Grown Men Don't Cry

Grown Men Don’t Cry
by Steve Seskin and Tom Douglas

Happy Monday, everyone! Today’s song is in recognition of the Men’s Ministry that is being established at our church. We already have a Men’s “Flannel Shirt Night” that meets every second Monday of the month (in the Summer, it’s called “Hawaiian Shirt Night”) for a time of fellowship. This year, we are looking at other ways for men in the congregation to connect with one another – to share hopes and fears, joys and concerns – and to reach out to one another and the community. It’s hard to go it alone, and the culture in which we live doesn’t make matters any easier.

Popular culture and the media have a vested interest, of course, in keeping things in a state of tension, so they exaggerate the extremes – good and bad – of both genders. In real-life, I see decent, ordinary men and women who can always use some guidance and who often make mistakes, but whose hearts are focused on doing the right things for their families as they try to navigate the moving waters of the culture. One very small example that, to me, points to a larger truth: in most of the couples I know, the husband does the grocery shopping and the wife balances the checkbook. So much for those stereotypes about domesticity and math skills!

I also find it interesting that the Nashville music industry seems to get closer to these truths than some of the other machines of popular culture. Maybe country music’s underpinnings of gospel music (and the Gospel) give it a leg up in understanding where we are in our relationships. Songs like Toby Keith’s Who’s That Man? and Colin Raye’s I Think About You do a good job, in my opinion, of pinpointing the relational locations of men in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In our song of the day, Grown Men Don’t Cry, Tim McGraw also contemplates some of the disconnects between what the world tells you it means to “be a man” and what your own “still, small voice” tells you. The first verse begins on a routine day, maybe on one of those aforementioned runs to the grocery store:

I pulled into the shopping center
And saw a little boy wrapped around the legs of his mother
Like ice cream melting they embraced
Years of bad decisions runnin' down her face
All mornin' I'd been thinkin' my life's so hard
And they wore everything they own, livin' in a car
I wanted to tell 'em it would be okay
But I just got in my Suburban and I drove away

But I don't know why they say grown men don't cry
I don't know why they say grown men don't cry

As with most everything else in life, the closer we get to Jesus, the easier the answers become. One of the most powerful verses in Scripture is the shortest one, the two-word John 11:35 – “Jesus wept.” Jesus arrives at the tomb of his dear friend Lazarus, he witnesses the sadness of the others there, and he begins to weep. So we know that grown men, in fact, do cry. But this whole business of feelings and men can still get complicated in our culture.

Even well-meaning Christian instructors can sometimes muddy the water unintentionally. I remember watching a Gary Smalley relationship seminar a few years ago. Dr Smalley had just chastised the husbands in the group for being unable to be open and share their true feelings with their wives. Fair enough. But in the very next breath, he chastised the husbands – again – for not correctly reading their wives’ feelings. He said, in essence (I am not making this up), “Husbands, what you fail to realize is that, when your wife says ‘Go away!’ what she is really saying is ‘Hold me!’” And I thought to myself; remind me again who has a lock on expressing themselves?

In fairness to preachers and teachers, though, it’s not like Hollywood gets it right, either. In one of my favorite films, Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks and his search team bivouac one night in a deserted French church. The medic, Wade, opens up to the others. He recalls a time as a child when we was lying in bed, aching to tell his mother something that was on his heart. When she came in later, though, to give him a kiss for the night, he couldn’t tell her: he closed his eyes and pretended he was asleep. “I don’t know why I did that,” Wade said with moist eyes. Watching Wade bare his soul to his band of brothers, I thought, “Uh oh. He’s history.” And sure enough, the next day, Wade is the first one to take a bullet in the chest from a Nazi sniper.

But 50 years hence, sitting in his Suburban in suburbia, the world made safe from Nazis by that “greatest generation” (Wade and our other World War II fathers), Mr McGraw is able to expound on his theme in verse two:

Keep having this dream about my old man
I'm 10 years old, and he's holding my hand
We're talkin' on the front porch watchin' the sun go down
But it was just a dream: he was a slave to his job and he couldn't be around
So many things I wanna say to him
But I just placed a rose on his grave, and I talk to the wind

But I don't know why they say grown men don't cry
I don't know why they say grown men don't cry, don't cry

Of course, sometimes it’s easy to look back at our ancestors and wonder why they didn’t “get it” without appreciating their circumstances. When comfortably middle-class Annie Hall talks about the generosity of her “grammy”, Woody Allen’s character replies, “My ‘grammy’ never gave gifts, you know. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.” Maybe part of “putting away childish things” that St Paul talks about is to make peace with our history; to recognize the failings and pitfalls of the past, sure; but to realize that we – each of us – are now responsible for how we respond to the Lord’s blessings in our lives. And, as we’re learning with our church’s Men’s Ministry, it’s easier to do this in community with others who are traveling the same road.

The musical structure of Grown Men Don’t Cry is also something that appears to be breaking with tradition (especially of a country song) but which, I believe, is actually paying homage to the past. For example, you might be able to guess, even just reading the words and without knowing the tune, that the song’s melodic line is more in the rambling, conversational style of Joni Mitchell or Tom Waits than of Merle Haggard or Loretta Lynn. And as for the words themselves: you’d be excused for wondering if they were more at home with Ginsberg and Kerouac at The Cedar Tavern than with McGraw at The Grand Ole Opry. But I believe there is some traditional structure going on: I’m not sure what it’s called in poetry, but there is some very intentional rhyming of final vowels, if not the final consonants.

Speaking of rhyming words (and I promise this is moving us closer to the song’s third verse), when my daughter was younger, we used to play a game at church while singing the hymns. When we came to a rhyme scheme that looked right on paper but not when sounded out, we would rhyme it exactly. For example, in the hymn “Take My Life”, the verse would become, Take my hands and let them move/At the impulse of Your looove. Then, we’d always look over at each other and smile (all right: we’d usually laugh). And what did I, obvious candidate for “Sensible Father of the Year”, do to foster maturity as Lindsay grew older? I upped the ante. The new rule became: rhyme the first word to the last one (muhve/love). And while we’re on the subject, I have one more confession to make: we still play that game.

Back to our song of the day: it’s in the third verse – in the sacramental nature of fatherhood and family – that the song’s question becomes purely rhetorical:

I'm sittin' here with my kids and my wife
And everything that I hold dear in my life
We say grace and thank the Lord
Got so much to be thankful for
Then it's up the stairs and off to bed and my little girl says
"I haven't had my story yet."
And everything weighin' on my mind disappears just like that
When she lifts her head off her pillow and says,
"I Love You Dad"

I don't know why they say grown men don't cry
I don't know why they say grown men don't cry

Me neither. I do it all the time. Just usually not when I’m sad, and most often not when others are around. But gentlemen: if you have even one dear, close friend with whom you can share a laugh and a tear, you’re a blessed man, indeed.