I’m a sentimental fool and I don’t care who knows it.

I cry at football games when The Star Spangled Banner is sung. Those television public service announcements about homeless, abused dogs and cats? I’m a goner. I want to rush to the nearest animal shelter with tears streaming down my cheeks and rescue every one of them. When I read about a family being reunited after forty years of separation, I figure a piece like that is deserving of my joyful tears.

Unlike some people I know, I am not embarrassed to admit that I have sat through the ultimate chick flick more times than I can count, and I cry like a hungry baby from beginning to end each and every time. When Bette Midler, aka C.C. Bloom, sings "The Wind Beneath My Wings" it's as though she’s singing that song especially to me, so I cry even harder.

Laughter is a wonderful thing, but a good cry is the best way for me to cleanse the clutter from my soul.

My empathic penchant for sad movies about heroines who die may have started in 1946 when Mama took me with her to see the movie, SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY. She was crazy about John Payne, and because of her Irish background, thought Maureen O’Hara was the sister who somehow managed to escape the Mississippi Delta only to end up in Hollywood seeking fortune and fame.

I was just six-years-old but I clearly remember that day in the theater. Mama started to sob about five minutes into the film and I, being a kid without the capacity to understand her tears, began to cry along with her. She would pull two Kleenex tissues at a time out of her pocketbook, hand one to me and then blow her nose with the other.

Mama loved going to the picture show and it didn’t much matter what was playing. She enjoyed dramas, comedies and musicals. Whatever was showing at the Carolina Theater (with the possible exception of something in the Roy Rogers genre) was a movie she was willing to stand in line and pay her twenty-five cents to see. For a lot of years, I went with her.

We saw PINKY, JOHNNY BELINDA, IMITATION OF LIFE and LITTLE WOMEN together. Tearjerkers, all. For years after watching Edward G. Robinson in THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, I’d wake up screaming, having dreamt of being stabbed with a pair of scissors.

But SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY was the film that set the sentimental bar for Mama and me. For the rest of her life, if that movie were mentioned in conversation, if she heard Peggy Lee’s recorded version of the song, or even if it were being performed on television, Mama would look over and give me a knowing smile. That long ago day in the theater when I was just a child continued to be a shared moment in time that lingered between us for over forty years.

Once while I was living in California, she sent me a newspaper article about the movie. It was little more than a blurb, but I still have it tucked away in my memory box, yellow now with age. I remember opening the envelope and lifting out the two-inch square news clipping. I read the heading first: SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY, and then I read the short note she had written to me: “Saw this in the paper today. Thought of you.”

Some years later, Mama died, and shortly after that, the movie BEACHES was released. I went to see it one afternoon all by myself thinking that anything starring Bette Midler would be fun and a sure way to lift my sagging spirits.

Just like Mama had done in SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY, I began to sob five minutes into the film because BEACHES was pretty much an updated version of SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY. The characters were not John Payne or Maureen O’Hara, but the plot was familiar: the heroine died. She left behind loved ones who would never again share the little things in life that had made them look at each other and smile knowingly when remembering a special moment.

For me, the greatest dissimilarity between the two films was that my mother was no longer sitting beside me handing me one Kleenex after another and whispering, “Blow your nose, Honey.”