KEY POINTS:
This week I have been mostly crying. Not that I intended to, or even noticed that I was at the time.
It's only now, sitting down to write this on Friday morning , that I realise it at all, and it's only the pressure of having to produce
a weekly column that helps me to remember what I've actually been doing for the past seven days.
Most of the time my life is a blur to me, moving quickly and unpredictably from moment to moment, lurching from drama to crisis, coloured by the odd triumph, punctuated by brief little cushions of calm and offset by a chorus of clinking.
I realised a while ago there's very little point in trying to keep up with myself, so I don't really try.
The past few months have been busier than usual in any case with our summer radio show on Radio NZ to prepare for. We've been on air for the past four weeks and so I've been talking to far more people on a daily basis than I normally would.
It is one of the abiding ironies of my job that I'm not a huge fan of people as they exist in front of me, in the flesh. I have a great capacity for talking and I'm easily beguiled by ideas, which makes me a weird class of misanthrope I know, but in general I have to admit, I prefer the idea of meeting people far more attractive than the actual reality of doing so.
Especially first thing in the morning. So that's been a challenge, but it wasn't what made me cry.
Actually, I've loved it. Of course I have. I'm mindful many of you will be brunching with this column, so I won't make your gorge rise with the usual incontinent ramblings from a media woman about what a privilege this job is, and how supersmashing lovely it is to interact with people from all walks of life, hear their stories and share them with our listeners.
It is lovely, and it is a privilege, but luvvies are sickeners so I'll shut up about that. Sometimes, though, you have a moment at work that takes things to a whole new level and is a genuine surprise.
I had one of those on Wednesday morning and it made my week. It was the day of the Obama inauguration, so I was probably primed for it, having been in tears since I turned on the telly at 6am.
As soon as those first images from the Mall came in I was off, just like I knew I would be. I'm a glutton for spectacle. Can't get enough of it. I like nothing better than to gorge myself on pageantry and I'm not really fussy about its source or reason. I'm as likely to cry at a dawn parade as at an Oscars acceptance speech, and yes, I do know how crass it is to conflate the two.
I can't help it, though. There is something about watching people gathered together en masse whether in celebration or commemoration or just plain fellowship that I find inescapably moving. I have no control over my reactions in these situations and I've long since learned not to dwell on my own sentimentality when it comes to displays of our shared humanity in public places.
I had tears in my eyes walking to work past those honking truckers when they protested on Hobson St last year. Even for a wuss like this one, it's a new low when a convoy makes you cry.
So I was always going to bawl for Barack, and his wonderfully bracing oratory didn't help. By the time he called on America to put away childish things I was a heap of sighs. I have loved those words from First Corinthians since I was 12 years old and it was the reading at my confirmation ... of course it helped that it was read by Nigel Wilkins from the boys' school across the road who was absolutely gorgeous.
The notion of what he might do when he put away childish things was thrilling enough to distract me from the Holy Spirit indefinitely. But I loved what the 44th President said, and how he said it.
So I was on a high by the time our show started anyway. And to have a guest that day of the calibre of Lewis Scott was simply magical. For those of you not familiar with Lewis, he is an African-American poet and writer who now lives in Wellington.
He has the sort of soft musical voice whose cadences stop the clocks and make you forget your own name and he speaks with the sort of fluency and articulation most of us can only dream of. He came on the show to talk to us about what the inauguration meant to him, a man who has travelled all over the world, writing poetry and finding stories, a black man who served in Vietnam and whose birth wasn't even registered in Cordille, Georgia, in
1947 because "who cared about another little black baby then?" For Lewis - and as he reminded us, for millions of Americans of his generation - segregation was not a foolish, pernicious idea, but a reality, not an abstract thing but a real thing. He chose a poem for us, a poem inspired by the victory of Obama last November and read it to us in his beautiful poet's voice:
I thought of the hushed voices in the slave cabins
'You just keep living, freedom goin' come'
I thought of dead bones holding on to that belief
I thought of black fingers quilting our stories
I thought of the Negro National Anthem
'Lift Every Voice and Sing'.
You're probably not supposed to admit to crying on air, and I'm sure, even in cases of extreme boredom, I never had before. But it was impossible not to bow under the flow of words last Wednesday, the words of a President determined to draw a line under the past and square up to a difficult future, and the poetry of Lewis Scott, a man whose poetry comes from the congregations of Georgia and who celebrated a new future for his country in the San Francisco Bathhouse in Wellington last Wednesday night.
Apologies to the millions of you who were undoubtedly listening at the time and who've heard it all already, and I know I haven't yet told you what else it was made me cry. But I think another poet by the name of Leonard Cohen, at the ripe old age of 74, deserves a separate column of his own. He'll get his turn next week.
