When C-SPAN Makes You Cry

While watching Caroline Kennedy pay tribute to Sen. Ted Kennedy on C-SPAN during the Democratic Convention, Sarah Vowell burst into tears.

''If your child is getting an early boost in life through Head Start or attending a better school or can go to college because a Pell Grant has made it more affordable, Teddy is your senator, too,'' Caroline told the delegates in Denver.

That's when the waterworks started, Vowell says in a recent New York Times Op-Ed (registration required). She says she was surprised by her tears, but there's no surprise here.

Without Kennedy's unwavering support of Pell Grants, Vowell wouldn't have been able to pay her way through Montana State University; take German every day at 8 a.m. just for fun; jumpstart her writing career by working for the school newspaper; pass geology; graduate magna cum laude; and "open a trap door to a bottomless pit of beauty -- to Walt Whitman and Louis Armstrong and Frank Lloyd Wright, to the old movies and old masters that have been my constant companions in my unalienable pursuit of happiness."

In other words, without Pell Grants, Vowell wouldn't have been afforded an education or any of the enriching, eye-opening, mind-expanding experiences an education brings to a person's life -- experiences that continue long after graduation.

When you think of what made your education possible, doesn't it bring tears to your eyes, too?