Beech Tree News Network

Sometimes I wonder if we as human beings have a time/date stamp on our emotions like we do physically on our hearts and brains.  A time and date when we’re done with certain feelings, when we’re filled up, when we say, “no more.”
    I’m not sure when I reached the point when I said, “no more,” to heart-breaking, but I did.  I find myself switching channels if a show on TV even hints that things are going to go awry for any of the main characters.  I’ve always been like this when it comes to animals in movies.  I’ve never watched “Ole Yeller” because I know the dog dies at the end, and I didn’t make it through Black Beauty.  I got to the part where Ginger died, and I was done.  I used to watch movies like “Beaches,” “The Way We Were,” and “Steel Magnolias,” cry my eyes out, and go back in for more.  Can’t do it now.
    Last week, I started a book I ordered before Christmas, called “False Mermaid,” by Erin Hart.  The blurb on the back cover said it was a mystery that started in the US, traveled to the bogs of Ireland then went back to the US.  I got about twenty pages in and had to put it down.  Normally, I love mystery.  I can read about people getting shot, stabbed or poisoned all day long, but this story was heart-breaking, and I just couldn’t finish it.   It takes a lot for me not to finish a book.  I’ll slog my way through just about anything I start; although, there were a couple of the classics I couldn’t finish, because the women were annoyingly stupid.  (If anybody else wants to read “False Mermaid,” give me a call.  You can have at it.)
    I’ve met other people who have reached a time/date stamp on their emotions, as well.  One elderly man, who was an avid hunter in his prime, told me he could no longer bear the thought of killing a dear.  “I guess, I’ve gotten tender-hearted,” he said, almost embarrassed.  My dad got like that in the last few years of his life.  Earlier, when I still lived at home, Dad took us all to the drive-in to see “Love Story” (for the one person out there who has neither read nor seen nor heard of “Love Story,” it’s a story about two star-crossed lovers, and the girl dies at the end).  We all cried, even my dad.
    When the movie came out on video, he would invite people over to watch it, first betting them that they couldn’t watch it without crying.  He had many takers.  He usually won.  I think, he must have been embarrassed about crying over the movie, and his consolation was everybody cried over the movie.  Toward the end of his life, Dad only watched comedies or baseball.  He was done with sad.
    As a writer, there are stories that I wish I had written earlier in my life.  I’ve carried them around with me through the years until they’ve broken my heart, and I can barely think about them, let alone write about them.  There was a movie called, “Hemmingway and Gellhorn,” about the relationship between the two writers.  In one scene, they are covering the same war, and Gellhorn complains about writer’s block.  Hemmingway says to her, “Writing’s easy.  You just sit down at your typewriter and bleed.”   He was right.  Of course, in the end, he couldn’t do it anymore either.  He blew his head off with a shotgun.
    I think, most people are more like I am, and don’t allow themselves to be pushed that far.  We just check the time/date stamp, realize it has expired and shut the book or switch the channel so we can enjoy our comedies and baseball.