It gets me every time.

I succumbed to the temptation and just finished watching Beaches on the WE network. I’ve resisted every time I’ve seen it on but this time it got me. I was sucked in and, of course, it ended with me sobbing uncontrollably. What is it with that movie? It’s not as if it’s a surprise when Barbara Hershey dies at the end and Bette Midler takes the little girl to L.A. and sings The Glory of Love. I distinctly remember when I saw Beaches for the first time. I was 12 and my grandparents, who have since passed away, took me to see it. We saw it at the old Creve Coeur Theater that was right on the corner of Olive and Old Olive when movie theaters only had a maximum of six screens and there was no such thing as stadium seating or cup holders on your seat. I believe the reason I remember this movie outing so clearly, other than the fact that it’s a movie you don’t forget, is that it was the first of two times in my entire life that I saw my grandfather cry. The tears were streaming down his face and he was sobbing during the final Glory of Love scene. I never said anything but I think I started crying because I saw that he was. My grandfather died about nine years later after a 3-month battle against liver cancer. I was away at college for the first two months of it. When I walked into his hospital room at Barnes a month before he died that was the second time I saw him cry. This memory is particularly poignant for me this week because Monday I started my new job at the family business. It was his business. His desk is still in the office and the pictures he kept of his grandchildren (myself and my cousins) sit on top of it. There’s a picture in the office that I drew with crayons when I was a child of my grandfather, my father, and my uncle working at the business. I can’t help but feel a little closer to him in that office. I can’t help but sob every time I watch Beaches.