Barbara Mahany: Gettysburg Address: Four score and one 7-year-old's tears ago
[HNN Editor: In this article reporter Barbara Mahany recalls a recent trip she and her family took, at her young son's insistence, to Gettysburg, where he delivered the famous address as his parents and older brother looked on.]
... We looked in, each of us, zeroed our eyes on his face, trying to read the root of the slowed-down reading.
Only then, as the next few words sputtered, did I see what I thought looked like a tear. And then another and another.
He was crying and reading, the boy who would not let the tears stop the cadence, the moment, not until the end when we all crushed him, a tangle of arms, cheeks, tears.
"Sweetheart, what is it?" I asked, not sure if the hard words had netted his courage, swallowed his sense of the moment.
"It's the soldiers," he managed to choke out in a short few syllables, before burying his face in my sleeve.
We all stood in this knot for a minute or two. I knew that I, for one, was etching the moment into my mind, into my picture of this boy who was not often considered the one with his pulse in sync with the poetry and pain of a world marred by bloodshed and tombstones.
Sometimes on a cold afternoon, at the crest of history, you discover the script that you've dotted and crossed in your head, the script of your own child, is not what you thought it was.
And you stand there, wiping back tears, his and your own. And all of a sudden you understand a whole new chapter has been written.
Read entire article at Chicago Tribune
... We looked in, each of us, zeroed our eyes on his face, trying to read the root of the slowed-down reading.
Only then, as the next few words sputtered, did I see what I thought looked like a tear. And then another and another.
He was crying and reading, the boy who would not let the tears stop the cadence, the moment, not until the end when we all crushed him, a tangle of arms, cheeks, tears.
"Sweetheart, what is it?" I asked, not sure if the hard words had netted his courage, swallowed his sense of the moment.
"It's the soldiers," he managed to choke out in a short few syllables, before burying his face in my sleeve.
We all stood in this knot for a minute or two. I knew that I, for one, was etching the moment into my mind, into my picture of this boy who was not often considered the one with his pulse in sync with the poetry and pain of a world marred by bloodshed and tombstones.
Sometimes on a cold afternoon, at the crest of history, you discover the script that you've dotted and crossed in your head, the script of your own child, is not what you thought it was.
And you stand there, wiping back tears, his and your own. And all of a sudden you understand a whole new chapter has been written.