of poverty and desperation so exquisitely. And maybe it resonated so much with me because I grew up just as poor as the folks in that movie.
But then, maybe poverty is a relative term. After all, growing up in Cairo circa the early and late '60s is not the same as growing up during the Great Depression. Still, with 10 kids to feed and menial jobs, my parents struggled just as hard as Jim and Mae Braddock did. And we were just as cold during Midwestern winters as they were in 1930's New York City.
Some of my clearest childhood memories involve trying to stay warm from November through April. You felt like you'd won the lottery when it was your turn to sit directly over one of the metal grates leading up from the coal furnace, or when you just received your old bleach bottle filled with hot water to tuck between the frigid sheets in your meat locker of a drafty bedroom.
I know what hunger is. Not just "being hungry." I know what it's like to go to bed with no supper. Gratefully, thanks to "socialist" initiatives like the Head Start and School Lunch and Commodity Food programs, I rarely went for days without eating something. There was alwasy at least one carton of free milk or a block of cheese to gnaw on at some point.
Anyway, I'm guessing that movie made me cry so hard because I'm thinking a lot these days about how far I'VE come. And I'm thinking about the prospect of a black man being President of the United States, something that little black girl huddling over a coal furnace grate back in Cairo, Illinois could have never imagined.
It's actually enormously bittersweet and ironic when I think about it. One of the things I clung to back then was my fantasy of a place over the rainbow, some wonderful land where all my dreams could come true. I BELIEVED in Oz, and Dorothy Gale was my hero, because she stood up to every challenge and never gave up in her search for home. I had to believe in her, because I had to find my way out of Cairo and out of poverty and into a brighter future.
Forty years ago, I could clearly envision Oz, but I couldn't envision a black man being President.
Maybe that's why I've been crying so hard. Maybe, sometimes, the dreams you don't even DARE to dream really do come true. After all, here I am, living in a far away land where it's actually hot between November and April.
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