On Listening to Les Mis Again

I was driving along on the way to pick my son up from day camp, listening to the boys die on the barricade in Japanese (like you do), and suddenly I started to cry: not the few silent tears I might shed watching the play in the theater but sobbing to the point that I had to be careful not to blind myself as I proceeded down the five-lane highway. I sobbed till about midway through Thenardier talking about the dogs eat the dogs, or the Japanese equivalent, then pulled myself together but cried again after reaching the parking lot of my son's school.

I wasn't just crying for the characters in Les Mis or for the real-life revolutionaries of the June Rebellion. I was crying because life as a new adoptive parent is stressful, and I'd spent much of my afternoon staring at my tax return in a vain attempt to fill out financial aid documents. But I wasn't just crying for my own life. My day had not been bad; my week hasn't been bad; my life isn't bad right now. I was surfeited, enmeshed in the tangled bank. I was crying for the characters I love, for the real people they represent, for the striving and failing of human life. I was crying because my life makes me tired and because the world is frightening, and the sweep of history is vast, and fact and fiction and then and now are not fully separate things but all part of one experience of living.

And words from Carbon Leaf came into my mind: "Pay no mind. My sorrow's fine. The day is alive, and that's why I cry." That's why I was crying: because the day is alive.