Having a Hallmark Moment

I'm a sucker for Hallmark Cards and Kodak moments. It's not a great trait in a woman who teaches courses entitled "Strategies for Subverting Sentimentality When Writing Poetry of Everyday Life." I tear up when I read the human interest stories in the "B" section of my paper. Maybe it's autumn, the beginning of the end of another year. Maybe it's the upcoming Jewish holy days, the beginning of a brand new year in the Jewish calendar. It is a time set aside to reflect back, recognize and acknowledge what went awry, a time to munch apples with honey in hopes for a sweet new year. I think, though, that this jag I've been on started with Ted Kennedy.


"He was the man who read with me. I didn't know he was famous." That was some child in Washington, D.C. I was on Cape Cod the week Ted Kennedy died, was glued to every bit of the coverage. The Cape Cod Times was filled with stories of Kennedy's life in Hyannis. "He waited for his turn in line." The man at the bakery. "He helped us when we were at risk of losing our house to the bank." A couple nearing retirement. "He remembered to call my family every September 11, ever since my boy died in the towers." A Massachusetts constituent. "He was father to 11 extra kids after our father and Uncle John died." One of the late Robert Kennedy's sons.


I was glued to the news coverage of Kennedy's funeral-- newspapers, television, radio. A child of the Sixties, I bathed in nostalgia. Outside, Hurricane Danny whipped the National Seashore lands the Kennedy family had fought to preserve. Two days before the senator was eulogized and buried, the sun had shone on Cape Cod, and people-- natives, wash ashores and first time visitors-- had lined the roadways, stood on the bridge to the mainland with placards. They waited for hours to see the entourage carrying his casket, his family, for a few seconds. They stood in the sun with children on their shoulders, with elderly and disabled relatives in wheelchairs, thousands of "regular people" wanting to bid a last farewell to a man from a family that the press dubbed "American royalty." At night, the senator laid in-state in the Kennedy Library in Boston, I followed his journey off Cape to pick my husband, Steve, up at the airport. Along all roads, construction signs were lit and read "From the People of Massachusetts: Thanks, Ted."

I arrived at the airport red-eyed and full of Kennedy stories to share, but when my husband jumped in the car, the first thing he told me was that he'd started the morning comforting our neighbor, Sue. Sue was pretty distraught, had to put her beloved cat, Sammy, down the night before. When Steve got to work, he stopped in the coffee shop next door to his office for his morning coffee, and saw his usual waitress weeping over the dog she'd lost the day before. "It was a day for comforting people, I guess," he said.

"He accomplished so much in his lifetime," my husband says as he reads the litany of legislation for which Ted Kennedy is given credit. "I'll never do what he did in his lifetime." I thought about all those kids who will remember the old guy who came to their school and read with them when no press corps was taking notes, the Ted Kennedy I've been mourning. I thought of those bereaved pet owners comforted by my busy lawyer husband who has always meant to change the world. "Sure you will," I say.