Kleenex and character...

I cried last night for a long time. Cried and cried. I laid down on my bed with tears streaming down my temples and puddling in my ears. I went through a half a box of Kleenex crying. My eleven year old laid on the bed next to me with tears running down his cheeks, trying not to let me see that he was crying too.

It was wonderful.

There are moments in life that one wouldn't trade for anything. Among my favorites are the sweet, stolen moments, serendipitously found between the yellowed, dog-eared pages of a book.

We shared one of these last night, my sweet boy and I. We were reading the book "A Day No Pigs Would Die" by Robert Newton Peck. In a hurry to finish a book report for school, we picked the shortest book we could find in our bookshelf and launched into what we thought would be a quick and easy foray into the life of a backward Shaker boy in the early 1900's.

What we got was something completely different. True, the story was about a backward Shaker boy in the 1900's, but what we learned, felt and shared was so much more than that. We learned that it is more than age that makes a man out of a boy. We learned that some things just have to be done no matter how hard or painful it is to do them. We learned that life is not always fair, but that the character built in a man in the face of unfairness is the hard-won prize.

And we learned that reading and crying together creates a bond. I loved my son more after sharing that time together than before. And I like to think he loved his teary-eyed, runny-nosed mom just a little bit more too.

These are the moments I will never trade.